Godfather (47 page)

“In reading some of the research,” Coppola explains, he discovered that the Jazz Age was “a very rich and very stimulating period. So I ultimately took a shot at the script…. I sort of fell in love with the Cotton Club. It's an epic, it's a story of the times”: it tells the story of the black entertainers, of the white gangsters, “everything of those times.”
⁴

On April 5, 1983, Coppola finished his first rewrite of the Puzo script in which he emphasized the cultural achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. Evans was severely disappointed with Coppola's draft, since Coppola had considerably reduced Richard Gere's role in the film in order to foreground the black performers at the Club. The producer fumed that Coppola's script departed drastically from the scenario that he had outlined at Napa. Evans maintained that it read like a grant proposal for a documentary about the Harlem Renaissance—it even included readings by black poets. With Gere's strong support, Evans insisted that Coppola build up the white superstar's role in the picture. Coppola thus felt that Evans was selling him down the river and ruefully suspected that the script was not going to turn out to be the tribute to black popular culture he had envisioned it to be.

The Doumanis demanded that Evans show them Coppola's first version of the screenplay, the one Evans himself was not satisfied with. He diffidently submitted it to them, along with a bogus note, to which he had forged Coppola's initial “F” as a signature, stating: “Well, after twenty-two days, here is the blueprint. Now let's get down to writing the script.”
⁵
The counterfeit note was meant to assure the Doumanis that Coppola was committed to a complete rewrite of the script, but they were not taken in. They still threatened to snap their purses shut if a better script was not in the offing.

Evans panicked and frantically cast about for other investors. He got to hear about Elaine Jacobs (a.k.a., Karen Jacobs-Greenberger), a rich, blonde divorcée from Texas who was interested in getting into the film business. She was in fact involved in dubious dealings with the underworld and had ties to a Colombian drug cartel. But Evans at this juncture felt that beggars couldn't be choosers and agreed to let Jacobs put him in touch with Roy Radin, a sleazy variety show promoter from New York. Radin arranged a multimillion-dollar loan from some of his disreputable financial sources in order to provide Evans with additional backing for
The Cotton Club
. Hearing about Evans's negotiations with Jacobs and Radin, one trade paper commented that Evans was willing to make deals with individuals whom most reputable producers would hesitate to shake hands with.

Shortly afterward Radin had a major falling out with Jacobs, who discovered that he had surreptitiously possessed himself of two hundred kilos of cocaine from her private stash. Radin was last seen on May 13, 1983, getting into Jacobs's limo, on his way to a dinner meeting with her at La Scala at which they were presumably going to bury the hatchet. As a matter of fact, the hatchet, so to speak was buried in Radin: his decomposed corpse turned up a month later in a remote canyon on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He had been shot several times through the head, and a stick of dynamite had been shoved into his mouth and the fuse lit. Evans, aware that the drug dealings between Radin and Jacobs had gone sour, went ballistic. A detective on the case later testified that Evans confided to the Doumanis, “That bitch killed Radin; and I'm next”—though there was no evidence that Jacobs was a threat to Evans.
⁶

Still, Evans was inevitably dragged into the case as a material witness, and so Jacobs's trial was dubbed by the tabloids the
Cotton Club
murder case. He was eventually exonerated of any involvement in Radin's death, while Jacobs was convicted of the kidnapping and killing of Radin in retaliation for the theft of the cocaine. Evans rewarded the Los Angeles homicide squad with autographed copies of the script for
Chinatown
. Needless to say, the loan Radin had engineered for Evans never materialized. Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein's documentary
The Kid Stays in the Picture
, based on Evans's autobiography of the same title, is riveting in its coverage of the
Cotton Club
murder case. It includes newsreel footage of the murder scene and of Jacobs's trial.

Meanwhile Coppola, who staunchly contends that he was completely ignorant of Evans's negotiations with Jacobs and Radin, soldiered on with the screenplay, with Evans, Gere, and Hines kibitzing over his shoulder. He decided that the only way to make more room for the white gangster plot
in the scenario was to have the story of the Cotton Club's black entertainers simply provide a backdrop for the melodrama about the white mobsters. Evans, along with Gere and Hines, bought the concept.

