12
Back to Harlem
March 19, 1983
Five years before I left the State University College at New Paltz, an article appeared in one of the movie gossip columns. It stated that Bob Evans was going to produce a movie called The Cotton Club. I wrote him at Paramount Pictures explaining that Winnie and I had danced in the chorus at the Cotton Club in the ’30s, that my father had been a waiter, that my brother Bobby had won an amateur night contest at the club, that I had seen every show from 1932 to 1940, and that as a sociologist I had done extensive research on Harlem in the ’30s and ’40s as part of my preparation for courses on “The Sociology of Jazz,” “The Harlem Renaissance,” and “The Sociology of Racism.”
In the spring of 1983, I received a telephone call from Jim Siff, Bob Evans’s cousin. He asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed as part of the preliminary work on the film. Without a moment’s hesitation, I replied, “I think it would be useful!”
Within a week, we had taped three hours of my reminiscing, and Siff transferred the tapes to Mario Puzo, who developed a storyline for the movie, in which the Johnson family was featured. Gregory Hines was to be me, Maurice Hines was to be Bobby, and Thelma Carpenter was to be Winnie. In a later discussion, Francis Ford Coppola told me that they were going to bring in a white family whose struggles would parallel the struggles of the Black Johnson family during the Depression, and the Cotton Club would be the vehicle for both families on both sides of the color line to surmount the difficulties of the Depression.
I suggested in a concept paper that, whatever the gimmick, the film could be the occasion for Hollywood to portray the wealth of talent that appeared at the Cotton Club during its heyday in Harlem and counter the stereotypical portrayals of Blacks in the movies for the first time in a major way: Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, the Nicholas Brothers, the Berry Brothers, Adelaide Hall, and the star of stars, Duke Ellington, and his music, which made the Cotton Club a symbol of the best in Black entertainment! It was my strong feeling that Coppola, looking for a box-office hit, after several films that had not lived up to financial expectations, would be assured a success with the Cotton Club film if he concentrated on the Black entertainment and the Duke’s musical genius.
Coppola saw otherwise and opted for a build-up of violence and gangster elements in the film that was actually quite accurate in showing the mob control of the club. My friends and I called it “The Godfather Comes to Harlem.” I had a parting of ways with Coppola, but one positive contribution I felt I had made was the scene that had been inspired by my family’s direct experience and Winnie Johnson teaching her two brothers Stretch and Bobby dance routines in the kitchen.
After that project I continued to do some consultant work on a number of films like Seeing Red. It was a big circle in my life with me coming back to the theater and show business. In fact, my life seemed to be a series of big circles.