Since Coppola found it helpful to have his co-scripter Susie Hinton on the set of Rumble Fish for last-minute rewrites, he decided to keep Kennedy on salary while The Cotton Club was in production. Gregory Hines remembers, “Francis at times would come on the set and say, ‘We don’t have a scene here,’” and begin reworking it with the cast. “Then you’d see the scene come together” Afterward, Coppola and Kennedy would put the scene in final form in the script.17
When Gere and some of the other actors complained about the ever-evolving script, Coppola emphatically pointed out that some of the key alterations in the script were made at the behest of the principal investors, the Doumani brothers and Sayyah. “They kept asking me to figure out ways to rewrite, to lower the budget,” by eliminating from the script some of the locations and some of the sets, Coppola explains.18 Hence Coppola would try to figure out ways to stage more scenes in the Cotton Club in order to trim the number of settings needed for the film and to make more use of Sylbert’s multimillion-dollar Cotton Club set.
Still the endless script revisions caused delays in shooting. After all, substantially reworking a scene with the actors prior to shooting was time-consuming—as Gordon Willis complained vociferously while photographing The Godfather. As a result, filming fell increasingly behind schedule. Thus actors would show up on the set in make-up and costume to do a scheduled scene, only to find by the end of the day that Coppola would not get to that scene until the next day at the earliest. This situation was repeated throughout the shoot with some regularity. Bob Hoskins’s scenes were delayed so often that he really got bored sitting around his dressing room day after day, “waiting for something to happen.” Eventually, he says, “you forgot what you do for a living.”19 Diane Lane adds, “This went on for months. We never knew when we were going to shoot.”
Nicolas Cage became so frustrated by the delays that one day he angrily trashed his dressing room. “I was slated for three week’s work,” he explains. “I was there for six months, in costume, in makeup, on the set” in case Coppola got around to doing a scene in which Cage was scheduled to appear.20 Francis Coppola tactfully explained his nephew’s behavior by saying that Cage’s fit of rage was meant to help him in preparing to play the ruthless “Mad Dog” Dwyer in the picture, a character based on the real gangster “Mad Dog” Coll.
The trio of investors constantly pressured Coppola to cut expenses, but, as Coppola periodically reminded them, the production had been running full speed ahead for six months before he came on board, and “the Tiffany concept” of the production had already been firmly established. The shooting period for The Cotton Club eventually ran to eighty-seven days, spread over twenty-two months. By the end of shooting, the budget had skyrocketed to $48 million, nearly double the original figure.
Toward the end of filming, the Doumanis realized that the Christmas season was coming, and, if principal photography continued during the Christmas holidays, the overtime paid to the union crew members would be prohibitively expensive. The Doumanis and Sayyah, who had no previous experience in the picture business and who had had no luck in dealing with Coppola, were finally fed up. In fact, Sayyah got so infuriated during a cost-accounting conference with associate producer Melissa Prophet, Coppola’s liaison with the investors, that he went berserk and hurled her through a plate glass window.21 A wag quipped that a Prophet is not known in her own country. With that, Sayyah sheepishly repaired to Vegas.
The brothers brought in a hoodlum from Las Vegas named Joey Cusumano, who was known to be associated with the Vegas Mafia, to scare Coppola into finishing the film before Christmas and gave him a coproducer screen credit on the film for his trouble. Cusumano, whom Ed Doumani complimented for his “street savvy,” did threaten Coppola during a production meeting. He pointed to the Silverfish trailer and said ominously, “You see this Silverfish! If we go past December 23, this is going into the ocean with the rest of the fishes.”22 Coppola (who had gotten along with the Mafiosi who showed up on the location sites of The Godfather when he was shooting in Italian neighborhoods in New York) knew how to patronize a mobster. (Cusumano would subsequently be jailed for racketeering in Las Vegas after his chores on the film were finished.)