Because Coppola as screenwriter seemed to be so cooperative, Evans broached to him the possibility of directing the movie. In June 1983 Coppola agreed to helm
The Cotton Club
: “I knew that
The Cotton Club
material was so rich,” he says, “that, if I had control, there was no reason why I couldn't make a beautiful film out of it.”
⁷

The Doumanis reaffirmed their role as investors in the film in the light of the new script and recruited Denver oilman Victor Sayyah as a coinvestor. Like the Doumanis, Sayyah was known to be a tough customer and to drive a hard bargain. The trio advised Evans that Coppola must not overspend on this picture as he had on his previous musical,
One from the Heart
. “Don't worry, I can control Francis,” Evans reassured them. He assumed that Coppola had been chastened by the recent commercial failure of
Rumble Fish
and would be more open to listening to an experienced producer like Evans.
⁸
By the time Coppola signed on to direct the movie, however, the project was plagued with a variety of production problems. Coppola did his best to improve matters, which to him basically meant ignoring Evans, who had been mismanaging the production.

The producer had rented the Astoria Studios in Queens to shoot the picture, and a host of highly paid technicians had already been working there for six months with minimal supervision from Evans. Preproduction costs were running to $140,000 a week and had risen alarmingly to $13 million before Coppola took over the direction of the movie. For example, production designer Richard Sylbert, whom Evans had engaged before Coppola came on the picture, had recreated a lavish replica of the Cotton Club. The set's authentic detail amazed former employees of the original club who inspected it, but the Cotton Club set alone cost $5 million.

Coppola demanded total creative control of the production from this point onward, since he was no longer just the scriptwriter. As writer alone he was willing to defer to Evans on the script, but as director he reserved the right not only to final cut but to further revise the script during production. In negotiating with Evans, he was very clear on this point, he remembers, “because Bob Evans is a known back-seat driver, a man who is prone to tinker with other people's work from his office or apartment.”
⁹

Coppola decided that the screenplay was not up to par and called in Pulitzer prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, who had written a trilogy of novels about the Roaring Twenties, including one about racketeer “Legs” Diamond. He wanted Kennedy to ensure period accuracy in the
script and to provide some terse, pungent dialogue. Evans balked at bringing in yet another expensive writer, but Coppola insisted. Coppola and Kennedy began their collaboration in the same suite at the historic Astoria Studios in which the Marx Brothers had held forth while filming
The Coconuts
there in 1929. The pair worked round the clock in a feverish, pressured atmosphere that Kennedy likened to that of the city room of a large metropolitan newspaper.

One of the major obstacles they met in rewriting the script, according to Kennedy, was the “perpetual task of enhancing Richard Gere's role.”
¹⁰
Since Gere as Dixie Dwyer, the lone white musician at the Cotton Club, was the male lead, he had to be central to the study. So Dixie became an employee of the infamous Dutch Schultz (James Remar), a sadistic real-life mobster who frequented the club. For the record, Dutch Schultz was born Arthur Flegenheimer. He took his pseudonym from a hoodlum named Dutch Schultz, who had flourished in the 1890s. Good-natured musician Dixie Dwyer comes off as a foil to racketeer Dutch Schultz, whom Coppola and Kennedy frankly found a far more intriguing character to develop than Dixie. The screenwriters produced what they called a “rehearsal script,” which had already gone through several drafts, just in time for the cast to use it during the rehearsal period that would precede principal photography.

In addition to Richard Gere and Gregory Hines (as Delbert “Sandman” Williams), the cast now included Bob Hoskins as Owney Madden; Diane Lane, who had appeared in two previous Coppola films, as Vera Cicero, Dixie's inamorata; and Leonette McKee as Leila Rose Oliver, Hiness love interest. Gregory Hines's own brother, Maurice, played Delbert's brother Clayton Williams. Julian Beck, co-founder of New York's Living Theater, was cast as Sol Weinstein, Dutch Schultz's grizzled, world-weary enforcer—this was a casting coup similar to Coppola's snagging the Actors Studio's Lee Strasberg to appear in
Godfather II
. Fabled Broadway musical comedy queen Gwen Verdon took the part of the Dwyer boys' mother. Nicolas Cage was given a meatier role than he had had in
Rumble Fish
, that of Gere's tough younger brother, Vincent “Mad Dog” Dwyer. Larry Fishburne, by now a Coppola regular, played “Bumpy” Rhodes, a black hood.

