The Cotton Club (1984)
Coppola was frankly appalled by the Puzo screenplay, which turned out to be an undigested mishmash of hoods and jazz. It was, in brief, a shallow gangster story devoid of any zest. So he accepted Evans’s offer of five hundred thousand dollars to do a full-fledged reworking of the script. Coppola invited Evans, Gere, and Hines to his estate in the Napa Valley, where he held a week-long script conference. He even mapped out on a blackboard his concept of the script as a gangster musical. Each day concluded with Coppola cooking a huge Italian dinner for his collaborators.
He then flew to New York City, where he engaged in background research on the scenario before attacking the screenplay. Coppola burrowed through countless volumes on Harlem, racketeers, and jazz while listening to Duke Ellington recordings.
Coppola’s first musical, Finian’s Rainbow, had dealt in some degree with the black community, and now he wanted The Cotton Club to do the same (see chapter 2). In the light of his voluminous research, Coppola decided to soft-pedal the gangster elements of the plot and focus more on the Harlem Renaissance, when Afro-American culture flourished in literature, music, and dance in New York’s black community in the Roaring Twenties.
The Harlem Renaissance was epitomized by the Cotton Club, located on the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, where top black entertainers performed between 1923 and 1935. Duke Ellington’s orchestra was the house band from 1927 to 1930, when Ellington was replaced by Cab Calloway. The bands accompanied singers like Lena Horne and Ethel Waters and dancers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The chorus girls were ballyhooed as tall, tan, and terrific, and the club was elaborately decorated like an old-fashioned Southern plantation. But, according to club policy, only well-heeled white patrons were welcome at the Cotton Club. Indeed, it was fashionable for upscale white clientele to go slumming at the Harlem club to drink bootleg liquor from drinking glasses disguised as tin cans and listen to jazz.
Club policy was dictated by Owney Madden, a gangster who ran the club as a front for his racketeering, with financing from a syndicate of white criminals. So entertainment and crime were inextricably linked in the operation of the Cotton Club, as Martin Scorsese states in an epigraph for this chapter.
“In reading some of the research,” Coppola explains, he discovered that the Jazz Age was “a very rich and very stimulating period. So I ultimately took a shot at the script…. I sort of fell in love with the Cotton Club. It’s an epic, it’s a story of the times”: it tells the story of the black entertainers, of the white gangsters, “everything of those times.”4
On April 5, 1983, Coppola finished his first rewrite of the Puzo script in which he emphasized the cultural achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. Evans was severely disappointed with Coppola’s draft, since Coppola had considerably reduced Richard Gere’s role in the film in order to foreground the black performers at the Club. The producer fumed that Coppola’s script departed drastically from the scenario that he had outlined at Napa. Evans maintained that it read like a grant proposal for a documentary about the Harlem Renaissance—it even included readings by black poets. With Gere’s strong support, Evans insisted that Coppola build up the white superstar’s role in the picture. Coppola thus felt that Evans was selling him down the river and ruefully suspected that the script was not going to turn out to be the tribute to black popular culture he had envisioned it to be.
The Doumanis demanded that Evans show them Coppola’s first version of the screenplay, the one Evans himself was not satisfied with. He diffidently submitted it to them, along with a bogus note, to which he had forged Coppola’s initial “F” as a signature, stating: “Well, after twenty-two days, here is the blueprint. Now let’s get down to writing the script.”5 The counterfeit note was meant to assure the Doumanis that Coppola was committed to a complete rewrite of the script, but they were not taken in. They still threatened to snap their purses shut if a better script was not in the offing.
Evans panicked and frantically cast about for other investors. He got to hear about Elaine Jacobs (a.k.a., Karen Jacobs-Greenberger), a rich, blonde divorcée from Texas who was interested in getting into the film business. She was in fact involved in dubious dealings with the underworld and had ties to a Colombian drug cartel. But Evans at this juncture felt that beggars couldn’t be choosers and agreed to let Jacobs put him in touch with Roy Radin, a sleazy variety show promoter from New York. Radin arranged a multimillion-dollar loan from some of his disreputable financial sources in order to provide Evans with additional backing for The Cotton Club. Hearing about Evans’s negotiations with Jacobs and Radin, one trade paper commented that Evans was willing to make deals with individuals whom most reputable producers would hesitate to shake hands with.
