The Cotton Club Encore will be screening at NYFF this year, with a Q&A with CoppolaDarkImbecile wrote: Thu Mar 14, 2019 11:32 pmTo answer that, let me quote from Coppola's written introduction to the Encore cut's debut at Telluride in 2017 (emphasis mine):Reverend Drewcifer wrote: Thu Mar 14, 2019 8:13 pm I have tried and failed to fully enjoy Cotton Club many times. The gangland plotline is performed too broadly for my taste, with Fred Gwynne making the only positive impression. The film has a highly-polished look that flatters chandeliers and burnished wood paneling, with a glow cast around everything and everyone like it was photographed by Allen Daviau. The whole thing looks and sounds well-cared-for, but it seems to wear its tortuous production history on its face. I always wanted more back stage showbiz story at the CC, and I always wanted the surrealistic ending to "work," whatever that means. Who cares what I want, though. What did you enjoy about it?Basically, I agree with Coppola that the film flows much more smoothly with the more equal weighting of the black and white characters, and the pacing feels more balanced in the longer version. Some of the musical numbers left out of the theatrical cut are among the best in the Encore version, and make the setting a vital part of the film rather than a curiosity. The Encore version is by no means a great film, but it's much closer to Coppola's best works than his worst, and unlike Apocalypse Now Redux — which I find a lot of value in but recognize its divisiveness — I think it's unequivocally better than the theatrical cut.Director's Statement
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.
Usually when I worked on a movie on which I supposedly had "final cut", the legal right to determine what form the film finally takes, I tried to be conciliatory to the opposition view. We made the film shorter, we took the emphasis off the black family story line, and we eliminated musical numbers, especially tap dance routines. The film that was finally released was about 2 hours and 7 minutes long, compared to my original final version which was 2 hours and 30 minutes.
When I screened this old Betamax tape for myself, I realized immediately that when a film is deemed too long, making it in fact shorter may make it play longer yet. It was meant to be a story of two main characters, one white and one black, and their families involved in and around the life of the Cotton Club, so diminishing the family life of Gregory Hines's character threw the balance of the story off-kilter. And losing many of the musical numbers, including the great "Stormy Weather" as well as the typical off-color specialty songs, eroded the historical portrayal of what the shows were really like.
After seeing this old tape, I became energized to find the missing parts and come up with a new version that would be much closer to what the intention of the film had originally been. I also realized that so many of the great members of the cast were gone, not the least being Gregory Hines, but so many others — Bob Hoskins, Fred Gwynne, Gwen Verdon, and Julian Beck — but beyond that sad fact, the cast was so full of talent: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Lonette McKee, Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, James Remar, Maurice Hines, Novella Nelson, Allen Garfield, Jennifer Grey, and many other memorable performers.
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
"Reawakened" is apt, though re-contextualizing the eighties without mentioning why he made these films is a bit of a whitewash. Jon Lewis covers this period in Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . .: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood. Between the bankruptcy, lithium carbonate, marketplace ructions, family tragedies, and his Airstream "Silverfish" trailer packed with gizmos and geegaws, Coppola's eighties period films are products of his chaotic personal life. His "vision" during this era was severely compromised, though all of these films hinted at work that would benefit from restoration. I wouldn't hesitate to see The Cotton Club in a form that really played. I also wouldn't hesitate to hear Coppola on stage with Robert Evans hashing out the whole mishegoss, or hear his current thoughts on his state of mind during the eighties.It’s now clear that Francis Ford Coppola’s eighties constituted his most fruitfully experimental period of filmmaking, when he used the clout from such behemoth masterpieces of the previous decade as the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now to try his hand at films of various genres and budget levels. At the time, The Cotton Club, Coppola’s stylish throwback to those 1930s Hollywood standbys the gangster film and the musical, was considered a costly disappointment, altered seemingly irrevocably due to behind-the-scenes conflicts with producers and financiers. Yet this sophisticated, witty, wildly ambitious movie, starring Gregory Hines and Richard Gere, about the titular Harlem nightclub, where legendary black musicians like Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington performed for an exclusively white clientele, was always something special, a rousing American entertainment that was both an evocation of the work of such directors as Raoul Walsh and William Wellman and a loving recreation of the period itself. The brilliance of Coppola’s vision is more apparent than ever in this “reawakened” version, The Cotton Club Encore, for which the director recovered lost negatives to bring the film back to its original length and luster, with restored sound and image.
Reverend Drewcifer wrote: Fri Aug 23, 2019 8:47 pm"Reawakened" is apt, though re-contextualizing the eighties without mentioning why he made these films is a bit of a whitewash. Jon Lewis covers this period in Whom God Wishes to Destroy . . .: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood. Between the bankruptcy, lithium carbonate, marketplace ructions, family tragedies, and his Airstream "Silverfish" trailer packed with gizmos and geegaws, Coppola's eighties period films are products of his chaotic personal life. His "vision" during this era was severely compromised, though all of these films hinted at work that would benefit from restoration. I wouldn't hesitate to see The Cotton Club in a form that really played. I also wouldn't hesitate to hear Coppola on stage with Robert Evans hashing out the whole mishegoss, or hear his current thoughts on his state of mind during the eighties.It’s now clear that Francis Ford Coppola’s eighties constituted his most fruitfully experimental period of filmmaking, when he used the clout from such behemoth masterpieces of the previous decade as the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now to try his hand at films of various genres and budget levels. At the time, The Cotton Club, Coppola’s stylish throwback to those 1930s Hollywood standbys the gangster film and the musical, was considered a costly disappointment, altered seemingly irrevocably due to behind-the-scenes conflicts with producers and financiers. Yet this sophisticated, witty, wildly ambitious movie, starring Gregory Hines and Richard Gere, about the titular Harlem nightclub, where legendary black musicians like Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, and Duke Ellington performed for an exclusively white clientele, was always something special, a rousing American entertainment that was both an evocation of the work of such directors as Raoul Walsh and William Wellman and a loving recreation of the period itself. The brilliance of Coppola’s vision is more apparent than ever in this “reawakened” version, The Cotton Club Encore, for which the director recovered lost negatives to bring the film back to its original length and luster, with restored sound and image.
A recent Washington Post article describes the intensive (and at times just plain intense) process of digitizing these films.LPM0317 wrote: Wed Sep 13, 2017 9:43 pm http://afghanistans-7000-lost-films-hid ... o-digital/
7000 Afghanistan films hidden from the Taliban are being preserved and restored.
The premiere of the new LA ROUE restoration took place 14 September at the Musikfest Berlin.tenia wrote:I had the opportunity to see a few frames at Ritrovata during the restoration process. It was gorgeous.
It hasn'r screened anywhere yet. Its premiere will be at Lyon Lumière Festival mid october.
http://www.festival-lumiere.org/program ... -roue.htmlLA ROUE Vert
Ciné-concert événement
En avant-première mondiale à Berlin et à Lyon