The Cotton Club Encore is showing December 13, 2019 – January 11, 2020 on MUBI in the United States as part of the series Francis Ford Coppola: Reignite Cinema.
Albany, New York is far from a cinephile hub but there exists a stronger network to the arts than what one would suspect. The city is synonymous with politics by being the state’s capital city and, especially if you live outside of the state, mostly associated with the setting of William Kennedy’s “Albany Cycle” novels that include his Pulitzer Prize-winning Great Depression-era masterwork, Ironweed. Kennedy, a former local newspaper journalist turned novelist, still remains a titan in the Albany area where he founded and developed, through MacArthur Foundation grant money, The Writer’s Institute with the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY Albany) to foster local artists and help expose the area to the best of literature, non-fiction writing, journalism, theater, and film. If you went to see a Federico Fellini film for free on a Friday night while SUNY Albany classes were in session over the last few decades, you could thank William Kennedy for that. This past October, Kennedy, now at 91 but still as sharp as a tact, held a regional film premiere at The Writer’s Institute. The film was the first screenplay Kennedy ever worked on and was credited to do, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984). But this time it was Coppola’s director’s cut, The Cotton Club Encore, with Kennedy and Coppola both in attendance. The final product of The Cotton Club Encore is a requiem of a masterful collaboration between two great artists and a brilliant cast and crew. The theatrical cut of the film, widely proclaimed a compromised, messy, over-budget commercial failure with notoriety in lawsuits and even murder hanging over its 1984 release, reflected the post-New Hollywood anxieties of ambitious, historical passion projects and also, depressingly, the racism within the film industry that gutted the soul of the movie. Luckily, the film has now been restored in this version that Coppola and Kennedy sought to create.
The film started without Kennedy as the writer nor with Coppola as the director. The general idea of the film, a crime drama set at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and primarily at the legendary gathering of The Cotton Club, based on the James Haskins non-fiction book on the famous location, was the passion project of the film producer Robert Evans, who optioned the book in 1979 and wanted to direct the film. He tapped Mario Puzo, best known for authoring The Godfather, whose adaptation Evans produced, to do a draft of a screenplay. This development caused multiple studios to express interest. Evans began working on getting talent in front of the camera, meetings which included those cast in the picture, like Richard Gere and Gregory Hines, as well as stars of the era such as Sylvester Stallone and Richard Pryor. But the Puzo script had many problems, for Evans and Gere’s dissatisfaction with the script had him making intimations of leaving the project altogether. Evans contacted his previous major collaborator, Francis Ford Coppola, to rewrite the script.
At this time, Coppola was still in massive financial straits from his self-financing of Apocalypse Now (1979) along with the disappointment of his deeply personal Las Vegas musical One from the Heart (1981). He was slowly trying to work out of it with his S.E. Hinton film adaptations of Rumble Fish and The Outsiders. Coppola and Evans were both branded by the Hollywood press as geniuses but also two men who had flown too close to the sun, Evans himself facing massive difficulties from subsequent flops after his peak with Chinatown (1974) and the two Godfather films. Coppola was sympathetic and loyal to Evans as a former collaborator and also sympathetic to him trying to make his passion project. Coppola was also burning for any cash flow and $500,000 to do a new draft of a screenplay paid better than the other directing gigs he was attached to at the time. But Coppola was not going to just be just a screenwriter for long. Evans knew what his name recognition and strongest association was in Hollywood with The Godfather films, and the fact he had Coppola and Puzo (who still had official co-credit on the screenplay) “reunited” could attract investors, as he was looking for money to be loaned for the film and Coppola had to be in the director’s chair for the film to secure funds for the project. Although seemingly a simple solution, things soured quickly.
Coppola’s first draft was not well-received by investors and temporarily resulted in Edward and Fred Doumani, Las Vegas casino owners who Evans got to bankroll the movie, to suspend their funding. Coppola’s draft was described as a “PBS-like documentary,” derided as a “history lesson,” with Coppola presenting “historical montage” of the era that broke from traditional narrative, which would include recreations of the civil rights marches of that period as well as actors reading the works of black poets of the Harlem Renaissance on-screen. Evans managed to coax the Las Vegas investors back into the project after revisions from Coppola and presented them with a copy of the book Memo From: David O. Selznick, linking the initial troubled production of the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind, which stemmed largely from script problems, to their own predicament, as in that this can happen to great, commercially lucrative art. Once in the director’s chair and with final cut, Coppola began to craft the project more into his personal vision, assembling a cast and crew to go along with his Jazz Age image of the project, intending to create a film that could not be boxed in as either a gangster picture nor a musical but something never seen before.
