“Any writer in Hollywood who’s working past the age of forty is inspiring-let alone past the age of sixty,” says Andrew Kevin Walker, thirty-nine, one of many screenwriters (he wrote the thrillers “Se7en” and “8mm”) who are fans of Cohen’s earlier films. One of Walker’s first jobs in the industry was as a production assistant on a Cohen film. “His stuff is incredibly energetic and overreaching,” Walker says. “There’s a lot of P. T. Barnum in him.”
There are screenwriters who have decent careers selling scripts that never get made, and there are even writers who are highly sought after, yet end up with only two or three screen credits. Here, too, Cohen is an anomaly: he has written or directed (or both) more than a hundred motion pictures, television shows, and stage plays. His body of work includes the nineties whodunit “Guilty As Sin” (in which Rebecca DeMornay defends Don Johnson, who may or may not have killed his wife), the eighties Mob thriller “Best Seller” (in which Brian Dennehy writes the life story of a hit man, James Woods), the seventies blaxploitation classic “Black Caesar” (in which Fred Williamson is a Harlem crime lord), and the sixties Western “Return of the Seven” (in which Yul Brynner is magnificent-again). Before that, Cohen wrote and created network TV shows that often delved into controversial issues (homosexuality, euthanasia, “un-American” activities, movie censorship). Since childhood, when he made his first 8-mm. movie, about spies and stolen microfilm, Cohen has been a geyser of ideas both cheesy and profound.
Mostly, people have relegated his movies-typically made on the fly, with meagre budgets-to the schlock pile. Cohen hasn’t always disagreed. “You’ve got to hush some of them up, you know,” he says, when reference is made to “Maniac Cop,” a 1988 horror flick that was marketed under the slogan “You have the right to remain silent. Forever.” But he has just had a very good year. “Phone Booth,” which was made, with Colin Farrell, for just twelve million dollars, grossed forty-six million at the domestic box office, and millions more from video and DVD sales. Three hard-to-find movies have just been released on DVD: “Bone,” “Q: The Winged Serpent,” and “God Told Me To.” And this past fall “Cellular” was made, with a name star (Kim Basinger), a solid budget (thirty-five million), and a major distributor (New Line Cinema); it’s scheduled for release later this year. Cohen has three more scripts ready to sell, one of which he’s hoping to direct-something he hasn’t done since 1996.
“Traditionally, careers in show business run out of steam,” he says. “But I just keep turning scripts out. Some people, they stop. Even people who’ve had huge successes for years find themselves unemployed, going to film festivals and being told how great they are-but nobody’s giving them a job. It’s better to be me, who never got all that. I’m still working.” Cohen is referring to something that’s both a privilege and a predicament: he has avoided becoming a has-been, in part, because he never fully was.
When Cohen is writing a screenplay, there are certain things he will not do. He will not rely on an outline. Over the years, he has found that organization and planning make his stories fall flat. He will not drive a car. Once, in the late sixties, he became so distracted by thinking about a script-in-progress that he drove his Lincoln Continental the wrong way up a one-way street. He will not use a computer.
“Oh, no,” Cohen says on being asked if he owns a laptop. “When I write, I’m watching the movie in my head, imagining it. I want to be in it. I don’t like to see the words that I’m writing.” Instead, he usually dictates his scripts into a hand-held tape recorder. He often does this as he wanders around the eighty-seven-hundred-square-foot Spanish-style house that he shares with his second wife, Cynthia Costas Cohen, a psychotherapist and sculptor. The house, which has high-ceilinged rooms and is surrounded by sloping lawns, is situated in Coldwater Canyon, a secluded area north of Sunset Boulevard. It was built in 1929 by William Randolph Hearst, and used to be owned by Samuel Fuller, the genre director of the fifties and sixties. (Fuller was a good friend of Cohen’s, and even acted in his 1987 vampire picture, “A Return to Salem’s Lot.”) It’s not Xanadu, but it’s so grand and sprawling that Cohen has used it to film scenes in fifteen of the twenty movies he has produced himself. Sometimes, he will begin dictating a script as he walks around the swimming pool, where he floated a dead rat in “Bone.” Sometimes, he’ll climb the stairs to the bedroom that served as the mutant baby’s nursery in “It’s Alive!” Until the moment he pushes “record” and starts to talk, he doesn’t know much about the story he’s telling. Then, suddenly, he does.