Evans and Coppola squabbled over casting decisions on this film, just as they had on
The Godfather
. Evans in particular contested Coppola's wish to hire Fred Gwynne, known primarily as a comic strip actor; Coppola wished to cast Gwynne against type as hangdog Frenchy DeMange, Madden's chief henchman. Since Evans had disputed several of Coppola's earlier decisions, such as the hiring of William Kennedy, Coppola finally lost patience with the producer and issued an ultimatum to him. Declaring, “I'm
fed up with you. Tired of your second guessing”
¹¹
Coppola threatened to quit and take the next plane for San Francisco if Evans did not cease challenging his casting choices. Evans gave in and cast Gwynne, but he referred to Coppola afterward sardonically as Prince Machiavelli.

Although Evans had earlier assured the Doumanis that he alone could control Coppola, he failed to realize that Coppola, still the Hollywood maverick, insisted on doing things his own way and would not be dictated to by producers. He understandably was determined to hold on tenaciously to the artistic control of the production that Evans had promised him.

The three-week rehearsal period commenced on July 25, 1983. Once more Coppola videotaped the rehearsals, allowing the cast to improvise bits of dialogue within certain limits. He would incorporate any of the improved dialogue he thought had worked particularly well into the script at the end of each day. He wound up the rehearsal period by employing his “previsualization” technique. He taped a complete run-through of the screenplay with the actors in front of a blue screen. Then he replaced the blue background with suitable shots of Harlem in the Roaring Twenties, inspired by Haskins's book of photos.

Evans had personally selected the technical crew before Coppola came in, and Coppola did not want a crew made up of Evans's partisans who were already prone to criticize his directorial decisions. On a day known ever after as “Black Sunday,” a reference to the title of one of Evans's flops, Coppola summarily fired several technicians, as well as choreographer Dyson Lovell. (For the record, Coppola had now parted company with the original choreographer on all three of his musicals.) He dismissed Lovell, he explains, because the routines Lovell had designed up to that point were not vintage Cotton Club numbers. They rather suggested a glitzy
Ice Capades
salute to Duke Ellington. For Lovell, Coppola substituted Michael Smuin, who had choreographed the fight scenes in
Rumble Fish
, and mollified Lovell with a credit as executive producer.

Coppola likewise dismissed the director of photography, John Alcott, because he had to work too closely with the cinematographer to go with an Evans pick. He approached Gordon Willis (
Godfather
and
Godfather II
), but Willis stated flatly that he did not believe in directors “sitting in trailers and talking to people over loudspeakers,” a practice Coppola had instituted after the two
Godfather
films.
¹²
As we know, Coppola had learned by painful experience on
One from the Heart
that he had to be on the sound stage to set up each shot. He would continue the practice he had established on
The Outsiders
and
Rumble Fish
, however, of reviewing each take on a monitor close to the set and only retreat to the Silverfish trailer to view
each completed scene before he passed it on to editor Barry Malkin, a veteran of several Coppola films. In any case, Coppola finally replaced Alcott with British cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt (
The Hunger
).

Coppola and Kennedy, as said before, had continued to revise the screenplay during the rehearsal period. The final shooting script, dated August 22, 1983, was circulated to cast and crew just days before principal photography officially began on August 28. On the first day of filming Richard Gere was nowhere to be found. Coppola was advised by an intermediary that the star was unhappy with the way Coppola was handling the production. Gere was accustomed to learning his lines and shooting the script as written. To him Coppola's flexibility about changing the script seemed haphazard. The screenplay, he believed, was becoming more and more elusive. Gere was also dissatisfied with his financial arrangement on the picture. This led Coppola to surmise that Gere's refusal to come to the set was mostly to get himself a bigger piece of the pie.