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Eric Roberts has never talked much about one particular night during the making of Star 80 — the night director Bob Fosse sent him to sleep alone in the actual Los Angeles apartment where Dorothy Stratten was murdered. Now, more than four decades later, he’s telling it.
Appearing on the It Happened in Hollywood podcast, Roberts reflected on the making of the 1983 film, recalling how Fosse insisted he spend the night at the real crime scene to prepare for filming one of the movie’s most harrowing scenes. “I didn’t want to go,” Roberts said. “I told him, ‘I don’t want it.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re going to spend the night with it. Come on.'” The apartment, located off a busy highway, was too loud and too charged to allow sleep. “That was Bob,” Roberts said. “He wanted you to feel what it was.”
The film, Fosse’s final feature before his death in 1987, dramatized the true story of Stratten — the Canadian Playboy model murdered by her husband and manager Paul Snider in 1980. Roberts played Snider opposite Mariel Hemingway’s Stratten, and the performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a drama.
Roberts got the script through a back channel — a casting director had passed it to his manager, who wasn’t supposed to have it. But Roberts almost turned it down. “It felt very black and white,” he said, finding the dynamic between Snider and Stratten too cartoonishly simple on the page. He auditioned anyway, went back five or six times, and won the role.
What made it harder was where Roberts stood personally at the time. The year before, a serious car accident had left him in a coma, causing short-term memory loss and lasting problems with hand-eye coordination. “I thought my days as an actor were probably over, if not very much numbered,” he said, “and was going through the deepest depression I’ve ever had in my life.”
Fosse, Roberts says, approached the material with extraordinary precision. “He knew exactly what he was going to shoot. Every move, every piece of furniture, everything.” The director wanted Snider rendered with specificity, not evil for its own sake. “He didn’t want a cartoon. He wanted someone real. And the truth is, people like that are all around us.”
Roberts places Star 80 alongside All That Jazz as Fosse’s defining works, calling them “perfect movies.”
