I'm obsessed with series openings and endings. They both have so many goals to accomplish--an opening wants to grab you so hard you can't turn away, while showing you something of the world, its characters, relationships and conflicts; the ending wants to come back to all of that and provide some kind of culminating idea or event that is both totally unexpected and yet in retrospect absolutely inevitable.
This weekend while I waited for a hurricane that (thankfully) never came to New York, I watched FOSSE/VERDON, the 2019 FX docuseries about choreographer and director Bob Fosse and his lifelong partner actress/producer Gwen Verdon. And I was bowled over by its opening, which watches Verdon and Fosse together choreograph and film the "Big Spender" number from the movie SWEET CHARITY.
A couple lessons learned in the watching:
1) THE OPENING TEACHES US A LANGUAGE: The very beginning of the series shows a very old Fosse in a tux, someone knocking on his door and him telling them they're too early. It's both a somewhat standard story technique today--Hollywood loves to start at the end--yet also has a bigger, more metaphorical dimension, as we get a caption that tells us this is "19 years before the end".
FOSSE/VERDON will occasionally have moments like this where we enter into a kind of a fantasy related to their lives. In the Lenny Bruce episode we keep cutting to Fosse as Bruce telling his life story on stage like a stand up routine. In another episode Fosse's temptation to commit suicide is presented as an offshoot of PIPPIN.
Although here in the opening it's a much gentler kind of fantasy--it could actually be happening rather than an end-of-life metaphor--still the moment teaches us something of the language of the show.
During those brief seconds we also get a momentary cutaway to a younger Fosse tap dancing. The show will be filled with split second flashbacks like this. Once again, inserting that moment here is about teaching us how to "read" what is to come.
2) THE OPENING BUILDS UP THE CHARACTER WE DON'T KNOW: Despite having died almost 40 years ago, Bob Fosse remains very well known, especially for his explosive and highly controlled choreography. There's just nothing like it.
Gwen Verdon, on the other hand, despite winning four Tonys in five years and being in many ways an equal partner in some of Fosse's greatest triumphs, is not well remembered today.
And so what does the opening do? It focuses on her, and does so in a way that makes us fall head over heels in love with her.
We begin on the two of them testing out some choreography. They're clearly peers, Gwen giving him a hard time. But the attention is all on her--she's the one center stage doing the moves, and him moving about the edges, watching her (and in doing so telling us to watch her). At the end he notes that he likes her choreography better, which tells us a ton about who she is and how they are together.
Then we cut to the two of them working together with the actors and the studio on the scene. And as the scene goes on it's more and more Gwen's scene. She's the one who really digs in with the actress, helping her think through her part; she's the one who talks the studio exec down; she's the one who makes the first call about removing a dancer; she's the one who teaches the dancers something about the shoulder roll that Fosse himself doesn't understand. She's the one so invested in the scene she's literally singing along from offstage as Fosse shoots it.
In just that few minutes the script tells us everything we need to know about her, and does it in a way that is so incredibly winning, her "saving" one cat after another, that we leave the scene far more invested in her than in Fosse.
(Just the sequence of she and Fosse talking to the actress about why she's got her leg up on the bar is so perfectly written it would have made us fall for her all by itself. Steven Levenson and his writers write the hell out of the whole season, and one of the things they are especially good at is moments like this where Fosse or Verdon steps back to consider the deeper layers of the show they're in. There's a later scene where Fosse talks about CHICAGO that is just next level genius.)
The sequence also sets up the major conflicts of the series, which are the struggles Verdon has to face: Fosse's philandering, which here is gently alluded to in the fact of him walking off with a young actress, who happens to be another redhead; and the fact she's only allowed to be equal to a point. While Fosse is shooting, in the thick of it all, she's left off stage. At the end of the scene we watch her reaction first, then she looks to Fosse--because that's who ultimately matters.
3) THE OPENING KNOWS WHAT WE WANT AND USES IT: What do you want to see in a show about musical theater? You want to see performances.
The opening uses that desire brilliantly. The SWEET CHARITY sequence begins in fact with the actresses starting the number, then immediately cuts away to Fosse and Verdon working with the actresses. And from there it keeps going back and forth, the performance teasing us onward, promising that thing we want.
And by the time we get to the actual number, we're so used to the back and forth of the onstage and offstage, that the performance can weave together with the behind the scenes of it all without any sense of interruption. It's all of a piece.
Really the opening is just like the number it shows, a perfect seduction.
