Godfather (48 page)

Coppola shot around Gere for the first week, commenting wryly, “I specialize in being a ringmaster of a circus that's inventing itself.”
¹³
When Evans boosted Gere's income for the picture, Gere showed up for work at the beginning of the second week of shooting, thus confirming the suspicion of Coppola, who saw Gere's making trouble at the outset of filming as thoroughly unprofessional. The incident created bad blood between director and star, and their relationship was strained throughout the production experience. At one point Coppola snapped at Gere, after a disagreement over a scene, that Gere obviously did not like him—he assured Gere that the feeling was mutual.

Coppola was further incensed when he had been directing the movie for a month without receiving a penny of his salary. He was so strapped for ready cash because of his precarious financial status that American Express canceled his credit card. So Coppola threatened to walk off the picture if his salary was not immediately forthcoming. Evans paid up.

Another financial crisis arose when the cast and crew missed a paycheck, and the unions simply ordered the union employees to go on strike until they were paid. (Gone were the days when studio employees would work for deferred wages, as they did on
One from the Heart
.) Coppola sprinted into the center of the soundstage and guaranteed that he would pay everyone out of his own pocket before the shoot was over, if need be. As it happened, an armored car drove onto the lot later in the day with the checks, but Coppola's rather operatic gesture was generally appreciated nonetheless—even though he obviously could never have hoped to make good his grand promise.

Recalling Evans's constant interference during the shooting of
The Godfather
, when Evans was studio boss at Paramount, Coppola took the precaution of barring him from the set of
The Cotton Club
. He was able to make this stricture stick by once more threatening to quit: “Who needs this?! You need me, I don't need you,” he stormed at Evans. “You stay; I leave.”
¹⁴
Evans was conscious that Orion had more confidence in Coppola, who had directed the recent blockbuster,
The Outsiders
, than in Evans himself, who could not boast of a hit in living memory. Therefore, in order to acquire $15 million from Orion to cover mounting bills, Evans reluctantly relinquished total control of the production to Coppola and agreed to stay off the set. When asked by film historian Peter Biskind about his reaction to Coppola's interdict, Evans answered bitterly, “I wanted to pick him up and throw the fat fuck out of the window.”
¹⁵
“It was like giving up your kid, but I had no choice,” Evans laments in his memoirs. “I was quarantined to what was commonly called ‘the crisis center,'” a Manhattan town house that served as his home and office during production.
¹⁶
He finally faced the fact that if Coppola was calling the shots there was no point in his being around the set anyway.

Since Coppola found it helpful to have his co-scripter Susie Hinton on the set of
Rumble Fish
for last-minute rewrites, he decided to keep Kennedy on salary while
The Cotton Club
was in production. Gregory Hines remembers, “Francis at times would come on the set and say, ‘We don't have a scene here,'” and begin reworking it with the cast. “Then you'd see the scene come together” Afterward, Coppola and Kennedy would put the scene in final form in the script.
¹⁷

When Gere and some of the other actors complained about the ever-evolving script, Coppola emphatically pointed out that some of the key alterations in the script were made at the behest of the principal investors, the Doumani brothers and Sayyah. “They kept asking me to figure out ways to rewrite, to lower the budget,” by eliminating from the script some of the locations and some of the sets, Coppola explains.
¹⁸
Hence Coppola would try to figure out ways to stage more scenes in the Cotton Club in order to trim the number of settings needed for the film and to make more use of Sylbert's multimillion-dollar Cotton Club set.

Still the endless script revisions caused delays in shooting. After all, substantially reworking a scene with the actors prior to shooting was time-consuming—as Gordon Willis complained vociferously while photographing
The Godfather
. As a result, filming fell increasingly behind schedule. Thus actors would show up on the set in make-up and costume to do a scheduled scene, only to find by the end of the day that Coppola would not
get to that scene until the next day at the earliest. This situation was repeated throughout the shoot with some regularity. Bob Hoskins's scenes were delayed so often that he really got bored sitting around his dressing room day after day, “waiting for something to happen.” Eventually, he says, “you forgot what you do for a living.”
¹⁹
Diane Lane adds, “This went on for months. We never knew when we were going to shoot.”

