The movie Richard Gere hated every second of making: “Madness that will never be surpassed”
Every actor signs on for every film with the best of intentions, assuming that nothing can go wrong. As Richard Gere discovered, though, sometimes a cinematic train won’t just wobble on the tracks, but come flying off them, hit the ground with a spectacular bang, and then burst into flames.
After the back-to-back success of American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman, he was suddenly anointed as one of Hollywood’s newest superstars. It wasn’t a label he enjoyed, with Gere confessing that he effectively self-sabotaged his own career because he didn’t want to be a stereotypical leading man.
His plan to zag when everyone wanted him to zig didn’t go too well, leaving him on the verge of irrelevancy by the end of the 1980s, with too many box office bombs and critical duds in a short space of time placing his mainstream viability on life support until Pretty Woman shocked it back into life.
In theory, working with a five-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker responsible for several of the greatest movies ever made seemed like a surefire way of jump-starting Gere’s professional stagnancy. Unfortunately, this was the Francis Ford Coppola of the early 1980s, not the one who’d delivered The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now in succession.
It was a period of the director’s career where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and it never went more wrong than The Cotton Club. The musical crime story went grossly over budget, sent Coppola spiralling into bankruptcy after tanking in cinemas, became tied to a contract killing trial, and a mobster was allegedly dispatched to threaten producer Robert Evans.
Dozens of scripts were written and thrown out, cast and crew members were being fired on a whim, and Gere had absolutely no idea what was happening most of the time. That wasn’t ideal when he played the lead role of Michael Dwyer, and in an interview with The LA Times several years after The Cotton Club‘s release, he didn’t look back on the experience particularly fondly.
“There was no script,” he said. “There were levels of madness there that will never be surpassed in movie-making.” If anything, he’s being generous, because the signs were there that The Cotton Club would be a shitshow long before he signed on. Al Pacino was announced to be playing Gere’s part in March 1982, only for Sylvester Stallone to replace him two months later, who was then replaced by Harrison Ford in June, before Gere was finally confirmed in September.
Between his casting and the movie’s release in December 1984, Robert Altman dropped out of the director’s chair to be replaced by producer Bob Evans, who subsequently decided that he didn’t want to helm The Cotton Club anymore, handing it over to Coppola, who’d initially been brought in to rewrite Mario Puzo’s screenplay after the Godfather author had burned through 60 unsuccessful drafts.
Things somehow conspired to get even more chaotic, and it’s no surprise that Gere couldn’t believe he was witnessing as the picture continued to lurch from one crisis to the next, and it was a minor miracle that it was finished at all.
