In 1980, the murder-suicide of a Vancouver couple shocked and horrified Hollywood. Model and actress Dorothy Stratten and her husband, Paul Snider, were found in their West Los Angeles home, both dead of gunshot wounds. At a point when Stratten’s career was about to reach new heights, the jealous and desperate Snider killed his wife and then himself.
Released only three years later, the film Star 80 (1983) offered a fictionalized account of Stratten and Snider’s relationship and the events leading up to the crime. Filmed in Vancouver and Los Angeles, using many of the real locations, Star 80 depicts how Stratten (played by Mariel Hemingway) rose from a teenager working at a Vancouver Dairy Queen to a Playboy centrefold and actress, and the small-time grifter Snider’s (Eric Roberts) growing resentment as Stratten moves beyond his control. Star 80 was the final film directed by Oscar-winner Bob Fosse (All That Jazz, Cabaret). Fosse brought an obsession with accuracy to the film, as well as his own destructive behaviour. Gaining in both controversy and acclaim since its release, Star 80 shaped the B.C. couple’s tragic story into an unnerving tale of celebrity culture and toxic male rage.
Stratten, born Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten in Vancouver and raised in Coquitlam, was discovered by Snider in 1978 while working at the Dairy Queen on East Hastings Street. Snider was a promoter of car shows at the Pacific National Exhibition who’d had several brushes with the law: “[The police] had him cold for pimping once but he traded them some narcotics information so they didn’t charge him,” claimed a hotel detective interviewed in The Province on August 17, 1980. Snider had once been hung out the window of a Vancouver hotel after incurring a debt to loan sharks.
Recognizing the 18-year-old Stratten’s potential as a Playboy model, Snider, 27, arranged for pictures of her to be taken and sent to the magazine. When Stratten was chosen Playmate of the Month for August 1979, she and Snider married and moved to Los Angeles.
Stratten’s career took off in spectacular fashion, while Snider’s enterprises fizzled. Stratten toured western Canada, doing press to promote her Playboy shoot and her upcoming role in the Canadian film Autumn Born. “I was really shy,” she told the Vancouver Sun in a July 13, 1979, interview, “but I didn’t feel guilty or anything like that.” More film and television roles followed. Stratten was chosen 1980’s Playmate of the Year and cast in a major motion picture, They All Laughed. Snider promoted wet T-shirt contests in L.A. as he had in Vancouver but was dependent on Stratten financially, spending her money on luxuries, including a Mercedes with the custom licence plate “Star-80.”
As both manager and husband, Snider sought to control and coach Stratten and profit from her success. Suspecting she was having an affair with her director, Peter Bogdanovich, Snider hired a private investigator to follow her in New York while she was filming They All Laughed. Snider’s lawyer Ted Ewachniuk claimed Snider found “love notes and poems allegedly written by Bogdanovich to Stratten.” When reconciliation failed, Snider bought a shotgun. And on August 14, 1980, Snider killed Stratten and then himself in their Los Angeles home.
Stratten’s shocking murder brought tributes from both Vancouver and Hollywood: a former Dairy Queen co-worker called her “a very loving friend, always writing poems to us,” while Playboy issued a statement that her death “takes from us all a very special member of the Playboy family.” Teresa Carpenter’s article on the murder, “Death of a Playmate,” examined how the men in Stratten’s life–Snider, Hefner, and Bogdanovich– attempted to influence her. In a world where powerful men used beautiful young women for their careers and pleasure, Snider’s “unforgivable sin,” according to Carpenter, was being small-time.” She would win a Pulitzer prize for the article.
Bob Fosse became interested in Stratten and Snider’s story after reading “Death of a Playmate.” An Oscar-winning director and the most famous choreographer of his day, Fosse, a former child prodigy from a vaudeville family, identified with both Stratten’s innocence and Snider’s desire for unattainable success and status. He would later tell Star 80’s leading man, Eric Roberts, “You’re playing me if I weren’t successful. Do you understand?” Fosse wrote the script himself.
Across from Roberts, who played Paul Snider, Mariel Hemingway was chosen to play Dorothy Stratten. “We rehearsed the film for six weeks prior to filming,” Hemingway told Patrick McDonald. “Even as I was doing poses for Playboy as Dorothy, [Fosse] choreographed that as a dance.” Roberts remained in character, often causing havoc on the set: “[Roberts] was trying to feel what it’s like to say the wrong things and have people reject you and what that does to you and how it sours you,” Fosse said. The director encouraged and enabled bad behaviour in his star; his own behaviour was even worse, including an attempted seduction of his lead actress. “He literally chased me around a couch,” Hemingway said in 2015.
According to Sam Wasson’s biography Fosse, the director made trips to Vancouver for casting and location scouting. “Fosse scouted Vancouver in a fifteen-passenger van big enough for every department head,” including famed cinematographer Sven Nykvist. “They couldn’t get Dorothy’s actual family home so they got one nearby, but they did get the real Dairy Queen, the one where Snider first saw Dorothy, and drove onward to the Penthouse, a strip club perfect for the part of Snider’s hangout.” Other locations included the Blue Horizon Hotel, where Snider is dangled out a window, the PNE Fairgrounds, and most controversially, the Los Angeles apartment where the actual crimes occurred. Interior shooting took place in Panorama Studios in West Vancouver as well as Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood. Fosse’s obsession with detail left him “a bottomless wound of insatiability” and full of “debilitating dread,” according to Wasson.
Despite the director’s desire for accuracy, Star 80 had to compromise how it portrayed living persons in order to gain their cooperation and avoid lawsuits. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner granted use of his company logo and access to the mansion though disliked Fosse’s first choice of actor to play Hefner. (He approved of Cliff Robertson, who got the part, though later he would sue the film’s producers over his depiction.) Peter Bogdanovich’s name doesn’t appear in the film; the character of the director, played by Roger Rees, is named Aram Nicholas. After Dorothy’s sister Louise sent Fosse a letter “telling him that he didn’t know the truth, that he was hurting her family … Fosse professed to be overcome with guilt.” In the film, the names of Dorothy’s family members are also fictionalized.
When the film was released in November 1983, it received mixed reviews, including a pan in the Vancouver Sun under the title, “Star 80 as Horrible as Playboy Bunny’s Fate.” Premiering only three years after the murder itself, the film was accused of glorifying violence, exploiting Stratten’s death, and portraying Snider in a sympathetic manner. “An accumulation of sordid scenes,” Pauline Kael wrote in her review. According to Sam Wasson, “Even the hippest crowds in New York fled the theater in abject speechlessness.” Hemingway said, “Hollywood didn’t like it at all.” Yet Roger Ebert praised Star 80 as “important, because it holds a mirror up to a part of the world we live in,” and Roberts was nominated for a Golden Globe for playing Snider, which Ebert singled out as “the best movie performance of the year.”
The film has grown in status since its release, with critics praising Hemingway and Roberts’s performances, and acknowledging the film’s prescience in focusing on male rage and the destructive lure of showbiz. Owen Gleiberman called Star 80 “the greatest modern American film that has never truly been recognized,” noting that “what raised the critics’ ire was precisely what made the film visionary.” Christina Newland writes that the film “forces us to think twice about how we digest violence against women onscreen.”
In the director’s own judgement of his Vancouver-inspired work, Wasson writes, “Fosse maintained Star 80 was his best film.”
Read more local film stories.
