They All Laughed

They All Laughed is a 1981 American romantic comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Ben Gazzara, Audrey Hepburn, John Ritter, Colleen Camp, Patti Hansen, and Dorothy Stratten. The film was based on a screenplay by Bogdanovich and Blaine Novak. It takes its name from the George and Ira Gershwin song of the same name.

The film is set in New York City, largely filmed outdoors on the streets, and tells the story of three private detectives investigating two beautiful women for infidelity. The detectives eventually wind up romantically pursuing the women, who turn the tables on them. The film is also a candid look at love and sex in New York City in the early 1980s.

Plot
The New York-based private investigation firm Odyssey Detective Agency employs three agents: the middle-aged, womanizing John Russo, the younger, hippie-ish Arthur Brodsky, and the nervy and anxious Charles Rutledge. Their cantankerous boss, Leon Leondopolous, tries to keep his bumbling agents in line while carrying on a poorly-disguised affair with his secretary Amy. Odyssey is investigating two separate married women: Angela Niotes, the aged but glamorous wife of a British tycoon, and Dolores Martin, a beautiful blonde. While attempting to follow Angela from the Manhattan heliport, John meets a taxi driver named Deborah Wilson. The two are instantly infatuated, and John makes plans to see Deborah (whom he calls "Sam") later that night. At the same time, Charles falls for Dolores as he spies on her in the lobby of a hotel. Arthur (who juggles a series of passionate romances throughout the film) is worried for each of his co-workers, but assists each of them in growing closer to their objects of affection: he helps John get away from his on-again off-again partner, country singer Christy Miller, and devises a plan for Charles to have a conversation with Dolores at a roller rink. He learns that Dolores is indeed cheating on her husband with Jose, a playboy with whom she plans to elope.

The next morning, John recounts his tryst with Deborah to Leon; he worries that he has become too old for younger women. Meanwhile, Christy, who has figured out what John has done, decides to get back at him by starting a relationship with Charles. The two head to Midtown, where they run into Dolores at an upscale clothing store. Christy later tries to initiate a sexual encounter with Charles, but he is already too infatuated with Dolores to reciprocate. Meanwhile, John and Arthur track Angela and her young son to a toy store. John confesses who he is, but Angela is not surprised, as she knows that her husband is himself cheating on her. An attraction grows between John and Angela; once again Arthur helps his friend by pretending to be John's son. Deborah runs into Angela and John at the latter's apartment; she does not appear to be bothered by John's simultaneous desire for the two women. Meanwhile, Dolores almost kisses Charles at one of Christy's concerts, while Christy herself confesses her attraction to Jose. When Charles follows Dolores back home, she eventually leaves her apartment and kisses him before running away.

Charles spends the night on a bench outside of Dolores' apartment, following her to a courthouse where Christy observes her and Jose enter a judge's chambers. Christy invites most of the other characters to another concert as Deborah and Angela have a secretive conversation. Later, Angela tells John that she is returning to Europe with her husband and son; she has arranged Deborah to take her place and nurse his broken heart. At the concert, Charles is reunited with Dolores, who reveals that she went to the courthouse to obtain a divorce. He proposes marriage to her (which she accepts). Christy introduces Jose, her fiancé, to the concert's audience. The following day, Charles and Dolores as well as Christy and Jose are married in a double wedding. John tearfully sees Angela off, then returns to his cab, where Deborah is waiting.

Cast

 * Audrey Hepburn as Angela Niotes
 * Ben Gazzara as John Russo
 * Patti Hansen as Sam (Deborah Wilson)
 * John Ritter as Charles Rutledge
 * Dorothy Stratten as Dolores Martin
 * Blaine Novak as Arthur Brodsky
 * Linda MacEwen as Amy Lester
 * George Morfogen as Leon Leondopolous
 * Colleen Camp as Christy Miller
 * Sean Hepburn Ferrer (Audrey's son) as Jose

Production
"The genesis of They All Laughed was that Benny [Gazzara] and I talked a lot about romances and affairs and the battle of the sexes", said Bogdanovich later. "[I wanted] to try to make a personal picture, but not a personal picture like an indie prod. I wanted to hide it, like the old filmmakers in the studio system did. Hide it behind a genre. The genre was private detectives". The film was financed by a filmmaking division of Time Inc.

"I didn't do any research about detectives", said Bogdanovich. "I never even went into a detective's office, but that didn't matter to me. That's not what it was about, that was just the disguise I hung my hat on."

"Audrey Hepburn's story in the movie is Audrey Hepburn's story in life", said the director. "She was living with a man, her second husband, he was cheating on her, and she basically stayed with him because of the child."

The film was shot on location in New York City during the spring and summer of 1980. Bogdanovich would often write scenes and give them to the actors just before they were shot, to give the film a feeling of freshness.