Coppola announced posthaste that he was going to draw on his early experience working on Roger Corman’s low-budget flicks (see chapter 1). He would abandon any further rewrites and shoot the remaining scenes with maximum efficiency. Three days in a row he did a dozen camera setups per day, whereas he had previously been averaging two to three setups a day. On December 22, Coppola took the unit to Grand Central Station to film the final scene, which he and Kennedy had not had time to script. Coppola kept the cameras rolling for nearly twenty hours and wrapped the picture at 6:00 AM on December 23, 1983, Cusumano’s zero hour.
When filming was completed, Evans sued Coppola because he wanted to be consulted on the editing of the film. When Evans contended in court that the budget had ballooned to over $40 million with Coppola running the show, Barrie Osborne, Orion’s official representative on the picture, responded that the studio believed that $40 million was “a normal figure for the scope of the picture,” especially “when you have a director of Coppola’s stature.”23
Coppola won the case, retaining control of the film’s editing process. So Evans was banished from the editing room just as he had been barred from the set. He took some consolation in the $500,000 cash settlement with the Doumanis, which he received in exchange for relinquishing all of his rights over the film. He also retained the official screen credit as principal producer of the film, since he had personally originated and developed the project.
Evans declared in a press interview at the time that he was satisfied with the outcome of his lawsuit since he no longer had to play David, doing battle with Goliath (Coppola). He also repeated his claim in the interview that Coppola was mostly to blame for the overages on the production. Evans states that Coppola was so incensed at these remarks that he bashed his fist on his desk several times in anger and had to be taken to a hospital emergency room for treatment. More recently, when asked about his volatile relationship with Evans, Coppola coolly observed, “For years Evans has put out a stream of nonsense about me, and I have pretty much ignored it. I only wish him well.”24
During postproduction Coppola was faced with a half-million feet of film, which he had to edit into a movie with roughly a two-hour running time. In order to release the film at Christmas 1984, Coppola employed a battery of eighteen editors during postproduction, with Barry Malkin and Robert Lovett as supervising editors.
Coppola had learned his lesson with One from the Heart when it came to having premature test screenings of a film (see chapter 7). In the late spring of 1984 he had a private screening of a 140-minute rough cut for an invited audience that included no film critics and no industry executives. The reaction was mildly favorable, but several of the viewers thought the film overlength. Accordingly, Coppola decided that the movie should be edited down close to two hours. One way of shortening the film was to condense the songs and dances performed by the black entertainers at the Cotton Club and leave the main plot about the white mobsters pretty much intact.
Barry Malkin, for one, was not in harmony with this decision, though it was endorsed by Orion. “The Cotton Club was a film that got compressed to its detriment,” he contends. “Right from the very beginning, there’s a dance piece involving the Cotton Club girls, and it’s intercut with the titles.” Originally this dance routine, shot in smoky color, was a self-contained sequence, and some of it was lost when it was combined with the opening credits, which are in black-and-white. This number displayed the sassy, high-kicking chorines as they paraded across the screen, accompanied by the original recording of Duke Ellington’s band playing “The Mooche,” all wailing clarinets and sultry strings. “I preferred it when it was … a separate sequence,” Malkin concludes. In sum, Malkin thought The Cotton Club “would have been more successful in a longer version.”25
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In the fall of 1984 Orion sponsored sneak previews of the picture in Boston, Seattle, and San Diego. Evans saw the sneak in San Diego as a paying customer—”Though I wasn’t invited, I was there,” he remembers—and he was severely disappointed with the picture. He went back to his hotel and stayed up all night composing a thirty-one-page memo to Coppola. Evans told him in effect that “there’s a great picture there, but it’s not on the screen—it’s on the cutting room floor.”26 Ed Doumani personally delivered Evans’s memo to Coppola in Napa. He reported to Evans that Coppola commented that “he would not implement any of that prick’s suggestions.”27 Actually, Coppola was miffed at Evans’s insistence that he lengthen the film’s running time, since Coppola had shorn much of the background material about the Cotton Club and the Harlem Renaissance at the script stage at the behest of Evans and the Doumanis. The maestro, concludes Evans, purposely ignored his every written word.