After reading the novel Legs, which was recommended to him by actor Mickey Rourke, Coppola decided to reach out its author, William Kennedy, to help him with the screenplay of the film. Published in 1975, Legs would be the novel that put Kennedy on the map. The first of what would be the “Albany Cycle” novels, Kennedy’s fictionalized account of the rise and fall of real-life gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond through the eyes of Diamond’s lawyer, Marcus Gorman, Kennedy’s novel was widely praised, earning comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Unlike more parochial entries of historical fiction, Kennedy’s prose offered a bittersweet and psychological account of a bygone era where gangsters were feared but also treated like movie stars. This is what attracted Coppola to Kennedy, making a narrative involving gangsters that transcended a pulpy crime novel and gangster cliches in popular culture for a deeper statement about men and country. Kennedy agreed to enter the project and with him now involved, the foundation of the script and basic story of the film was formed.
The film’s story was a mix of fictional characters and real-life gangsters as well as Jazz Age legends but was mainly about two sets of brothers in corresponding narratives, one white and the other African-American. There was Dixie Dwyer (Richard Gere), a cornet player who rubs shoulders with the mob to advance his career, ultimately becoming an actor in gangster films (loosely based on the life of actor George Raft). The complications are that his brother Vincent Dwyer (Nicolas Cage) is becoming an unpredictable, hyper-violent gangster in his own right, and Dixie finds himself falling for Vera (Diane Lane), the girl of real-life gangster kingpin Dutch Schultz (James Remar). Vera, a lounge singer who wants to open her own club, and Dixie both owe their career aspirations and advancement to Dutch, but they can only compromise and flirt with each other so much. In Dixie’s Harlem neighborhood is the character of Delbert “Sandman” Williams, who is a dancing act with his brother Clay (played by Hines’ real-life brother Maurice), but Sandman is immediately captivated by light-skinned performer Lila (Lonette McKee) and soon leaves his brother behind. Sandman’s complications are that, especially compared to Dixie, his career aspirations are capped due to systemic racism of the era. He can be an entertainer of the nightclubs and even be a performer for mostly white audiences, but there are parts of New York City he cannot set foot in without him getting suspicious looks or being in danger. Meanwhile, Lila, biracial, can pass as white, which troubles her romance with Sandman because being in present company with a black man does threaten her ability to pass and be able to go into the spaces to have the career she wants. That was the skeleton of the story, a rich and sprawling American epic on race, violence, crime, capitalism, and fame, but details and tangents that Kennedy and Coppola were wont to do were subject to daily changes and revisions due to pressure from financiers and production.
Coppola and Kennedy would work several hours a day on the script, their inspiration coming from movies and music of the era. They also bonded over their mutual love of the Irish author James Joyce. Coppola has noted that for the 1979 Cannes Film Festival when he showed a still not-yet-finished Apocalypse Now on the Croisette he referred to it as “Work in Progress,” a nod to when Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was initially published in fragments as “Work in Progress” before its publication as a whole. Kennedy and Coppola in one initial draft had an explicit allusion to Joyce’s Ulysses in scripting a musical number to the song, “Those Lovely Seaside Girls,” famously featured in the novel, which imagined a scene of a wedding. That segment was excised but it showed how these two extremely creative minds met and worked in harmony, while being under the gun of a difficult production that was day-to-day largely predicated on what the financial situation could afford them by powerful, shady investors. When the whole process was done, it was estimated dozens of different drafts were turned out by Coppola and Kennedy. Script length was cut from 135 pages to 110 pages to save on costs; most of what was excised per Kennedy was that the film’s initial drafts portrayed a fuller picture of gang violence in showing scenes of widows and those impacted by senseless deaths. At one point, Kennedy, back home in Albany and away from the film’s New York City shooting location, had to phone in a scene for Coppola to shoot in an effort to save money.
Evans was still presenting The Cotton Club as a Godfather reunion to keep investors happy. Kennedy’s Ironweed was published in 1983, around the time of this film still being in production, and Kennedy, while getting strong notices for Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, was not yet in the arena of Puzo in commercial name recognition. He was still a Hollywood outsider but he rolled with the punches even if the author never quite saw the mystique of Robert Evans that others around Kennedy did. The film ran into numerous troubles that overshadowed the narrative of the film itself. Gere tried to quit numerous times, to the point Coppola floated the suggestion that Matt Dillon become the new lead; financier Roy Radin was murdered under mysterious circumstances that caused Evans to be paranoid; the Doumanis ran out of money; Coppola shot over a month without getting paid; mob-related figures from Las Vegas began showing up on set to see through that this production finished on time; and despite cost-cutting efforts in the script, the film went significantly over-budget.
