Godfather (49 page)

Since the story of the white characters eclipses that of the black characters in the picture, a fair amount of screen time is spent in portraying how Dixie uses his association with Dutch Schultz to snag the title role in a Hollywood gangster picture called
Mob Boss
, in which he imitates his erstwhile boss Dutch Schultz. To that extent Dixie is based on George Raft, a dancer in New York nightclubs who, by his own admission, got help from top underworld figures in his struggle to make it in pictures. He gained overnight success as a coin-flipping gangster in
Scarface
(1932). Gere even had his hair brushed back flat with brilliantine just to look more like Raft. (Dixie's parlaying his mob connections into a screen career recalls the episode in
The Godfather
when Vito Corleone fostered the movie career of Johnny Fontane, who, as we know, was modeled in some ways on Frank Sinatra.) Dixie “turns his back on the world of violent crime in order to mock it in the movies.”
³⁰

At one point Dixie and Vera actually get to do a complete musical
number, when he accompanies her on his cornet as she warbles, “Am I Blue?” Their song is not shortened, possibly because of its significance in presaging that they eventually will be united in a real-life duet, after he makes it big in Tinsel Town.

One way Coppola bolstered the gangster plot in the picture was by interpolating into the story some historical events from the gangster wars of the Roaring Twenties. Vincent “Mad Dog” Dwyer was inspired by Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, as was mentioned earlier. Like his namesake, Vinnie Dwyer is a reckless, unpredictable hoodlum who quickly makes a number of enemies in the underworld. As Owney Madden says in exasperation, “What do you do with a mad dog in the street?” Madden arranges for Vinnie to be riddled with bullets in a drugstore phone booth. This is precisely how Mad Dog Call met his death.

By the same token, the movie also incorporates the death of Dutch Schultz just as it happened in reality. Madden, who is described as a “class guy” when it comes to running the Cotton Club, is as ruthless as the rest of the gangsters in the picture when the occasion arises. He decides in consultation with real-life Mafia czar Charles “Lucky” Luciano (Joe Dallesandro) that the hotheaded Dutchman's violent, mercurial behavior is getting out of hand. Moreover, they fear that Dutch might panic and spill his guts to the new crime commissioner in New York, Thomas Dewey, who has amassed impressive evidence about Dutch's crimes. Coppola inserts a private joke in the dialogue at this point: one of Luciano's henchmen advises him that the Dutchman is not bullet proof, so they should treat him “like we treated Coppola,” someone that the mob had rubbed out!

Madden and Luciano arrange to have Dutch Schultz mowed down in the Palace Chophouse and Tavern in Newark, New Jersey—an event that actually took place on October 23, 1935. Dutch's murder conjures up memories of Michael Corleone opening fire on two of the Corleones' enemies in a Bronx restaurant in
The Godfather
. In conceiving the scene depicting Dutchman's murder, Coppola recalls, “I started with the notion that tap dancing sounds like machine guns.”
³¹
He then got the ingenious notion to intercut Gregory Hines's rapid-fire tap dancing at the Cotton Club with the machine gun bullets that slaughter Dutch Schultz in the Newark restaurant, so that the sound of the tap dancing melds with that of the machine gun fire on the sound track. At this point the gangster picture and the movie musical truly intersect. The Dutchman slumps over the table dead, as Sandman finishes his routine.

One critic indicated that
The Cotton Club
was not a satisfying film because, as producer David O. Selznick (
Gone with the Wind
) once said,
blood and jokes do not mix. As a matter of fact, the film is not really a comedy with music but a drama with music. It is indeed a very dark film, with a high body count—many more characters bite the dust than I have detailed here. The only unalloyed optimism reflected in the movie is the reunion of the two couples, one white, the other black, in the finale. Otherwise, the picture is mainly serious melodrama.

At film's end Vera is now free of Dutch and can marry Dixie, and Sandman has likewise won the heart of Lila. Coppola accordingly stages a grand finale that cuts between Grand Central Station and a Grand Central set on the Cotton Club stage—a sequence that is not in the shooting script and, consequently, was created by Coppola during filming.

In this final production number montage, “the conclusion of the narrative is blended together with a Cotton Club production spectacular,” and the delirious crosscutting between Grand Central Station and the Cotton Club stage makes it difficult to distinguish between the two locations: Sometimes it appears that the club chorus is dancing in Grand Central Station.
³²
On stage, Clay Williams leads the Cotton Club company through a dance number set in the depot, and the action shifts to Sandman and Lila at Grand Central Station going off on their honeymoon, while Dixie is reunited with Vera on the depot platform. The two couples travel off on the Twentieth Century Limited toward marital bliss, to the tune of Duke Ellington's “Daybreak Express.” Pianist-humorist Oscar Levant once described the movie musical as a series of catastrophes ending in a floor show. That description certainly fits
The Cotton Club
, which has its share of catastrophes and yet concludes with a dazzling production number.

The most noticeable flaw in the film is its lack of a solid story line, possibly due to the fact that the major source of the screenplay was Haskins's nonfiction pictorial history of the club. Consequently, Coppola was handicapped by the necessity of creating a coherent narrative of his own, something that had stymied Puzo. Moreover, the film was ostensibly structured to tell the stories of the two sets of brothers, whose lives are influenced by their association with the Cotton Club and the gangsters who run it. But the producers, as stated, mandated that the main plot be devoted to the Dwyer brothers, with the Williams brothers relegated to a subplot. As a result, “the parallel stories are not effectively intertwined—they simply pass in the night,” the way that the two pairs of brothers pass each other on the street in one scene.
³³

Admittedly, Coppola made some concessions to Evans and the Doumanis at the script stage and to the Orion executives during the final edit, but the moguls' effort to control the irrepressible maverick Francis
Coppola met with only limited success.
The Cotton Club
turned out to be essentially a Francis Coppola film, certainly not a Robert Evans film. “Regardless of the input Coppola gets from others on a picture, it somehow always turns out fundamentally the way he wants it to,” one industry insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me. “I have never figured out how he does it.” That makes Coppola a genuine auteur, the author of every film he has made. Indeed, the relationships of the two pairs of brothers reflect Coppola's constant theme about the dynamics of family and recall the complicated interactions of the Corleone brothers in the
Godfather
films. In short, that theme helps to tie his films together.

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.

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.