Shortly afterward Radin had a major falling out with Jacobs, who discovered that he had surreptitiously possessed himself of two hundred kilos of cocaine from her private stash. Radin was last seen on May 13, 1983, getting into Jacobs’s limo, on his way to a dinner meeting with her at La Scala at which they were presumably going to bury the hatchet. As a matter of fact, the hatchet, so to speak was buried in Radin: his decomposed corpse turned up a month later in a remote canyon on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He had been shot several times through the head, and a stick of dynamite had been shoved into his mouth and the fuse lit. Evans, aware that the drug dealings between Radin and Jacobs had gone sour, went ballistic. A detective on the case later testified that Evans confided to the Doumanis, “That bitch killed Radin; and I’m next”—though there was no evidence that Jacobs was a threat to Evans.6
Still, Evans was inevitably dragged into the case as a material witness, and so Jacobs’s trial was dubbed by the tabloids the Cotton Club murder case. He was eventually exonerated of any involvement in Radin’s death, while Jacobs was convicted of the kidnapping and killing of Radin in retaliation for the theft of the cocaine. Evans rewarded the Los Angeles homicide squad with autographed copies of the script for Chinatown. Needless to say, the loan Radin had engineered for Evans never materialized. Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein’s documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, based on Evans’s autobiography of the same title, is riveting in its coverage of the Cotton Club murder case. It includes newsreel footage of the murder scene and of Jacobs’s trial.
Meanwhile Coppola, who staunchly contends that he was completely ignorant of Evans’s negotiations with Jacobs and Radin, soldiered on with the screenplay, with Evans, Gere, and Hines kibitzing over his shoulder. He decided that the only way to make more room for the white gangster plot in the scenario was to have the story of the Cotton Club’s black entertainers simply provide a backdrop for the melodrama about the white mobsters. Evans, along with Gere and Hines, bought the concept.
Because Coppola as screenwriter seemed to be so cooperative, Evans broached to him the possibility of directing the movie. In June 1983 Coppola agreed to helm The Cotton Club: “I knew that The Cotton Club material was so rich,” he says, “that, if I had control, there was no reason why I couldn’t make a beautiful film out of it.”7
The Doumanis reaffirmed their role as investors in the film in the light of the new script and recruited Denver oilman Victor Sayyah as a coinvestor. Like the Doumanis, Sayyah was known to be a tough customer and to drive a hard bargain. The trio advised Evans that Coppola must not overspend on this picture as he had on his previous musical, One from the Heart. “Don’t worry, I can control Francis,” Evans reassured them. He assumed that Coppola had been chastened by the recent commercial failure of Rumble Fish and would be more open to listening to an experienced producer like Evans.8 By the time Coppola signed on to direct the movie, however, the project was plagued with a variety of production problems. Coppola did his best to improve matters, which to him basically meant ignoring Evans, who had been mismanaging the production.
The producer had rented the Astoria Studios in Queens to shoot the picture, and a host of highly paid technicians had already been working there for six
months with minimal supervision from Evans. Preproduction costs were running to $140,000 a week and had risen alarmingly to $13 million before Coppola took over the direction of the movie. For example, production designer Richard Sylbert, whom Evans had engaged before Coppola came on the picture, had recreated a lavish replica of the Cotton Club. The set’s authentic detail amazed former employees of the original club who inspected it, but the Cotton Club set alone cost $5 million.
Coppola demanded total creative control of the production from this point onward, since he was no longer just the scriptwriter. As writer alone he was willing to defer to Evans on the script, but as director he reserved the right not only to final cut but to further revise the script during production. In negotiating with Evans, he was very clear on this point, he remembers, “because Bob Evans is a known back-seat driver, a man who is prone to tinker with other people’s work from his office or apartment.”9
Coppola decided that the screenplay was not up to par and called in Pulitzer prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, who had written a trilogy of novels about the Roaring Twenties, including one about racketeer “Legs” Diamond. He wanted Kennedy to ensure period accuracy in the script and to provide some terse, pungent dialogue. Evans balked at bringing in yet another expensive writer, but Coppola insisted. Coppola and Kennedy began their collaboration in the same suite at the historic Astoria Studios in which the Marx Brothers had held forth while filming The Coconuts there in 1929. The pair worked round the clock in a feverish, pressured atmosphere that Kennedy likened to that of the city room of a large metropolitan newspaper.
