The tragic murder behind one of Francis Ford Coppola’s biggest failures
Even the directors responsible for several of the greatest movies of all time are prone to failure every now and again, with The Cotton Club just one of several high-profile mishaps hailing from Francis Ford Coppola.
The good will always outweigh the bad when you’re responsible for The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, among others, with the filmmaker’s 1984 musical crime caper proving to be one of his biggest follies that went vastly over-budget and tanked at the box office to lose a fortune, even if it did end up securing Golden Globe nominations for ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama’.
Placing the titular establishment at the centre, a star-studded cast including Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Bob Hoskins, Nicolas Cage, Tom Waits, Laurence Fishburne, and many others all swing by as various plot threads weave in and out of each other. From start to finish, though, The Cotton Club went through multiple writers, dozens of scripts, and extensive reshoots, during which the budget more than doubled from $28million to a figure Coppola himself estimated could have been as high as $65m.
One of the reasons why the film managed to keep gathering money might have to do with its questionable sources of funding, the majority of which was orchestrated through producer Robert Evans, who originally wanted to direct the project himself. Coppola needed the money because One from the Heart had plunged him into debt and bankrupted his own production company, so he presumably wasn’t interested in asking too many questions.
Evans had recently pled guilty to cocaine trafficking, but that wasn’t the shadiest part of his involvement. Promoter Roy Radin had been introduced to Evans by a drug dealer named Karen Greenberger and started their own company with the express purpose of creating a movie about the Cotton Club.
Radin allegedly offered Greenberger a $50,000 finders fee, which she interpreted as being cut out of the producorial side of the equation, much to her chagrin. Radin ended up being murdered in 1983, with the killers claiming they’d been hired by Evans and Greenberger to pull off the hit as a measure of revenge.
The case went to trial, but Evans refused to incriminate himself and testify, while Greenberger and cohort Robert Lowe were convicted of second-degree murder and kidnapping and sentenced to life without parole, with William Mentzer and Alex Marti charged with first-degree murder.
That barely even scratches the surface of the madness that went on behind the scenes of The Cotton Club – which even extended to Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi funnelling tens of millions of dollars of his personal wealth into the project at one stage – and it isn’t an exaggeration to say the making of the nobly-intentioned disaster is infinitely more interesting than anything to have unfolded on screen.
