Godfather (46 page)

It is generally believed that the negative reaction to the film at the New York Film Festival sabotaged the movie's chances to succeed with the public. If the movie failed on its original release, it is to some degree because
Rumble Fish
is an austere picture that is not easy to love. Several reviewers across the country subsequently condemned the movie as hopelessly obscure and pretentious. They pointed to the fantasy sequence in which Rusty-James passes out after he and his buddy Steve are pummeled by muggers. Rusty-James has a rapturous “out-of-body experience,” in which he believes he is dead. As he floats above the city, he sees his comatose body stretched out on the ground below. He even imagines his own wake in a pool hall, as his grieving friends offer a toast “to Rusty-James, a real cool dude.”

This fantasy sequence is surely relevant to the film, since it patently reflects a pathetic wish fulfillment on Rusty-James's part: he pictures himself being esteemed by his old buddies as a legend like his older brother, which is sadly not the case. David Ehrenstein calls this “wonderfully wacky moment” just the kind of element in a Coppola film that his critics dismiss as mere “visual trickery.” One critic grudgingly complimented the movie for possessing a feverishly, partially redeeming grandeur, as evidenced in the fantasy sequence just noted. Another reviewer went so far as to state that this whimsical sequence reminds one that Coppola can be one of the most powerful filmmakers of our time. He summed up the picture by saying that Coppola has created a bleak, oppressive world, a simmering limbo of pool parlors, bars, and teen hangouts—clearly the work of an artist who refuses to surrender. Yet another critic observed that it seems that Coppola, still the maverick, simply will not behave. Prodded by the suits who run the studios to turn out another crowd-pleaser like
The Outsiders
, he instead followed up that picture that had captured the youth market with a baroque film, more likely to appeal to the much smaller art house set.
⁴⁰
A small group of Coppola well-wishers endorsed his sophisticated handling of his material in
Rumble Fish
, calling it a brave film from a director who stands apart from the “flavor-of-the-month” mentality in Hollywood, whereby producers try to cater to the changes in public taste.

Rumble Fish
has gained a following over the years. It is now seen as a highly inventive film that maintains an abrasive edge. The plot moves gamely along to the climax, where Motorcycle Boy's fate is sealed. While some reviewers saw the grim, forbidding movie as an addled, disjointed tale of young
drifters, it is really a thought-provoking slice of street life about some losers who are being deprived of the little they have left to lose. The austere lighting and black-and-white photography help to give the movie genuine intensity, as the camera lingers on scenes of dereliction, finding artistic beauty in foggy railroad yards and smoky cafes. In fact, Dean Tavoularis's stark production design and Steven Burum's black-and-white cinematography deserved more credit than they got at the time of release for the shadowy, atmospheric netherworld they helped Coppola to create.

Coppola complained with some justification that the critics who reviewed the picture from the New York Film Festival did not even bother to acknowledge the performances in the film. Matt Dillon gives a much more shaded depiction of the misfit Rusty-James in
Rumble Fish
than he did in his rather perfunctory portrayal of Dallas Winston in
The Outsiders
. Mickey Rourke gives the performance of his career in his understated reading of Motorcycle Boy, and Vincent Spano gives an immaculate portrayal of Steve, Rusty-James's good-hearted best friend, who has the same sort of dogged devotion for Rusty-James that Rusty-James himself has for Motorcycle Boy. All three young actors effectively project the inner turmoil of modern young people.

Nevertheless, the movie did not find an audience at the time of its initial release and was pulled from distribution after only seven weeks, with a mere $1 million in earnings. By contrast,
The Outsiders
racked up a $12 million gross while it was playing first run. Still,
Rumble Fish
, like
One from the Heart
, attracted a larger audience in Europe than it did in the United States.

The Outsiders
and
Rumble Fish
are linked and not only because they are both based on youth-oriented novels by S. E. Hinton that examine ritual gang violence. They are further connected by Coppla's consistent theme of family, which is quite visible in both movies. The Matt Dillon characters in
The Outsiders
and in
Rumble Fish
derive a sense of family from fellow gang members. Dallas Winston's dysfunctional family is all but nonexistent in
The Outsiders
and he has no contact with them to speak of. If he cares about anyone, it is Johnny and Ponyboy. Rusty-James's family in
Rumble Fish
collapsed when his mother took off for California, his father took to drink, and his brother became a restless vagabond. Rusty-James attempts to reestablish a family-like bond with Motorcycle Boy when the latter returns from California, but they never really reconnect. If anyone truly cares about Rusty-James, it is Steve, even when Rusty-James takes his friendship for granted.