The anxiety around the film could not rest even after shooting was completed. Due to the box office disappointment of Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of The Wiz, Evans struggled to even fund this picture that was largely centered around African-Americans. Coppola’s cut of the film featured numerous scene-to-scene musical numbers of only African-Americans (with Lane’s Vera being the most prominent non-black character to lead a musical number). Despite the fact it was historically accurate and honored many black performers of the era, the notion that “there’s too many black people in the film” was the general complaint Coppola heard from the studio at the time and has since gone public about. Although having final cut, Coppola was still shell-shocked from his experiences in One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now, and so he obliged the studio with what they wanted. Length, musical numbers, and much of the narrative threads of the African-American characters were cut, with Gere, Lane, Cage, and Remar more central while Hines and McKee’s performances feel sidelined with their musical numbers serving as their calling cards rather than delivering any dialogue. "I didn't have the courage nor the perspective to realize that maybe this was a different kind of musical," Coppola would admit in a post-screening panel with Kennedy.
The Cotton Club premiered in December of 1984 as an Orion Pictures release, with Kennedy’s Ironweed winning the Pulitzer earlier that April, and would fail to make a fraction of its budget. The film received good but not great reviews and managed to get two Oscar nominations for the Herculean editing work and lavish, rich in detail production design. But the financial difficulties of the film that preceded its release remained a dark cloud that impacted the final product of the released film. Luckily, Coppola had saved his rough cut of the film on Betamax tapes and from there worked to make what is now available as the Encore cut.
The Cotton Club Encore expands on what made the film great and in adding more numbers becomes one of the best American musicals of the 1980s. The dynamic pairing of Fred Gwynne and Bob Hoskins as partners Frenchy Demange and Owney Madden is terrifically lived in and scene-stealing. John Barry’s musical score compliments the jazz standards like “Stormy Weather” and “Ill Wind,” each performed in the film incredibly well. Stephen Goldblatt’s virtuoso cinematography has fluidity and unpredictability in the musical scenes in framing and movement, going from a vérité approach going off-stage to on-stage to near abstract Dutch angles. The cross-fades in the editing are dream-like, harkening back to pre-Code crime films, and the cross-cutting is just as smooth as the work in the first Godfather film. The performances of Lonette McKee, Jackée Harry, the Hines brothers, and the other black performers, some of whom are standing in for real-life entertainers like Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers, are hair-raising and spectacular. The final number shot at New York’s Grand Central Station rivals some of the best scenes of any Golden Age Hollywood musical. And by re-centering the story on African-Americans and how the Cotton Club slowly integrated—in part thanks to the rise of the black mob best embodied by Laurence Fishburne’s Bumpy Rhodes—during a time when African-Americans were originally segregated from watching their own kind in white clubs, the film easily functions as a meta-commentary of the Hollywood system’s treatment and neglect of African-Americans. Having a high-point of African-American culture not be foregrounded into being a story on blackness and black stardom was malpractice and luckily Encore exists to right its own initial wrongs.
While the Encore cut is still a marked improvement from what was a good film to begin with, there still feels like there were more depths to explore in the narrative due to the ambitions of Coppola and Kennedy’s script. McKee’s storyline as Lila in terms of racial passing is such a complicated and fascinating narrative, and one that has a complex cultural legacy in many other works of art, but it feels like there should have been more explored with her character. The exposition-filled information consigned to her speaks to Kennedy and Coppola’s limitations in telling the black woman’s experience as white male artists. Lila and Vera’s friendship is another off-screen event that could have been afforded at least another scene to present their connection as women who want to move up in society at this time. Nicolas Cage suffers the most in the new cut, as he is the white character who gets less foregrounded and becomes more of a phantom. What was, even for Cage’s standards, an eccentric early performance becomes even stranger. But Cage’s loss is Gregory and Maurice Hines’ gain, with the brotherhood of the Williams, and not the Dwyers, ultimately being what endures in the film, approximated in the wonderful and heartfelt musical dance number “Crazy Rhythm.”
The Cotton Club Encore presents a dizzying, rich, inspiring achievement in the creative partnership of Francis Ford Coppola and William Kennedy. After thirty-five years since the film’s initial release, these men, now elder statesmen of their fields of film and literature, show how a “work in progress” can be fully realized in due time.