Nicolas Cage became so frustrated by the delays that one day he angrily trashed his dressing room. “I was slated for three week's work,” he explains. “I was there for six months, in costume, in makeup, on the set” in case Coppola got around to doing a scene in which Cage was scheduled to appear.
²⁰
Francis Coppola tactfully explained his nephew's behavior by saying that Cage's fit of rage was meant to help him in preparing to play the ruthless “Mad Dog” Dwyer in the picture, a character based on the real gangster “Mad Dog” Coll.

The trio of investors constantly pressured Coppola to cut expenses, but, as Coppola periodically reminded them, the production had been running full speed ahead for six months before he came on board, and “the Tiffany concept” of the production had already been firmly established. The shooting period for
The Cotton Club
eventually ran to eighty-seven days, spread over twenty-two months. By the end of shooting, the budget had skyrocketed to $48 million, nearly double the original figure.

Toward the end of filming, the Doumanis realized that the Christmas season was coming, and, if principal photography continued during the Christmas holidays, the overtime paid to the union crew members would be prohibitively expensive. The Doumanis and Sayyah, who had no previous experience in the picture business and who had had no luck in dealing with Coppola, were finally fed up. In fact, Sayyah got so infuriated during a cost-accounting conference with associate producer Melissa Prophet, Coppola's liaison with the investors, that he went berserk and hurled her through a plate glass window.
²¹
A wag quipped that a Prophet is not known in her own country. With that, Sayyah sheepishly repaired to Vegas.

The brothers brought in a hoodlum from Las Vegas named Joey Cusumano, who was known to be associated with the Vegas Mafia, to scare Coppola into finishing the film before Christmas and gave him a coproducer screen credit on the film for his trouble. Cusumano, whom Ed Doumani complimented for his “street savvy,” did threaten Coppola during a production meeting. He pointed to the Silverfish trailer and said ominously, “You see this Silverfish! If we go past December 23, this is going into the ocean with the rest of the fishes.”
²²
Coppola (who had gotten along with the Mafiosi who showed up on the location sites of
The Godfather
when he
was shooting in Italian neighborhoods in New York) knew how to patronize a mobster. (Cusumano would subsequently be jailed for racketeering in Las Vegas after his chores on the film were finished.)

Coppola announced posthaste that he was going to draw on his early experience working on Roger Corman's low-budget flicks (see
chapter 1
). He would abandon any further rewrites and shoot the remaining scenes with maximum efficiency. Three days in a row he did a dozen camera setups per day, whereas he had previously been averaging two to three setups a day. On December 22, Coppola took the unit to Grand Central Station to film the final scene, which he and Kennedy had not had time to script. Coppola kept the cameras rolling for nearly twenty hours and wrapped the picture at 6:00
AM
on December 23, 1983, Cusumano's zero hour.

When filming was completed, Evans sued Coppola because he wanted to be consulted on the editing of the film. When Evans contended in court that the budget had ballooned to over $40 million with Coppola running the show, Barrie Osborne, Orion's official representative on the picture, responded that the studio believed that $40 million was “a normal figure for the scope of the picture,” especially “when you have a director of Coppola's stature.”
²³

Coppola won the case, retaining control of the film's editing process. So Evans was banished from the editing room just as he had been barred from the set. He took some consolation in the $500,000 cash settlement with the Doumanis, which he received in exchange for relinquishing all of his rights over the film. He also retained the official screen credit as principal producer of the film, since he had personally originated and developed the project.

Evans declared in a press interview at the time that he was satisfied with the outcome of his lawsuit since he no longer had to play David, doing battle with Goliath (Coppola). He also repeated his claim in the interview that Coppola was mostly to blame for the overages on the production. Evans states that Coppola was so incensed at these remarks that he bashed his fist on his desk several times in anger and had to be taken to a hospital emergency room for treatment. More recently, when asked about his volatile relationship with Evans, Coppola coolly observed, “For years Evans has put out a stream of nonsense about me, and I have pretty much ignored it. I only wish him well.”
²⁴

During postproduction Coppola was faced with a half-million feet of film, which he had to edit into a movie with roughly a two-hour running time. In order to release the film at Christmas 1984, Coppola employed a
battery of eighteen editors during postproduction, with Barry Malkin and Robert Lovett as supervising editors.

