Travolta/Cage Ep. 4 - Grease/The Cotton Club (with Jake Fogelnest)

This week on the pod, we continue our trek through John Travolta and Nic Cage’s early careers, when Travolta was hitting it big as a singing, dancing A-list movie star and Cage was still slumming it in weird supporting roles in his uncle’s ambitious films. To that end, we brought on Emmy-nominated writer, comedian and satirist Jake Fogelnest (Corporate, The Fogelnest Files) to talk about these distinctly disparate entries in our subjects’ oeuvre.

For Grease, it was John Travolta’s big moment — a rip-roaring, gleeful Hollywood musical with killer choreography, catchy songs, and only a few major whiffs of problematic material when seen through 21st-century eyes. And then, there’s The Cotton Club, the Robert Evans-produced misfire that saw Francis Ford Coppola try to make a Gilded-Age melodrama about an aspiring musician (Richard Gere), a black tap-dancing performer (Gregory Hines), and the titular Harlem club where their paths collide. Oh, and Nic Cage is there too, paying Gere’s hotheaded brother who weasels his way into the mafia that owns the club.

Grease is exuberant where Cotton Club is… less so, lean where the latter is bulky (though Cotton Club Encore at least restores some of Coppola’s intended vision), but both have a lot to discuss. And discuss we do, alongside tangents about The Fanatic, Blinded by the Light and Alan Carr, among other things. Take a listen!

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