One of the major obstacles they met in rewriting the script, according to Kennedy, was the “perpetual task of enhancing Richard Gere’s role.”10 Since Gere as Dixie Dwyer, the lone white musician at the Cotton Club, was the male lead, he had to be central to the study. So Dixie became an employee of the infamous Dutch Schultz (James Remar), a sadistic real-life mobster who frequented the club. For the record, Dutch Schultz was born Arthur Flegenheimer. He took his pseudonym from a hoodlum named Dutch Schultz, who had flourished in the 1890s. Good-natured musician Dixie Dwyer comes off as a foil to racketeer Dutch Schultz, whom Coppola and Kennedy frankly found a far more intriguing character to develop than Dixie. The screenwriters produced what they called a “rehearsal script,” which had already gone through several drafts, just in time for the cast to use it during the rehearsal period that would precede principal photography.
In addition to Richard Gere and Gregory Hines (as Delbert “Sandman” Williams), the cast now included Bob Hoskins as Owney Madden; Diane Lane, who had appeared in two previous Coppola films, as Vera Cicero, Dixie’s inamorata; and Leonette McKee as Leila Rose Oliver, Hiness love interest. Gregory Hines’s own brother, Maurice, played Delbert’s brother Clayton Williams. Julian Beck, co-founder of New York’s Living Theater, was cast as Sol Weinstein, Dutch Schultz’s grizzled, world-weary enforcer—this was a casting coup similar to Coppola’s snagging the Actors Studio’s Lee Strasberg to appear in Godfather II. Fabled Broadway musical comedy queen Gwen Verdon took the part of the Dwyer boys’ mother. Nicolas Cage was given a meatier role than he had had in Rumble Fish, that of Gere’s tough younger brother, Vincent “Mad Dog” Dwyer. Larry Fishburne, by now a Coppola regular, played “Bumpy” Rhodes, a black hood.
Evans and Coppola squabbled over casting decisions on this film, just as they had on The Godfather. Evans in particular contested Coppola’s wish to hire Fred Gwynne, known primarily as a comic strip actor; Coppola wished to cast Gwynne against type as hangdog Frenchy DeMange, Madden’s chief henchman. Since Evans had disputed several of Coppola’s earlier decisions, such as the hiring of William Kennedy, Coppola finally lost patience with the producer and issued an ultimatum to him. Declaring, “I’m fed up with you. Tired of your second guessing”11 Coppola threatened to quit and take the next plane for San Francisco if Evans did not cease challenging his casting choices. Evans gave in and cast Gwynne, but he referred to Coppola afterward sardonically as Prince Machiavelli.
Although Evans had earlier assured the Doumanis that he alone could control Coppola, he failed to realize that Coppola, still the Hollywood maverick, insisted on doing things his own way and would not be dictated to by producers. He understandably was determined to hold on tenaciously to the artistic control of the production that Evans had promised him.
The three-week rehearsal period commenced on July 25, 1983. Once more Coppola videotaped the rehearsals, allowing the cast to improvise bits of dialogue within certain limits. He would incorporate any of the improved dialogue he thought had worked particularly well into the script at the end of each day. He wound up the rehearsal period by employing his “previsualization” technique. He taped a complete run-through of the screenplay with the actors in front of a blue screen. Then he replaced the blue background with suitable shots of Harlem in the Roaring Twenties, inspired by Haskins’s book of photos.
Evans had personally selected the technical crew before Coppola came in, and Coppola did not want a crew made up of Evans’s partisans who were already prone to criticize his directorial decisions. On a day known ever after as “Black Sunday,” a reference to the title of one of Evans’s flops, Coppola summarily fired several technicians, as well as choreographer Dyson Lovell. (For the record, Coppola had now parted company with the original choreographer on all three of his musicals.) He dismissed Lovell, he explains, because the routines Lovell had designed up to that point were not vintage Cotton Club numbers. They rather suggested a glitzy Ice Capades salute to Duke Ellington. For Lovell, Coppola substituted Michael Smuin, who had choreographed the fight scenes in Rumble Fish, and mollified Lovell with a credit as executive producer.
