“The people around him cease to exist during that moment,” says his first wife, Janelle Webb Towey, who collaborated on many of the films Cohen wrote, directed, and produced under his own banner, Larco Productions. “He just goes bye-bye. His eyes glaze over, and he’s in a world of his own that he’s creating. He walks around with that little tape-recorder thing, talking. He’s all the characters. He speaks in their voices. His whole body gets into the act.”
“The best stuff, I don’t remember writing,” Cohen maintains. “The subconscious just takes over.” His subconscious generally fills up both sides of a ninety-minute cassette, which his conscious self then pays a typist to turn into about twenty-five pages. With “a fix-up here, a fix-up there-but surprisingly very little,” he says, five good writing days can yield a finished screenplay. Each year, he offers as many as six of these completed (or “spec”) scripts for sale to the highest bidder.
Most profit-minded studio executives would rather market a movie with a one-hook plot-a man racing to defuse a bomb implanted in his own body, say, or a housewife who bumps her head and remembers she was once a secret agent-than try to sell a literary adaptation like “The Hours.” This plays to Cohen’s strengths. “He thinks up really simple, strong premises,” Lauren Lloyd, a former executive vice-president at Sony Pictures, who is one of the producers of “Cellular,” says. “There’s no setup. On page 2, you already know what the issue is and what’s going on.”
“It’s the core idea of Larry’s films I find so intriguing,” says Michael Dougherty, a twenty-nine-year-old screenwriter (he has a credit on “X2,” the “X-Men” sequel) who has been a Cohen fan since childhood, when he discovered “It’s Alive!” on cable. “They always start off with reality-our world-and he just adds one little tiny twist: What if a family had been wanting to have a child and finally does, but it’s this mutated cannibalistic creature?” (The 1974 horror flick was so successful that Cohen went on to write and direct two sequels, “It Lives Again” and “It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive.”)
Cohen is a lifelong Hitchcock fan. As a young man growing up in New York City, he sneaked into the Plaza hotel to watch Hitchcock shoot Cary Grant being kidnapped in “North by Northwest.” A decade later, Cohen met Hitchcock at the St. Regis to pitch him a script-”Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting”-about a mentally disturbed man stalking a former lover who, years before, aborted their child. Hitchcock liked it but eventually passed, and the script, which Cohen co-wrote with Lorenzo Semple, Jr., went to the director Mark Robson (“The Harder They Fall,” “Peyton Place”). “He did a terrible job,” Cohen recounts. “That’s what finally made me want to direct movies. My wife said, ‘This is just too depressing for you to have a wonderful script ruined like that.’ So I said, ‘O.K., let’s try something small, like ‘Bone.’ And that’s how it all began.”
“Bone”-a 1972 satire about a working-class black man who becomes entangled in the lives of the wealthy white couple he’s trying to rob-had only three key characters, and Cohen shot the film for just eighty-five thousand dollars. But, from the start, when Bone (played by Yaphet Kotto) appears ominously beside a Beverly Hills pool, viewers were on notice that big issues were in play. The film is daring, both in its editing and in its dialogue. (“Don’t call me names, lady,” Kotto tells the woman at one point. “I’m just a big black buck doing what’s expected of him.”) Thirty years later, its portrayal of liberals trying to mask their prejudices still resonates.
To Cohen’s dismay, “Bone” was marketed as a blaxploitation picture, with posters that blared “Tougher Than Shaft! Meaner Than Superfly!” It did not do well. Cohen’s second film, however, was a hit. He made “Black Caesar” for Samuel Z. Arkoff, of American International Pictures, the prime purveyor of exploitation cinema. Arkoff had seen “Bone,” and decided that Cohen had a knack with black actors. Cohen dusted off a story he’d written for Sammy Davis, Jr., about a gangster who rises to power but loses his soul along the way. The movie, modelled on the 1931 classic “Little Caesar,” was shot in just eighteen days, with a budget of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
