For Cohen, there’s some irony in its success. “Bone” was the more ambitious picture. It failed, at least in part, because it was marketed as if it were a movie like, well, “Black Caesar.” ” ‘Bone’ was way ahead of its time,” Cohen says today. “If that picture had received the kind of critical response it really deserved-if I’d gotten some real heat out of it-my whole career would have been different. I don’t know if it would have been better or worse, but it would have been different.”
Growing up in the forties and fifties, Cohen lived with his parents-and, after the age of thirteen, his baby sister, Ronni-in a small first-floor apartment in Inwood. Cohen’s father, Irving, was an amateur photographer who spent weekends locked in the family’s one bathroom, developing pictures. Weekdays, though, he collected rent from half a dozen apartment buildings he owned in Harlem. He hated his job. “But he had the belief that you cannot make a living doing anything you enjoy,” Cohen says. Cohen’s mother, Carolyn, by contrast, took joy in everything. The daughter of a Jewish vaudevillian who was a minstrel on the Orpheum circuit, she was a movie buff who encouraged her son’s fascination with Hollywood. “She’d see every movie and then come home and tell me the plot,” Cohen recalls. “I’d say, ‘What was it about, Mom?’ And she’d tell me ‘Key Largo’ or ‘Double Indemnity.’ She could tell you a whole movie in five minutes, without leaving anything out.”
From the beginning, Cohen’s mother played a key role in his career. After Cohen graduated from City College and enlisted in the Army, he was offered a writing job on a TV series, “The Defenders,” starring E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed as a father-and-son legal team. Cohen, then in his twenties, was stationed at Fort Eustice, in Virginia, and was impossible to reach. So his agent called his mother about his fee. “The agent wanted to turn the offer down because he thought the money wasn’t good enough,” Cohen’s sister recalls. “Our mother knew it was an important job and she told the agent, ‘Take it.’ ”
Cohen’s love of New York City can be seen in the way he memorializes its landmarks. Over the years, his films have depicted a fistfight at the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center, the beheading of a window washer on the eighty-eighth floor of the Empire State Building, and the printing of newspapers in the basement of the New York Times Building (Cohen got in and shot until he was ejected by security guards). Once, he had the actor Billy Dee Williams making an escape on the Staten Island ferry.
Cohen is fond of saying that he can’t walk more than a few blocks in Manhattan without seeing a location he rented, borrowed, or stole for one of his films. One Saturday, he agreed to test that assertion. For hours he traversed the island, pointing out alleyways, rooftops, water towers, balconies, stairways, and street corners where he rolled cameras, usually without permission and with skeleton crews. At the intersection of Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, several movies competed for his attention. One was “God Told Me To,” released in 1976, about a police detective who, in the course of investigating a series of murders, discovers that his sibling is a hermaphrodite deity. (Cohen claims that he was inspired by America’s emerging gay culture.) At one point during the filming, Cohen had the comedian Andy Kaufman impersonate a police officer and join the St. Patrick’s Day parade as it marched down Fifth Avenue. Luckily for Kaufman, by the time he pulled a fake gun out of his pocket and started firing into the crowd, a few of the five thousand actual police officers marching around him had been let in on the plot.
“I’m holding them back, saying, ‘He’s an actor, not a cop,’ ” Cohen said giddily. “I kept him from being killed.” It was a windy afternoon, and Cohen was wearing an untucked Ralph Lauren T-shirt and chinos, and, with his strong chin, prominent nose, and neatly trimmed eyebrows, he resembled Danny Kaye at sixty-something. He pointed to the northeast. “Right across the street there, under the Louis Vuitton sign, we shot a scene from ‘The Ambulance,’ ” he said, recalling a 1990 thriller about a sinister emergency vehicle that rescues New Yorkers, then takes them to their doom. “Eric Roberts meets Janine Turner, she collapses, and the ambulance comes and picks her up right where that tree is.”