Malkin was not aware that he was in full accord with Evans on wanting a longer final cut. He said afterward that he worked eighteen months on the picture and never once laid eyes on Bob Evans. In any event, there was no indication in the preview cards from these advance screenings that the audience wanted more of the performers at the Cotton Club. On the contrary, the younger members of the preview audiences consistently complained that there was too much tap dancing. As a result, the dance routines were further truncated as one of the ways of bringing the film in at two hours. In retrospect, Coppola acknowledges that “we eliminated about twenty minutes or so” of the musical numbers “that probably should not have been cut out.”28 “The response of the test audiences is paramount,” adds Malkin—“it becomes the bottom line; the tail wags the dog.”29 Orion allowed Coppola to restore nine minutes of material to plug up some holes in the plot, if not to lengthen any of the dance numbers. So the film was finally released at 128 minutes.
The plot of The Cotton Club as released revolves around the lives of two pairs of brothers, and their stories are told in parallel fashion. The white brothers are Dixie and Vincent Dwyer. Dixie Dwyer, a cornet player, is the token white musician at the Cotton Club and is allowed to sit in with the band. He is also a minion of beer baron Dutch Schultz and secretly falls for Dutch’s teenaged gun moll, Vera Cicero. His younger brother Vinnie is an inexperienced hood who hopes to gain the Dutchman’s favor by becoming Dutch’s bodyguard. The two black brothers are Delbert “Sandman” Williams and Clayton Williams, a dance team at the Cotton Club. Sandman longs to make it big as a solo act in order to impress Lila Rose Oliver, a satiny torch singer at the club. Clay is hurt when Sandman goes off on his own, but they eventually are reconciled.
Since the story of the white characters eclipses that of the black characters in the picture, a fair amount of screen time is spent in portraying how Dixie uses his association with Dutch Schultz to snag the title role in a Hollywood gangster picture called Mob Boss, in which he imitates his erstwhile boss Dutch Schultz. To that extent Dixie is based on George Raft, a dancer in New York nightclubs who, by his own admission, got help from top underworld figures in his struggle to make it in pictures. He gained overnight success as a coin-flipping gangster in Scarface (1932). Gere even had his hair brushed back flat with brilliantine just to look more like Raft. (Dixie’s parlaying his mob connections into a screen career recalls the episode in The Godfather when Vito Corleone fostered the movie career of Johnny Fontane, who, as we know, was modeled in some ways on Frank Sinatra.) Dixie “turns his back on the world of violent crime in order to mock it in the movies.”30
At one point Dixie and Vera actually get to do a complete musical number, when he accompanies her on his cornet as she warbles, “Am I Blue?” Their song is not shortened, possibly because of its significance in presaging that they eventually will be united in a real-life duet, after he makes it big in Tinsel Town.
One way Coppola bolstered the gangster plot in the picture was by interpolating into the story some historical events from the gangster wars of the Roaring Twenties. Vincent “Mad Dog” Dwyer was inspired by Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, as was mentioned earlier. Like his namesake, Vinnie Dwyer is a reckless, unpredictable hoodlum who quickly makes a number of enemies in the underworld. As Owney Madden says in exasperation, “What do you do with a mad dog in the street?” Madden arranges for Vinnie to be riddled with bullets in a drugstore phone booth. This is precisely how Mad Dog Call met his death.
By the same token, the movie also incorporates the death of Dutch Schultz just as it happened in reality. Madden, who is described as a “class guy” when it comes to running the Cotton Club, is as ruthless as the rest of the gangsters in the picture when the occasion arises. He decides in consultation with real-life Mafia czar Charles “Lucky” Luciano (Joe Dallesandro) that the hotheaded Dutchman’s violent, mercurial behavior is getting out of hand. Moreover, they fear that Dutch might panic and spill his guts to the new crime commissioner in New York, Thomas Dewey, who has amassed impressive evidence about Dutch’s crimes. Coppola inserts a private joke in the dialogue at this point: one of Luciano’s henchmen advises him that the Dutchman is not bullet proof, so they should treat him “like we treated Coppola,” someone that the mob had rubbed out!
