September 19th, 2012
The Cotton Club, (1984)
Nicolas Cage is Vincent "Mad Dog" Dwyer
Critics often cite Michael Cimino's
Heaven's Gate as the deathknell for the '70's Golden Era of auteur filmmaking. Before
Cimino's film single-handedly brought United Artists to near-bankruptcy money was no object in service of a director's artistic spectacle. Afterwards former golden boys like Robert Altman, Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola had to soft shoe a little more if they wanted anything near the budgets they were once allotted. If
Heaven's Gate was a deathknell then 1984's
The Cotton Club was the nails in the coffin. Throwing money at a troubled production wasn't a solution anymore.
The same year
Heaven's Gate came out Francis Ford Coppola pulled up on the tiller and managed to cut his own near-debacle - the notoriously costly
Apocalypse Now - into arguable the greatest war film of all time. Years later Coppola was in deep debt following his self-funded, little-loved film
One From the Heart and Robert Evans' Zoetrope Pictures was looking for a hit. Evans, the financial force behind the
Godfather movies and Coppola's biggest frenemy had optioned James Haskins' pictoral history of New York's famous Cotton Club with the intent on directing it himself. With distributor Orion Pictures' money already spent Evans hired Coppola to write a draft of
Godfather-scribe Mario Puzo's script in the hope of attracting some private investors With tensions mounting between the two men directing duties fell to Coppola and once more he found himself trying to land a cinematic Spruce Goose.
