Introduced by James Mockoski, Restoration Supervisor at American Zoetrope

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club Encore brings back to life the 1984 gangster saga whose release was overshadowed by the lore of a troubled production and studio interference. In this beautifully restored version, Coppola’s vision of Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club — where Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson rose to fame — comes into focus: the music and stories of Black performers, once diminished, now take center stage.

In the original cut, Richard Gere’s Dixie Dwyer, a talented cornet player, and Diane Lane’s Vera Cicero, the mob boss’s mistress, embody a classic Hollywood love story; however, it is Gregory Hines’s Sandman Williams, a dazzling tap dancer, and Lonette McKee’s Lila Rose Oliver, a luminous singer, who now provide the film’s true heartbeat and soul in the Encore cut. The film, co-written by Coppola and novelists Mario Puzo (The Godfather) and William Kennedy, also stars Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne (who broke through in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now just five years prior), Bob Hoskins, and James Remar.

“As often happens, I came upon an object that brought back an entire chapter of my life. In this case it was an old Sony Betamax tape that had the recording of the original final version of The Cotton Club, the film I made in 1984 and which I had blocked from my memory due to the odd circumstances that surrounded it. When I say “the original final version,” that means it was the form the film was in when I presented it to its financiers, distributors, and producers. The situation at the time was closer to “trench warfare” than any film I had worked on; the version was condemned as too long, having “too many black people,” and with “too much tap dancing.” The ownership of the film itself was the subject matter of a court case to determine who ultimately had control of it, and in addition to this confusion, there had been a murder related to a producer of the film, and the negative and film prints were constantly being jockeyed from office to secret office to avoid falling into the wrong hands. ….Clearly, a film that stumbles into its world premiere in controversy and does less than stellar box office tends to remain stuck in its place, with few of those connected to it willing to spend the time and treasure it takes to make a restoration. I didn’t know about the others, but I and my company American Zoetrope set about the daunting task to find the more than thirty minutes of lost negative, in some cases restoring it from old print material, and to restore, remix and allow this film to re-emerge in a new and worthy edition. This is The Cotton Club Encore, the film the world should have seen despite the countless court cases, murder trial proceedings, and warring producers.” – Francis Ford Coppola

Courtesy of Lionsgate

Screens with:

Minnie the Moocher (Fleischer Studios Cartoons, 1932, 8 mins)