Cop Land's Casting Didn't Go The Way James Mangold Had Hoped

One of the first things that come to mind about James Mangold's 1997 crime drama "Cop Land" is its stacked cast — and how some of them played against type. Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Robert De Niro were just the tip of the macho iceberg in a who's-who ensemble of stars and familiar character actors. There was also Peter Berg, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick, Michael Rapaport, Annabella Sciorra, Noah Emmerich, and Malik Yoba — the list goes on and on. Even smaller roles utilized notable Martin Scorsese alumni like Cathy Moriarty and Frank Vincent, and future "The Sopranos" stars Edie Falco and Tony Sirico (the latter of whom only appears in a surveillance photo). This was the movie that put "Rocky" and "Raging Bull" in the ring together and had Stallone gain 40 pounds to play a half-deaf sheriff in a New Jersey town populated by corrupt cops.

Yet for Mangold, having such a star-studded cast wasn't exactly what he had in mind for his first studio film. In 2020, Mangold related to Vulture how the casting for "Cop Land" became what it was only after the script was bought by now-disgraced producer and convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob Weinstein, who ran Miramax at the time. It put an inordinate amount of pressure on the film to live up to the casting hype, since this wasn't necessarily a movie that was going to appeal to "Rambo" fans or sniffy awards voters who saw it as Oscar bait for Stallone. Preview scores weren't as good as the Weinsteins hoped, and according to Mangold, this led to reshoots and recutting, with the brothers invading the editing room and dictating changes to the movie.

"Because of the cast," James Mangold told Vulture, "I think Miramax saw the potential in ['Cop Land'] as high, but the scores were more the scores of an art film. It had gotten cast so aggressively that it now needed to perform in a way that justified its cast."

"Cop Land" is really more of a character drama and modern Western, with Sylvester Stallone's protagonist, Sheriff Freddy Heflin, being someone whose life went a different way than he hoped after he rescued a drowning woman and lost his hearing in one ear. Instead of joining the NYPD like he always dreamed, Freddy is left presiding over a town that dirty cops have set up as their own lawless outpost outside the purview of Internal Affairs. He looks up to Harvey Keitel's veteran officer, Ray Donlan, but even in 1997, the movie didn't shy away from showing how low Ray and his ilk were willing to stoop in order to save their own skins. It's not exactly a crowd-pleasing moment when Ray's nephew shoots two unarmed Black men and his cronies proceed to try and plant evidence on them.

It wasn't just the Weinsteins who had unrealistic expectations for "Cop Land." Mangold also noted how the casting "overscaled the movie" for audiences:

"One of the things that was difficult for me at the time was that I'd imagined the lead being someone you hadn't heard of before, so that their extension into a hero would be less Hollywood. I was grateful for the opportunity, obviously, to work with some of these amazing people, and I got swept up in the excitement of working with them, as well. But the story itself was one of loss, sadness, hate, and aggrievement. I think it was a harder sell."

"Cop Land" climaxes with a "High Noon"-like showdown in the street, as Sheriff Freddy Heflin tries to do the right thing by bringing Ray Donlan's nephew to justice and exposing the corruption in his town. He's forced to run a gauntlet of gun-toting bad guys, and it sounds like James Mangold faced a similar trial by fire while he was making "Cop Land" at Miramax under Harvey Weinstein. Looking back on his directorial experience over 20 years later, after the Weinstein effect had swept through Hollywood, Mangold told Vulture:

"Miramax was a place that gave me an incredibly big shot, but it was also an incredibly thuggish place to work. It had a very unusual environment at that time. [It was] this place that seemed golden, in Hollywood's eyes, and in the zeitgeist. You felt honored to be included, but you also felt like you were a cog in a system that was dark and corrupt."

In its own way, the studio during Weinstein's reign was maybe not so different from the corrupt police town in "Cop Land."

"The movie always has this hangover, for me, when I look at it, of a really difficult period," Mangold concluded. "It was the first large-scale movie I ever directed, and the learning curve for a director is intense when you step into a movie on that scale."