Expanded, re-edited ‘Cotton Club’ coming to Albany
Director Coppola, writer Kennedy to be in town for screening at The Egg
Celebrated film director Francis Ford Coppola in October will bring a newly re-edited and expanded version of his 1984 movie “The Cotton Club” to town for a screening and conversation at The Egg with local author William Kennedy, who wrote the screenplay for the movie.
The event will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6, at the Hart Theatre at The Egg. It will be a benefit for the New York State Writers Institute, which Kennedy founded in 1983, the year Coppola commissioned him to rewrite a script originally penned by “Godfather” author Mario Puzo. It centers on the eponymous Harlem jazz venue of the 1920s and ’30s, which showcased legendary performers of the era and patrons from high society and criminals of the era.
Officially called “The Cotton Club Encore,” the movie was re-edited by Coppola himself, at what is described
as a personal expense of $500,000. It features 30 minutes of footage cut from the original, including performance numbers and more of the black characters’ storylines.
When “The Cotton Club Encore” premiered at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival, critic and “American Cin
ematographer” podcast host Jim Hemphill wrote:
“(T)he changes Coppola has made to his film, both major and minor, cumulatively alter the impact and meaning of ‘The Cotton Club’ so significantly that it is essentially a new movie — one with the audacity, resonance and ambition of its era’s most important films. To discover ‘The Cotton Club’ in this form is to come across a lost masterpiece that stands alongside ‘Raging Bull,’ ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ as one of the great American epics of the early 1980s.”
According to the Writers Institute, after Coppola hired Kennedy in 1983, a dozen scripts were produced in a four-week span, including five during one 48-hour nonstop weekend. Kennedy estimated that between 30 and 40 scripts overall were written, according to a story published in the Toronto Globe and Mail in November 1984. The $47 million film made its world premiere at Albany’s Palace Theatre on Dec. 2, 1984.
In an interview with Associated Press, Coppola discussed his motivation for an expanded version of his original film now, 35 years later:
“The Cotton Club was sort of made on the battlefield between the various people who put up the money and the producer (Robert Evans). At the time, they looked at it and said, ‘Oh, there’s too many black people in it. Can we cut out some of the tap dancing and put the emphasis less on the black people in the story?’ I happened to have a Betamax very rough copy of what the movie had been before all that happened . ... Much of the film had been lost, but through hook and crook, I was able to put it back together.”
The cast includes Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane, Lonette Mckee, Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Gwen Verdon, Tom Waits and Fred Gwynne. Two cast members, Waits and Gwynne, also were in the 1987 film adaptation of Kennedy’s novel “Ironweed,” which was shot in Albany and elsewhere locally.