Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast

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 h