Coppola likewise dismissed the director of photography, John Alcott, because he had to work too closely with the cinematographer to go with an Evans pick. He approached Gordon Willis (Godfather and Godfather II), but Willis stated flatly that he did not believe in directors “sitting in trailers and talking to people over loudspeakers,” a practice Coppola had instituted after the two Godfather films.12 As we know, Coppola had learned by painful experience on One from the Heart that he had to be on the sound stage to set up each shot. He would continue the practice he had established on The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, however, of reviewing each take on a monitor close to the set and only retreat to the Silverfish trailer to view each completed scene before he passed it on to editor Barry Malkin, a veteran of several Coppola films. In any case, Coppola finally replaced Alcott with British cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt (The Hunger).
Coppola and Kennedy, as said before, had continued to revise the screenplay during the rehearsal period. The final shooting script, dated August 22, 1983, was circulated to cast and crew just days before principal photography officially began on August 28. On the first day of filming Richard Gere was nowhere to be found. Coppola was advised by an intermediary that the star was unhappy with the way Coppola was handling the production. Gere was accustomed to learning his lines and shooting the script as written. To him Coppola’s flexibility about changing the script seemed haphazard. The screenplay, he believed, was becoming more and more elusive. Gere was also dissatisfied with his financial arrangement on the picture. This led Coppola to surmise that Gere’s refusal to come to the set was mostly to get himself a bigger piece of the pie.
Coppola shot around Gere for the first week, commenting wryly, “I specialize in being a ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself.”13 When Evans boosted Gere’s income for the picture, Gere showed up for work at the beginning of the second week of shooting, thus confirming the suspicion of Coppola, who saw Gere’s making trouble at the outset of filming as thoroughly unprofessional. The incident created bad blood between director and star, and their relationship was strained throughout the production experience. At one point Coppola snapped at Gere, after a disagreement over a scene, that Gere obviously did not like him—he assured Gere that the feeling was mutual.
Coppola was fu
rther incensed when he had been directing the movie for a month without receiving a penny of his salary. He was so strapped for ready cash because of his precarious financial status that American Express canceled his credit card. So Coppola threatened to walk off the picture if his salary was not immediately forthcoming. Evans paid up.
Another financial crisis arose when the cast and crew missed a paycheck, and the unions simply ordered the union employees to go on strike until they were paid. (Gone were the days when studio employees would work for deferred wages, as they did on One from the Heart.) Coppola sprinted into the center of the soundstage and guaranteed that he would pay everyone out of his own pocket before the shoot was over, if need be. As it happened, an armored car drove onto the lot later in the day with the checks, but Coppola’s rather operatic gesture was generally appreciated nonetheless—even though he obviously could never have hoped to make good his grand promise.
Recalling Evans’s constant interference during the shooting of The Godfather, when Evans was studio boss at Paramount, Coppola took the precaution of barring him from the set of The Cotton Club. He was able to make this stricture stick by once more threatening to quit: “Who needs this?! You need me, I don’t need you,” he stormed at Evans. “You stay; I leave.”14 Evans was conscious that Orion had more confidence in Coppola, who had directed the recent blockbuster, The Outsiders, than in Evans himself, who could not boast of a hit in living memory. Therefore, in order to acquire $15 million from Orion to cover mounting bills, Evans reluctantly relinquished total control of the production to Coppola and agreed to stay off the set. When asked by film historian Peter Biskind about his reaction to Coppola’s interdict, Evans answered bitterly, “I wanted to pick him up and throw the fat fuck out of the window.”15 “It was like giving up your kid, but I had no choice,” Evans laments in his memoirs. “I was quarantined to what was commonly called ‘the crisis center,’” a Manhattan town house that served as his home and office during production.16 He finally faced the fact that if Coppola was calling the shots there was no point in his being around the set anyway.
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