Country music is prominently featured. According to Bogdanovich, in the first version of the script, the character of Christy was going to be a jazz singer, singing jazz standards, but then: "There was a short, very short, very brief, vogue of country music in New York. About 30 seconds. And so I changed it. I like country music. I fell in love with it on Last Picture Show. In fact, I wrote a couple of country songs. The phrase 'One Day Since Yesterday' was something Dorothy said to me in a card. I liked the phrase."

Themes
Many hints are given at a relationship between the plot and real life in this picture, which has caused some commenters to question the discipline of the filmmakers, but may, in time, actually contribute to the film's interest. Hepburn's son plays the part of Jose, though the part of her son in the film is played by Glenn Scarpelli. According to Bogdanovich, Hepburn and Gazzara had had an affair prior to the filming, though evidently this had fizzled by the time filming began, and Gazzara's ongoing divorce made further contact inadvisable. (Commenters have not agreed as to whether Gazzara and Hepburn have good onscreen chemistry in They All Laughed). Bogdanovich's real-life daughters portray John Russo's daughters, who along with Arthur (pretending to be Russo's son in a crucial scene), are enlisted to win Angela Niotes's trust. More implicitly, Arthur, who acts primarily as a facilitator to the others' romances, is portrayed by one of the film's screenwriters, Blaine Novak. Charles, who pursues Dorothy Stratten's character, wears director Peter Bogdanovich's trademark oversized plastic-framed eyeglasses, perhaps a reference to Bogdanovich's initial guilt and subsequent acceptance of his love for Stratten.

Indeed, the theme of secret love surfacing is pervasive throughout. Even Russo's relationship with the taxi driver—possibly the least secretive and most above-board of all the couplings, so much so that Russo is brought to confess that he is aging and his sexual prowess is failing—takes place under a pseudonym (Russo calls Deborah "Sam" for obscure reasons). The theme of hidden desires is echoed in the soundtrack, which juxtaposes country music by Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Rodney Crowell—as well as by Camp—with visuals of the Manhattan skyline (the credits sequence follows a trek into Manhattan, notably focusing on the twin towers of the World Trade Center as Dorothy Stratten's credit appears) and songs recorded by Frank Sinatra, including the eponymous George and Ira Gerswhin song "They All Laughed".

No traditional villains are seen in the film, with the only unpleasant character momentarily depicted in extremely brief appearances as an understandably frustrated husband whose wife (Stratten) cuckolds him with their next door neighbor.

Release
Bogdanovich says Frank Sinatra let him have the rights to several of his songs for a cheap price because Sinatra felt sorry for Bogdanovich after Stratten's murder.

Before the film was released, Time shut down its filmmaking division. 20th Century Fox, which retained North American distribution rights, test-marketed the film in Providence, Rhode Island and Minneapolis, but was disappointed with the results and pulled the film's release. Bogdanovich decided to distribute the film himself. His manager later claimed the director spent $5 million, but it made less than $1 million in ticket sales. This contributed to the director declaring bankruptcy in 1985. Bogdanovich: "It was a nightmare. Dorothy was murdered and I went crazy. I decided I would buy the film back from Fox and I lost my shirt distributing it myself which was insanity. Unfortunately, nobody stopped me. So it didn’t get great distribution because you can’t self-distribute. It's impossible. For example, we played 15 weeks at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills. It was a huge success. We got a great theatre in Westwood and it broke all the records, and they pulled it right out because Paramount wanted the theatre for Reds." Bogdanovich later wrote about the making of the film in the 1984 book The Killing of the Unicorn.

Significance
They All Laughed was the last theatrical film in which Hepburn played a lead role (she later starred in the television film Love Among Thieves and had a cameo role in Steven Spielberg's Always). According to an interview conducted by Wes Anderson in the DVD features for the film, director Bogdanovich claims Hepburn and Gazzara fell in love and had an affair while shooting Bloodline (1979). Though the affair was short-lived, it inspired the characters they each played in They All Laughed.

Dorothy Stratten was murdered by her estranged husband and manager Paul Snider before the film's release. Stratten had begun an affair with Peter Bogdanovich during filming, and Snider hired a private detective to follow her. They separated and Stratten moved in with Bogdanovich, planning to file for divorce. When Snider was certain he had lost his wife and protégé, he murdered her and killed himself. These events were depicted in Bob Fosse's 1983 film Star 80 (where Bogdanovich's counterpart was named Aram Nicholas, played by Roger Rees) and the television film Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story (1981).

Along with Heaven's Gate, Cruising, and One from the Heart, They All Laughed generally is regarded as the end of the New Hollywood period, and the director-driven studio films of the 1970s. Since the very public failures of these four films, Hollywood studios rarely allow directors to control the films they finance.

Cult status
In 2002 the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson praised the film. The film was released to VHS on January 31, 1995; HBO Home Video released the film to DVD (as a 25th Anniversary Edition) on October 17, 2006. It started streaming on Max in March 2024.

"It was a very loving picture", said Bogdanovich in 2011. "It was the happiest time of my life. I look back on it now and it's been like thirty years or so – it was definitely the high point in my life."