Remake "The Cotton Club" Movie

Prior to seeing Francis Ford Coppola's film, The Cotton Club in 1984, I had interviewed several people who had either worked at the nightclub or knew someone who did. The interviews were for a syndicated article I was writing about the upcoming movie.

Like the film critic Rex Reed, in his Guide to Movies on TV & Video, 1992-1993 Edition (Warner Books, 1992), I had heard a lot about this "Harlem bastion of glamour, sequins, and jazz that characterized the Roaring Twenties in New York night life."

So when I went to see the film I was full of excitement and high expectations. For the first time I would be seeing the fabled night spot on the big screen, and see an exploration of the lives and working conditions of the black performers who worked there in a Jim Crow environment, in, of all places, Harlem.

And, like Reed, I was disappointed. "[W]here," he asked, "is the Cotton Club? Somewhere on the cutting-room floor."

The movie was more focused on the white gangsters who owned the place than it was on the black performers who were its backbone. This was a missed opportunity to explore the racial and socio-economic aspects of the period. Instead of watching this movie, "You [will] learn more about the Cotton Club," wrote Reed, "and the people who made it famous just by listening to old records by Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Waters." Amen.

In the hands of Spike Lee, Kasi Lemmons, Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, or another capable black director the movie would have been more riveting, more incisive, and more thoughtful. It certainly would have been more black-centered.

If there is one movie that deserves a remake, The Cotton Club is it.

Note: I wrote a similar blog post in February 2015.

The 1984 article I wrote was published in this blog as "Exotic Negroes at the Cotton Club " on February 12, 2013.