The Cotton Club Encore

When studio executives told Francis Ford Coppola to edit down his 1984 musical crime drama The Cotton Club, about the legendary New York jazz club, the reported purpose was to center more on bankable star Richard Gere as mobbed-up musician Dixie Dwyer. What happened? Most of the Black characters were cut out of this movie about a center of Black culture. The movie cost – and lost – a fortune but decades later Coppola was able to restore his vision and, most importantly, put Gregory Hines back in the spotlight as hoofer Sandman Williams. The Jazz Age never looked more sumptuously seductive. – Richard Whittaker