In fact, the parallels between The Cotton Club and the first two Godfather films led Pauline Kael to assert that The Cotton Club had fallen woefully short of the standard for the gangster picture that Coppola had established with those earlier films. Instead, she continues, the present film is “a composite of the old Warner Bros. gangster pictures and musicals of the 1930s.” It seems that Coppola had skimmed the top off every 1930s movie he had ever seen, “added seltzer, stirred it with a swizzlestick, and called it a movie.”34
Still Coppola’s Jazz Age gangster musical had some fans among the critics. There were those who hailed it as a glorious celebration of a bygone era. Furthermore, Coppola shows himself once more in this picture to be a master of visual imagery. One dandy visual metaphor in the film is built around the barrier that separates the tarty Vera from Dixie as long as she is the Dutchman’s property. Coppola visualizes the obstruction that this barrier initially places between them by photographing Dixie and Vera on different sides of symbolic barriers. For example, their exchange of good-byes as they part after one of their encounters occurs while they are on opposite sides of the fence that encloses the apartment building where Dutch Schultz has Vera ensconced. The image suggests that Dixie is barred from entering the world Vera at this point still inhabits with the Dutchman. As Vera and Dixie make love in a later scene, the shadows cast by the lace curtains on the windows make a netlike pattern on their naked bodies, implying that they are caught in a net from which they cannot at the moment get free.
At times the picture is like a three-ring circus, with nightclub sequences that are suitably noisy and flamboyant. The production numbers at the club are captured by Coppola’s flexible and fluid camerawork. In general, Coppola directs throughout with a vigor that compensates for the derivative elements of the plot, which have been lifted from old musicals and gangster pictures.
The Cotton Club premiered in New York City on December 8, 1984, with an eye on an initial release during Christmas week in selected key cities. Despite the mixture of positive and negative notices, the movie performed well in the marketplace during its opening run. But Orion, which controlled the film’s nationwide distribution, was disheartened by the downbeat reviews and mounted a half-hearted publicity campaign across the country. When exhibitors realized that Orion was not really behind the film, they backed off from booking it. If The Cotton Club lost money, film scholar Jon Lewis affirms, Orion must bear much of the blame because it botched the movie’s general release.
Moreover, Evans had insisted from the start on a screenplay in which the story of a black cabaret during the Harlem Renaissance was overshadowed by the gangster story line. As a result, black audiences did not flock to see the movie. Thus, the fact that The Cotton Club only racked up $25 million in domestic rentals cannot be laid at Coppola’s door.
The Cotton Club has its share of eye-filling musical numbers, featuring the celebrated dancer Gregory Hines, plus some exciting action sequences built around harrowing gangland shootouts between rival mobs of bootleggers. Nevertheless, despite Coppola’s conscientious efforts to whip the movie into shape, The Cotton Club remains a hybrid, a mixture of two disparate screen genres that, in the last analysis, never quite coalesce into a unified work of art.
Be that as it may, it is well worth noting that when Gregory Hines died in August 2003, several obituaries singled out The Cotton Club as a major film for which he will be remembered. The New York Times, for example, wrote of his rare screen presence in The Cotton Club and recognized his graceful, self-assured performance in the film, whether he was acting the role of an ambitious hoofer or tap-dancing solo or with his brother Maurice. The vitality and comic intelligence of his stage performances, said the Times, easily translated to the screen in The Cotton Club.
Still The Cotton Club is a film worth watching, and it has attracted on videocassette and DVD some of the wider audience it deserves. Indeed, the sale of the ancillary rights to television and home video eventually accounted for the film’s breaking even and ultimately realizing a modest profit. In any case, Coppola had much better luck with his next venture, Peggy Sue Got Married, when he was called in yet again to save a project that was foundering.
Part Four
The Vintage Years
10
The Past as Present
Peggy Sue Got Married and “Rip Van Winkle”
We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.
—Donnie Smith, a former Quiz Kid
in the film Magnolia
I’ve spent much of my life trying to outrun the past, and now it floods all over me.
