As Kathy notes, it might have been more interesting to make a movie about middle-aged Hollywood directors’ obsessions and pursuits. Were she not dead, Dorothy Stratten could claim to have ended the careers of two A-list helmers whose careers never recovered from her. Peter Bogdanovich, whose Last Picture Show is one of the best films of the Seventies, fell in love with Miss Stratten, starred her in a movie for which she was eminently unsuited (They All Laughed), and never got his mojo back. He wound up writing that Unicorn book and marrying his late love’s younger sister (younger than Dorothy, that is, although she was also three decades younger than Bogdanovich). Bob Fosse, who’d rolled through the Seventies from Cabaret to All That Jazz, was too cynical to marry any centerfold siblings or write books with Unicorn in the title, but Star 80 turned out to be the last film he ever made, and confirmed that he only had one story to tell (showbiz as a metaphor for life) – or two if you include Chicago (life as a metaphor for showbiz). At least with Sweet Charity, the naive exploited good-time gal came with a score.
