The Cotton Club

Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Evans spent five years and almost $60M to transform James Haskins' picture-book history of the storied Harlem jazz club of the 1930s into an epic, prestige motion picture. The result certainly feels like a movie based on a big book of photographs rather than a novel. The story, such as it is, follows dancers and gangsters associated with the titular Harlem nightclub where the patrons were white and the performers were black. The swirling series of events depicted revolves around two couples: Richard Gere and Diane Lane navigate the gangster side, while Gregory Hines and Lonette McKee are the focus of the dance musical side. Hines's brother, Maurice Hines, shares the screen and the stage with his more famous little bro, playing his fictional brother and partner. These two began tap dancing when they were around five years old and frequently danced together in numbers choreographed by Henry Le Tang, who staged their numbers for this film. Their childhood performances were patterned on the Nicholas Brothers, so it was perfect casting to pair the Hines brothers as a fictionalized version of the famed acrobatic dancing duo. The film's most electrifying aspect is when we see these two guys in action. While the rudderless narrative prevents The Cotten Club from fully gelling into anything more than a series of vignettes and production numbers, it intertwines its characters and its two parallel worlds fairly well. This is especially true in the climax, which intercuts a mob hit with a bravura tap-dance number and then moves into a surreal, theatrical grand finale.

The Cotten Club was one of those legendary troubled '80s productions. Evans began the film with Robert Altman set to direct and Mario Puzo writing the script, but Evans and Altman had a massive falling out over the runaway production of Popeye in 1980. The celebrity producer and former actor briefly considered directing the movie himself but must have laid off the cocaine for long enough to realize this was probably too big a project to make into his directorial debut. Despite having as adversarial a relationship with Coppola on The Godfather as he'd had with Altman on Popeye, Evans approached the collaborator with whom he'd reached his loftiest heights and asked him to take over The Cotton Club first as screenwriter and then as director. Coppola was deeply in debt due to the failure of his lavish musical One From the Heart and figured, what better way to get out of debt than to direct another lavish musical (one that would pay him rather than that one he'd be on the hook for).

The movie was plagued with production overruns. Nearly everyone behind the camera got fired at one point or another; some were rehired after things had calmed down. Evans mortgaged his mansion in Beverly Hills, which he lost, and was busted for drug trafficking, which he tried to offset using this film as collateral. Another financial backer, the vaudeville promoter Roy Radin, was murdered with the killers alleging that they had been hired by Evans and Radin's drug dealer girlfriend because she was cut out of the profit-sharing she was promised on this film. Yet another financier, Saudi businessman, arms dealer, and frequent guest on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous also lost a pile of money on the picture, which was well-reviewed but not anywhere near successful enough to make back even half of what it cost. Everyone with money in this movie sued everyone else with money in this movie, with most of the cases dragging on for years.

Despite all this, The Cotton Club is a very entertaining picture with an incredible cast, solid performances, exquisite period production design by Richard Sylbert (The Graduate, Chinatown, Reds), and an exciting score by John Barry (Midnight Cowboy, Body Heat, Out of Africa, and most of the James Bond pictures). There's no question that the hot Jazz musical sequences in The Cotton Club are far more interesting than its generic mobster storyline. For this reason, it was all the more frustrating that when Orion Pictures wanted Coppola to shorten the movie's length, the director opted to take time out of the musical storyline, focusing the picture more on its less interesting gangster characters. Orion was a company that rarely interfered with the producers and directors it worked with as long as they stayed within the agreed-upon budget, which Evans and Coppola decidedly did not. As he has with nearly all of his '80s movies, he hastily (often sloppily) cut them down when his financiers insisted—something he did even with films in which such demands were not made. In 2019, Coppola released a longer "encore" edition of The Cotten Club. Though I'm not a fan of "director's cuts," this was not a latter-day re-edit so much as a restoration of the film's original fine cut, which Coppola had preserved on videotape, and it's a superior version that reinstates the balance between the Gere and Hines characters.