Today’s movie of the day is Star 80 (1983) directed by Bob Fosse.

This was Bob Fosse’s last movie he directed before he died in 1987. This movie is about Playboy model Dorothy Stratten. How she started her rise to fame, and was continuing to branch out her career as a movie star but her life was cut short. She was murdered by her husband Paul Snider at the age of 20.

This movie stars Mariel Hemingway as Dorothy Stratten and Eric Roberts as Paul Snider.

This movie talks about Stratten’s humble beginnings working at a Dairy Queen in Canada where she encounters Paul Snider who was a well known scammer and pimp but once he met Dorothy.

He absolutely falls in love with her  and decided to devote all of this time, effort and money in making her  a star.

He is able to convince her that they way to stardom is for her to become a playboy model and is able to conned her into taking nude photos of her then creating a portfolio and sending them off to Playboy. However she was about 17 years old at the time when these shots were taken so he was so hell bent in making her a star that he forged her mom’s signature (who is played by Carroll Baker).

Then by luck Dorothy is invited to fly out to California (at that point Paul Snider becomes her agent and husband) to get professional photography by Playboy and her career quickly escalates from there. Including being picked to by Playmate of the Month (August 1979) then she becomes 1980’s Playmate of the Year. With those titles she hear Hollywood calling and starts to get small film roles.  However the luck of stardom is not the same for Paul Snider he goes onto these business ventures which ends up in failure and he feels dejected by Dorothy’s success.

Enrage by constant failure and jealous paranoia of Dorothy the final straw for him is when he finds out that she has been seeing someone else. He ends up killing her and then quickly killing himself.

 

This is one of my favorite movies because it is based on real life. I do not know how I found out about this movie but I tend to re watch it every couple of years. When I first saw it I did not know it was a movie directed by Bob Fosse. Because it didn’t feel like his usual musical or dancing type of film. This film like the real life it was based on was gritty, hard and absorbing!

Here is the trailer for the movie:

Fun fact about the film:

Hugh Hefner said that Eric Roberts portrayal of Paul Snider was exactly right!

 

Until next time!