—Ian McKellen as James Whale in
the film Gods and Monsters
At this juncture Francis Coppola still considered himself a hireling who was compelled to accept projects brought to him by the studios because he was not in a position to originate projects of his own. Still facing bankruptcy because of the demise of Zoetrope Studios in Los Angeles, he had arranged to pay off some of his debts at thirty cents on the dollar. But this accommodation depended on his making regular payments to his creditors.
Even the Sentinel Building, the headquarters of American Zoetrope in San Francisco, which continued to house his offices and editing facilities, was in danger of being lost to him if he could not ante up the $1.7 million he still owed on it. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Sentinel Building, which was topped with a blue-and-green cupola, would be put up for sale “unless, of course, the Seventh Cavalry arrives with the cash to save Coppola’s cupola”1
The Seventh Cavalry did arrive, in the person of independent producer Ray Stark, for whom Coppola had labored as a screenwriter in the mid-1960s at Seven Arts (see chapter 1). Stark was planning Peggy Sue Got Married, a time-travel fantasy, as an independent production to be released by Tri-Star Pictures. TV director Penny Marshall had been set to make her feature debut with Peggy Sue, but she left the project in November 1984 after a dispute with the screenwriters.
The property languished in limbo until Stark finally approached Coppola and made him an offer he could not refuse: Stark agreed to pay Coppola $3 million to direct the picture. Because of his financial bind, Coppola committed himself to lensing Peggy Sue Got Married, and he immediately utilized more than one-third of his directorial fee to save the Sentinel Building, just hours before the deadline.
Coppola was still bitter about his experience with The Cotton Club. He had been called in to salvage a production that was already out of control when he took over, yet he was already being blamed in some quarters for the film’s tepid critical reception. His financial straits resulting from The Cotton Club compelled him to direct the romantic fantasy film Peggy Sue Got Married, which was not exactly his cup of tea. “Peggy Sue, I must say, was not the kind of film that I normally would want to do,” he explains. “At first I felt the script—although it was okay—was just like a routine television show.” Nevertheless, “the project was ready to go and they wanted me,” and he had so many debts that he simply had to keep working.2
Poggy Sue Got Married (1986)
In July 1983, Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtling, a husband-and-wife screenwriting team, had brought Peggy Sue Got Married to the attention of producer Paul Gurion, who in turn interested Ray Stark in making the picture for his independent film unit. The title of Peggy Sue Got Married was derived from a popular song by the late rock-and-roller Buddy Holly. The scenario portrays Peggy Sue as a middle-aged woman whose marriage to her husband Charlie is on the rocks. She is magically transported back to her senior year in high school and comes to terms with her past life. The screenwriters presented the first draft of the script to Gurion on December 2,1984, and it was passed on to Coppola. Kathleen Turner (Body Heat) was picked to play the title role because she was halfway between the ages of the younger and the older Peggy Sue, whom she would be portraying in the movie.
Turner would not be available until she finished another picture, however, so shooting was po
stponed until August 1985. That gave Coppola time to tinker with the script, in collaboration with Sarner and Leichtling, during the preproduction phase. After all, Francis Coppola, the maverick, was not a director to be handed a script that he did not revise to suit his vision of the material.
One of the major inflections Coppola gave the script was to strengthen the emotional center of the film. His model was the last act of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, “when the daughter goes back and sees her mother and her youth,” he says. “I was looking for more of that small-town charm and emotion.”3 Our Town is a work steeped in Americana that depicts the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens living in a whistle-stop. Like Our Town, Peggy Sue Got Married is a paean to those mundane details of life that we take for granted—and that pass away all too fleetingly. The kind of emotion Coppola helped to inject into the screenplay is evident in the scene where Peggy Sue encounters her mother for the first time in her dream of the past, after the hands of time have been turned back to her teen years. Peggy Sue is touched to see Evelyn, her mother, looking so young. She hugs Evelyn and blurts out, “Oh, Mom, I forgot that you were ever this young!” Peggy Sue is pleased to have her mother restored to her, but Evelyn wonders why her daughter is embracing her so warmly. This scene, more than any other in the movie, was inspired by a parallel scene in Our Town.