Coppola had learned his lesson with
One from the Heart
when it came to having premature test screenings of a film (see
chapter 7
). In the late spring of 1984 he had a private screening of a 140-minute rough cut for an invited audience that included no film critics and no industry executives. The reaction was mildly favorable, but several of the viewers thought the film overlength. Accordingly, Coppola decided that the movie should be edited down close to two hours. One way of shortening the film was to condense the songs and dances performed by the black entertainers at the Cotton Club and leave the main plot about the white mobsters pretty much intact.

Barry Malkin, for one, was not in harmony with this decision, though it was endorsed by Orion.
“The Cotton Club
was a film that got compressed to its detriment,” he contends. “Right from the very beginning, there's a dance piece involving the Cotton Club girls, and it's intercut with the titles.” Originally this dance routine, shot in smoky color, was a self-contained sequence, and some of it was lost when it was combined with the opening credits, which are in black-and-white. This number displayed the sassy, high-kicking chorines as they paraded across the screen, accompanied by the original recording of Duke Ellington's band playing “The Mooche,” all wailing clarinets and sultry strings. “I preferred it when it was … a separate sequence,” Malkin concludes. In sum, Malkin thought
The Cotton Club
“would have been more successful in a longer version.”
²⁵

In the fall of 1984 Orion sponsored sneak previews of the picture in Boston, Seattle, and San Diego. Evans saw the sneak in San Diego as a paying customer—”Though I wasn't invited, I was there,” he remembers—and he was severely disappointed with the picture. He went back to his hotel and stayed up all night composing a thirty-one-page memo to Coppola. Evans told him in effect that “there's a great picture there, but it's not on the screen—it's on the cutting room floor.”
²⁶
Ed Doumani personally delivered Evans's memo to Coppola in Napa. He reported to Evans that Coppola commented that “he would not implement any of that prick's suggestions.”
²⁷
Actually, Coppola was miffed at Evans's insistence that he lengthen the film's running time, since Coppola had shorn much of the background material about the Cotton Club and the Harlem Renaissance at the script stage at the behest of Evans and the Doumanis. The maestro, concludes Evans, purposely ignored his every written word.

Malkin was not aware that he was in full accord with Evans on wanting a longer final cut. He said afterward that he worked eighteen months
on the picture and never once laid eyes on Bob Evans. In any event, there was no indication in the preview cards from these advance screenings that the audience wanted more of the performers at the Cotton Club. On the contrary, the younger members of the preview audiences consistently complained that there was too much tap dancing. As a result, the dance routines were further truncated as one of the ways of bringing the film in at two hours. In retrospect, Coppola acknowledges that “we eliminated about twenty minutes or so” of the musical numbers “that probably should not have been cut out.”
²⁸
“The response of the test audiences is paramount,” adds Malkin—“it becomes the bottom line; the tail wags the dog.”
²⁹
Orion allowed Coppola to restore nine minutes of material to plug up some holes in the plot, if not to lengthen any of the dance numbers. So the film was finally released at 128 minutes.

The plot of
The Cotton Club
as released revolves around the lives of two pairs of brothers, and their stories are told in parallel fashion. The white brothers are Dixie and Vincent Dwyer. Dixie Dwyer, a cornet player, is the token white musician at the Cotton Club and is allowed to sit in with the band. He is also a minion of beer baron Dutch Schultz and secretly falls for Dutch's teenaged gun moll, Vera Cicero. His younger brother Vinnie is an inexperienced hood who hopes to gain the Dutchman's favor by becoming Dutch's bodyguard. The two black brothers are Delbert “Sandman” Williams and Clayton Williams, a dance team at the Cotton Club. Sandman longs to make it big as a solo act in order to impress Lila Rose Oliver, a satiny torch singer at the club. Clay is hurt when Sandman goes off on his own, but they eventually are reconciled.