Coppola's faith in
Rumble Fish
as a significant film has been vindicated,
to the extent that it has over the years achieved the status of a cult film, and it is often shown in college film courses. Furthermore, film historians acknowledge in retrospect Coppola's artistic courage in making an unrelentingly pessimistic picture about modern youth, which transcends the simplistic presentation of youngsters in more innocuous, safe teen flicks. “That film has gained some sort of underground status,” says Barry Malkin. “The black-and-white photography with splashes of color, the painted shadows of the German expressionistic cinema,” and Stewart Copeland's music “have garnered a following.”
⁴¹
Summing up Coppola's two youth movies, Bergan perhaps says it all when he declares that “both films proved that Coppola was not content to make genre movies in a conventional way” but, instead, breathed new life into the old formulas.
⁴²

Since
Rumble Fish
failed to find an audience at the time of its original release, however, Coppola found it difficult at the time to mount another production. Quite unexpectedly he was brought in at the eleventh hour to help salvage a picture entitled
The Cotton Club
by none other than his old nemesis from
The Godfather
days, Robert Evans.

I don't like crap games with barons and earls;
Don't go to Harlem in ermine and pearls
.......................................................................
That's why the lady is a tramp.

—Words and music by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers

Very often performers were court jesters or troubadours for the gangsters, whether they liked it or not, because the gangsters owned the place. That's part of the world they were in.

—Martin Scorsese

Robert Evans, who was production chief at Paramount when Francis Ford Coppola filmed
The Godfather
there, in due course left his position to become an independent producer, releasing films through Paramount. After producing successful movies like
Chinatown
(1974), Evans subsequently turned out some flops. To make matters worse, he was convicted of cocaine possession. By the early 1980s, Evans's career was in dire straits, and he hoped to get back on top by making
The Cotton Club
.

In 1982 Evans optioned James Haskins's
The Cotton Club
, a coffee-table book that was a nonfiction picture-history of the famous Harlem
nightclub that enjoyed its heyday in the Roaring Twenties, a cabaret where the drinks were cold and the jazz was hot.

The Cotton Club
was designed as a musical about the famed Harlem nightspot that flourished in the Prohibition Era, where the entertainers were black and the customers were white. Because the club was run by racketeers, the plot at times takes on the dimensions of a gangster picture, thereby recalling Coppola's
Godfather
films. The concept of blending the format of the movie musical with that of the gangster movie—the two most popular film genres during the period of the early talkies—seemed like a dandy idea in theory, but it proved difficult to work out in practice.

Evans planned to finance the picture through private investors so that all the rights to the picture would belong to him. In his familiar fashion of expressing himself in crudities, he touted the film project to prospective investors as filled with gangsters, music, and “pussy galore,” a reference to the temptress with that name in one of the James Bond movies.
¹
He eventually made a deal with Ed and Fred Doumani, owners of the Tropicana and El Morocco casinos in Las Vegas. The brothers were reputed to have links to the Mafia in Vegas, but Evans believed that their checkbooks were as good as anyone else's. The Doumanis committed themselves to investing in the film, which Evans budgeted at $20 million.

One of the project's drawing cards was that Evans had signed superstar Richard Gere (
An Officer and a Gentleman
) to appear in the movie. Gere would play one of the rare white musicians who appeared at the Cotton Club. Evans also obtained Gregory Hines, the popular black actor-hoofer whose own grandmother had danced at the Cotton Club, to play a featured role.

Since the present film was to some extent a gangster picture, Evans commissioned Mario Puzo—who by this time had co-written the screenplays of
The Godfather
and
Godfather II
—to do the first draft of the script. But Evans was dissatisfied with the screenplay Puzo submitted in the summer of 1982. Since all Puzo had to work with was Haskins's nonfiction account of the Cotton Club, he had to weave a plotline virtually out of whole cloth, and his scenario simply did not hold together.

Orion Pictures was willing to distribute the picture, provided that Evans could present them with a viable script. It occurred to Evans that he should corral Francis Coppola, the experienced script doctor who had saved
Patton
and other screenplays over the years, to do a rewrite of Puzo's draft.

The producer was aware that Coppola had creditors snapping at his heels in the wake of the collapse of Zoetrope Studios in Los Angeles (see
chapter 7
). Indeed, Coppola was still living under the shadow of bankruptcy,
and the bill collectors were already getting into his wife's jewelry box. Although Evans and Coppola had had multiple clashes during the filming of
The Godfather
, Evans was confident that Coppola would be glad to make a fast buck revising Puzo's
Cotton Club
screenplay.

In March 1983 he phoned Coppola and begged him to rescue the script: “Francis, my baby is sick and needs a doctor.” He added for good measure that the trio responsible for
The Godfather
—Evans, Puzo, and Coppola—would then all be involved in
The Cotton Club
. Evans was convinced that the new picture would be “
The Godfather
with music,” and would prove to be another winner.
²
Coppola remembers that Evans called him “in desperation with some hokey metaphor that his baby was sick and needed a doctor. I said I'd be happy to help him for a week or so, no charge.
³
That week eventually stretched into a commitment on Coppola's part that lasted well over a year, as he ultimately not only rewrote the script but directed the film as well.

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.