Later on, Peggy Sue becomes teary when she speaks on the phone with her grandmother, Elizabeth Alvorg, who has since died. Coppola indicates in the script that Peggy Sue be photographed in somber silhouette as she talks to her “dead” grandma, because Peggy Sue is “literally reviving the ghosts of memory.” She knows what lies ahead: “death and decay for the family she once took for granted.”4
Kathleen Turner observes, “I saw Francis, together with the original writers, take out gags that undercut the sentiment” of the story.5 For example, Coppola deleted a farcical sequence marked by smatterings of piquant sex, in which a male student hypnotizes Peggy Sue to make her take off her blouse. In fact, the more Coppola worked on the script, the more he found it an endearing, bittersweet tale and the more he found himself getting involved in it.
Coppola was going for deeper characterization in the rewrites, so he developed the role of Charlie Bodell, Peggy Sue’s wayward husband, in the revised screenplay. He shows how Charlie’s failed career aspirations help to account for his unhappiness in his later life. Coppola also strengthened the role of Richard Norvik, who had a crush on Peggy Sue in high school. Richard, a science whiz kid, reminded Coppola very much of himself when he was in high school. Like Richard, young Francis was a technology fanatic—his nickname in high school was “Mr. Science,” because he loved to experiment with electronic gadgets.
When it came to casting, Coppola conferred with Gurion much more harmoniously than he had with Robert Evans on either The Godfather or The Cotton Club. It was actually Gurion and not Coppola who chose Coppola’s nephew, Nicolas Cage, to play Peggy Sue’s unfaithful husband. Sofia Coppola, the director’s daughter, would appear as Peggy Sue’s kid sister Nancy. Many members of the supporting cast willingly took part in the film just to work with Coppola: Don Murray (A Hatful of Rain) and Barbara Harris (Family Plot) were cast as Peggy Sue’s parents, Jack and Evelyn Kelcher; Maureen O’Sullivan (Hannah and Her Sisters) and Leon Ames (Meet Me in St. Louis) as Peggy Sue’s grandparents, Elizabeth and Barney Alvorg; John Carradine (The Grapes of Wrath) appeared as an old friend of Barney’s.
Two staples of Coppola’s production crew were on hand, production designer Dean Tavoularis and editor Barry Malkin. The underscore was to be composed by John Barry (Body Heat), who was responsible for the background music in The Cotton Club. Coppola selected Jordan Cronenweth as director of photography, because he was impressed with Cronenweth’s work on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
Because the picture is essentially an extended dream sequence, Coppola had Cronenweth suffuse the movie with bright, saturated colors to give it a nostalgic glow. “The basic approach,” said Cronenweth, was to make Peggy Sue Got Married “a contemporary Wizard of Oz, painted with broad strokes.”6 After all, Peggy Sue is knocked into the middle of her high school years the way that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz is knocked into the middle of next week. The present film is a fanciful picture of the past that is meant to crystallize for the viewer Peggy Sue’s yearnings for her lost youth. Hence, the movie is bathed in a golden glow and amounts to a valentine for a vanished past.
As always Coppola prefaced the shooting period with a couple of weeks of videotaped rehearsals, ending with a taped run-through of the whole script. “It was like acting school, with all the improvisations,” some of which resulted in rewrites of the dialogue, Turner remembers. “[P]eople were really getting involved in the process and it was working.”7
Principal photography commenced near the end of August 1985 and involved location filming in Petaluma, California, which Coppola and Tavoularis had selected to serve as Santa Rosa, the small California town in which Peggy Sue grew up. Setting the film in Santa Rosa is perhaps an homage to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which was co-written by Thornton Wilder and which takes place in the same sleepy town of Santa Rosa. Coppola was partial to the town because it was only an hour away from his Napa estate.
