At Fifty-seventh and Second, Cohen admired the Excelsior, the apartment building where his mother lived in the sixties and seventies. Her apartment was on the twenty-first floor, and when he was shooting “Black Caesar” he had Fred Williamson throw several of her fur coats off the balcony. “I was afraid that one of the coats would land on top of a taxicab and drive off into the city with my mother looking out the window, screaming,” Cohen says. He walked a few blocks to the south and west, where he could picture Williamson emerging from Tiffany’s only to be shot down in the street. “There used to be an office building here and on the fifth floor was a former agent of mine who used to let me shoot out the window,” he recalled. “The cameraman thought I was insane. When he showed up, he said, ‘Where’s the crew?’ I said, ‘You’re the crew. We’ll never get this scene if we have a bunch of people. We have to shoot it like it’s really happening.’ ”
Williamson laughs when reminded of the shoot. “He put me in some very precarious situations,” he says, recalling how in the sequel, “Hell Up in Harlem,” Cohen had him climb a rickety scaffolding to the top of a building in Times Square. “I said, ‘Instead of standing down here imagining stuff, you go up there, tell me what it looks like, and when you come down, then I’ll go up.” Cohen started climbing.
“It was skin-of-your-teeth filmmaking,” Michael Moriarty, the actor best known for his stint as Ben Stone, the Assistant D.A. on TV’s “Law & Order,” says. Moriarty appeared in four Cohen films, including “Q,” in which he plays Jimmy Quinn, a small-time crook who discovers a gigantic flying lizard nesting atop the Chrysler Building. (Think “King Kong” with wings.) “Larry tends occasionally not to look ahead. But genius is what you do with the mistakes, and nobody was better with mistakes than Larry Cohen.”
During the filming of “Q,” in 1981, Cohen had permission to shoot only on the first level of the Chrysler Building’s spire. He took his crew-and Moriarty-all the way to the top. In one scene, lawmen, perched in cages on the outside of the building, fired machine guns loaded with blanks, and spent cartridges rained down on the streets below. Hearing the gunfire, passersby thought a sniper was terrorizing the city. “horror movie stirs up a real scare,” the Post reported.
As Cohen hiked around a city he calls “my own back lot,” the associations kept coming to him. Late in the day, he arrived in front of the Chrysler Building. “Look at that,” he said, cocking his head toward the sky. “Every time I look up at that building, I feel it belongs to me.” Then he strode through the Art Deco doorway, pushed past a velvet rope, and headed assertively toward the elevator.
“Hello!” a security guard barked.
“We’re being thwarted,” Cohen whispered. He turned to the guard. “How you doing?” he said, all charm. “I filmed a movie here years ago. You ever seen it? ‘Q’-about the big bird that lives up there?” Cohen pointed upward. The security man looked blank.
“It’s a movie,” Cohen continued, gamely. “About a nest up there. David Carradine was in it? You never saw this movie?” The guard shook his head. Cohen didn’t get upstairs.
Not long ago, Cohen arrived at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank to pitch Matt Gross, an executive producer who has a development deal with Touchstone Television, a division of Disney, which also owns ABC. Cohen knew Gross from a cable movie they made together in the mid-nineties called “As Good As Dead,” about a woman who loses her identity after she lends her insurance card to a sick friend, who impersonates her, then dies on the operating table. Cohen was wearing a black T-shirt and slacks, a beige linen jacket with the sleeves rolled up, a clunky chrome Tag Heuer watch, and expensive tan lace-ups that made his feet look narrow and elegant. He carried no notes, no talking points.
Nearly thirty years had elapsed since Cohen created his last dramatic show, “Griff,” which starred Lorne Greene as a Los Angeles police captain turned private eye. Now he’d decided to try to get a new series on the air. “TV people always want somebody who’s doing movies,” he said. “Phone Booth” made it a good time to be out pitching.
