Hollywood’s king of schlock
Originally appeared in The New Yorker February 2, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
In 1998, a script entitled “Phone Booth” started making the rounds in Hollywood. It had a simple premise: a smarmy New York City publicist picks up a ringing pay phone and learns that a sniper will kill him if he hangs up. The story, which takes place entirely in and around a booth on Fifty-third Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, was seductively “high-concept,” meaning that you could explain it in a sentence or less. Such scripts are relatively easy to sell to moviegoers, which is why Tom Cruise’s production company flirted with buying it, and why Twentieth Century Fox paid seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to take it off the table. Steven Spielberg briefly considered directing it, as did Mel Gibson, who also planned to star. Michael Bay, the king of blow-it-up cinema, was in line for the director’s job, and then the Hughes brothers were. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robin Williams were interested in starring, but the studio wanted to go younger, so Will Smith came aboard. After he dropped out, Jim Carrey stepped in, with Joel Schumacher as director. Then Carrey took a pass.
All this was difficult for the screenwriter, Larry Cohen, to watch. So as A-list actors and directors came and went, offering suggestions for rewrites, Cohen-who is more of a B-movie man-dealt with his frustration by doing something that has soothed him since he was a teen-ager. He wrote another script.
In 1999, as “Phone Booth” continued to linger in development, Cohen sold his new script, “Cellular,” for nine hundred thousand dollars. “Cellular” is “Phone Booth” turned inside out. It’s the story of a man who answers his cell phone and hears a woman say that a kidnapper will kill her if he hangs up. “Phone Booth” is a guy on a phone stuck in one place trying to save himself; “Cellular” is a guy on a phone running all over the place trying to save someone else. As far as Cohen was concerned, the two scripts were completely different. Fox executives disagreed.
“I was furious at Larry,” Elizabeth Gabler, the president of Fox 2000, says. She called Cohen after reading the script for “Cellular,” which was eventually sold to Dean Devlin, the producer and co-screenwriter of “Godzilla.” Devlin had a development deal at Sony Pictures. “I said, ‘What were you thinking? It’s exactly the same idea.’ ”
Even Cohen’s mother heard the echo. “She said to him, ‘Larry, enough with the telephones,’ ” Cohen’s sister, Ronni Chasen, a well-known Hollywood publicist, says. Gabler, meanwhile, alerted Fox’s lawyers, who threatened to sue. They exacted a promise from the producers of “Cellular” that “Phone Booth” could be released first, and it was, last year. Today, Cohen still doesn’t see why everyone got so worked up.
“So I’m in my phone phase-so what?” he says. “I want to do a phone trilogy, so that the people who write about movies and review them will think, Oh, that’s a Larry Cohen script,” he explains. “Now if anyone sees a telephone in a movie, they’ll know it’s mine.”
Hollywood is a place where wunderkinder are so prized that even twenty-eight-year-olds try to pass for younger, and people with any history-a writing credit from a hit TV show like “M*A*S*H,” a birth date before 1980, or even a slight familiarity with “Father of the Bride” (the one that didn’t star Steve Martin)-usually take pains to hide it. When you work in the entertainment industry, Botox isn’t just about vanity; it’s about parity.
This is part of what makes Larry Cohen a puzzling figure: he has been in the business for nearly half a century. Forty-eight years ago, when he was seventeen, he sold his first script, to NBC’s “Kraft Television Theatre.” Today, he is sixty-five and a grandfather. Not that he looks it: he has a full head of hair that he tints a sandy blond, and his five-foot-ten-and-a-half-inch frame is lean. Twice a week, he and his personal trainer climb the steep trails that crisscross the Santa Monica Mountains above Beverly Hills, where he lives, often while listening to tapes of Abbott and Costello’s classic radio show.