The shooting phase lasted eight weeks, ending in late October, and it proceeded without any noticeable mishaps. Turner recalled that she got along famously with her director, once she made one thing perfectly clear. She had heard about Coppola’s penchant in the past for monitoring a scene while it was being shot on the TV screens in his Silverfish trailer. So she told him that if he was inclined to watch a scene being filmed in his trailer she would perform the scene in her trailer. And that was that.
Coppola was absolutely determined to bring in the picture on schedule and on budget in order to wipe out the bad press he got for the overages on The Cotton Club. “We were under such pressure to finish it on schedule that we averaged close to an eighteen-hour day,” says Turner.8 Coppola even shot the last scene, the reconciliation of Peggy Sue and Charlie, between 1:00 AM and 4:00 AM on the last official day of the shoot. Coppola of course collaborated closely with editor Barry Malkin on the final cut, and postproduction went as smoothly as the shooting period had. The premiere was set for the fall of 1986, after the plethora of teen flicks released during the summer had played out.
The opening credits of Peggy Sue Got Married are accompanied by Buddy Holly’s original recording of the title song. From the film’s opening sequence onward, Coppola demonstrates that he is in total control of his material. The picture begins with a shot of a TV set on which Charlie can be seen doing a commercial for his hardware store. Coppola’s camera pulls back to reveal Peggy Sue primping at her dressing table before departing for the high school anniversary party. Her back is to the television set, indicating that she has, at this juncture, turned her back on her philandering spouse.
Coppola pulled an adroit visual trick in the shot of Peggy Sue’s reflection in her dressing table mirror in this scene. Because it is a large mirror, the camera would have been visible in the mirror if he placed it behind Turner as he photographed her image in the mirror. So he arranged to have Turner’s double sitting at the dressing table with her back to the camera. There is, in fact, no mirror at all—only a frame—so that it is really Turner herself, and not her reflection, that is facing the camera.
Like Natalie Ravenna in The Rain People, Peggy Sue Bodell has walked out on her husband, for the time being at least. She is separated from Charlie, and their two children, Scott and Beth, live with her. She has become more successful in her business—running her own bakery—than Charlie has in running his hardware business, although Charlie was the once-promising class hotshot in high school. Peggy Sue is embarrassed by Charlie’s goofy TV commercials as “Crazy” Charlie, the Appliance King, which her teenage daughter Beth, of course, thinks are terrific.
At any rate, Peggy Sue manages to pour herself into her glittery prom dress, whic
h is described as a “blast from the past.” As she struggles into the outfit, she implies that it must have shrunk while hanging in the closet all these years (!). But the gown is really an uncomfortable reminder that her figure is not as slim as it used to be and serves as an apt prelude to the woeful evening ahead in which she is forced again and again to acknowledge that she is neither as young nor as resilient as she once was. When she arrives at the party, which is being held in the school gym, she is chagrined to see an enormous blowup of a photograph picturing herself and Charlie as king and queen of the senior prom. The photo captures them at a moment in time when their relationship was happy and carefree rather than sad and careworn, which is what it eventually became. Some of the alumni regress to high school behavior, thus Walter Getz (Jim Carrey) begins behaving like the class clown he once was. He says that his motto in high school was, “When it comes to girls, what Walter wants, Walter gets!”
Visual metaphors abound in the movie. As a balloon floats upward toward the rafters of the gym, one of the alumni reaches for it, but it gets away. So too, many of the hopes and dreams that Peggy Sue and her classmates nurtured when they were young have eluded their grasp, driven off by the frustrations and disappointments of later life—epitomized, in her case, by her foundering marriage to Charlie. When Charlie himself makes his appearance at the reunion, he is at first barely visible in the shadowy doorway. He is but a dim figure from Peggy Sue’s past, someone whom she will get to know all over again, as she relives the past and is thereby able to come to terms with the present. She is distressed at seeing Charlie again—she had hoped that her two-timing husband would have the decency not to show up at the reunion.
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