Madden and Luciano arrange to have Dutch Schultz mowed down in the Palace Chophouse and Tavern in Newark, New Jersey—an event that actually took place on October 23, 1935. Dutch’s murder conjures up memories of Michael Corleone opening fire on two of the Corleones’ enemies in a Bronx restaurant in The Godfather. In conceiving the scene depicting Dutchman’s murder, Coppola recalls, “I started with the notion that tap dancing sounds like machine guns.”31 He then got the ingenious notion to intercut Gregory Hines’s rapid-fire tap dancing at the Cotton Club with the machine gun bullets that slaughter Dutch Schultz in the Newark restaurant, so that the sound of the tap dancing melds with that of the machine gun fire on the sound track. At this point the gangster picture and the movie musical truly intersect. The Dutchman slumps over the table dead, as Sandman finishes his routine.
One critic indicated that The Cotton Club was not a satisfying film because, as producer David O. Selznick (Gone with the Wind) once said, blood and jokes do not mix. As a matter of fact, the film is not really a comedy with music but a drama with music. It is indeed a very dark film, with a high body count—many more characters bite the dust than I have detailed here. The only unalloyed optimism reflected in the movie is the reunion of the two couples, one white, the other black, in the finale. Otherwise, the picture is mainly serious melodrama.
At film’s end Vera is now free of Dutch and can marry Dixie, and Sandman has likewise won the heart of Lila. Coppola accordingly stages a grand finale that cuts between Grand Central Station and a Grand Central set on the Cotton Club stage—a sequence that is not in the shooting script and, consequently, was created by Coppola during filming.
In this final production number montage, “the conclusion of the narrative is blended together with a Cotton Club production spectacular,” and the delirious crosscutting between Grand Central Station and the Cotton Club stage makes it difficult to distinguish between the two locations: Sometimes it appears that the club chorus is dancing in Grand Central Station.32 On stage, Clay Williams leads the Cotton Club company through a dance number set in the depot, and the action shifts to Sandman and Lila at Grand Central Station going off on their honeymoon, while Dixie is reunited with Vera on the depot platform. The two couples travel off on the Twentieth Century Limited toward marital bliss, to the tune of Duke Ellington’s “Daybreak Express.” Pianist-humorist Oscar Levant once described the movie musical as a series of catastrophes ending in a floor show. That description certainly fits The Cotton Club, which has its share of catastrophes and yet concludes with a dazzling production number.
The most noticeable flaw in the film is its lack of a solid story line, possibly due to the fact that the major source of the screenplay was Haskins’s nonfiction pictorial history of the club. Consequently, Coppola was handicapp
ed by the necessity of creating a coherent narrative of his own, something that had stymied Puzo. Moreover, the film was ostensibly structured to tell the stories of the two sets of brothers, whose lives are influenced by their association with the Cotton Club and the gangsters who run it. But the producers, as stated, mandated that the main plot be devoted to the Dwyer brothers, with the Williams brothers relegated to a subplot. As a result, “the parallel stories are not effectively intertwined—they simply pass in the night,” the way that the two pairs of brothers pass each other on the street in one scene.33
Admittedly, Coppola made some concessions to Evans and the Doumanis at the script stage and to the Orion executives during the final edit, but the moguls’ effort to control the irrepressible maverick Francis Coppola met with only limited success. The Cotton Club turned out to be essentially a Francis Coppola film, certainly not a Robert Evans film. “Regardless of the input Coppola gets from others on a picture, it somehow always turns out fundamentally the way he wants it to,” one industry insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me. “I have never figured out how he does it.” That makes Coppola a genuine auteur, the author of every film he has made. Indeed, the relationships of the two pairs of brothers reflect Coppola’s constant theme about the dynamics of family and recall the complicated interactions of the Corleone brothers in the Godfather films. In short, that theme helps to tie his films together.
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