“Larry is the king of high-concept,” said Gross, who wore bluejeans, a red plaid Western shirt with snap buttons, black Prada loafers, and white socks. He shook Cohen’s hand. “Anytime he’s got an idea, I want to listen.” Cohen didn’t have one idea; he had four. “Con Job” was about a petty hoodlum who is wrongly convicted of a crime, wins a ten-million-dollar judgment from the state, and devotes his life to helping others imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. “The Victim” was a sci-fi detective drama about a crime solver who is possessed by the spirits of people who have been murdered. Next was a supernatural drama about a clinic where witches, werewolves, vampires, and extraterrestrials go when they’re feeling under the weather.
” ‘ER’ meets ‘Men in Black,’ ” Gross said, holding out a bowl of Hershey’s miniatures.
“I wish I’d said that,” Cohen replied. His final idea was about a former heavy-weight champion who solves crimes. The twist: everyone thinks the Champ is invincible, but, in truth, his final fight injured his skull so seriously that the next punch he takes will be fatal. When Cohen told this story, his right foot started to pump, as if working an accelerator.
“It’s a perfect Disney show-a total family show,” Cohen said, warming to his subject. “The best thing about Superman is kryptonite. If it wasn’t for kryptonite, Superman would be the most boring fuck that ever lived. So the Champ is vulnerable. Everybody thinks that he can handle any situation, but we know that he can’t.” Cohen had even thought about casting. “All you’ve got to do is negotiate a good enough deal with Michael Clarke Duncan,” he said, referring to the beefy African-American actor whose movie roles have never moved beyond prison inmates and gangster bosses. He had already been in touch with Duncan’s manager. He added, “Our position should be that this will give Michael the stardom that will always elude him in features because he’s not going to make it as a top banana in the movies.”
Gross leaned forward, scribbling on a yellow legal pad. “I like it,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. What are you calling it again?”
” ‘The Champ,’ ” Cohen said.
” ‘The Champ,’ ” Gross repeated. “That’s the first thing we’ll change.”
Over the years, the quality of Cohen’s movies has been the focus of some debate, mostly in the alternative press. Writing about “Q” in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman compared Cohen to Fuller, his more celebrated friend, saying that the film gave more expression to “the delirious tabloid quality of American life than any film since ‘The Naked Kiss.’ ” Seth Cagin, of the SoHo News, writing about Cohen’s 1977 political biography, “The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover,” noted that “few films-or works in other media, for that matter-so intelligently grasp the true, grimy nature of the American political beast.” Still, these assessments are self-consciously against the grain. Part of the difficulty of evaluating Cohen’s films is that they smuggle sophisticated (and often political) ideas inside the goofiest scenarios. “The Stuff,” for example, a 1985 horror movie, is about a frozen-yogurt-like goo that turns people who eat it into zombies. (The tag line: “Are you eating it or is it eating you?”) All the same, some critics saw it as a satire of American materialism; one scholar declared it “one of the few radical films that emerged during the Reagan era.”
Among Cohen’s champions is the British film historian Robin Wood, whose 1986 book “Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan” compares Cohen’s “characteristically odd, subversive, inventive, and marvelously acted” films favorably with those of more commercially successful directors like Brian De Palma. Cohen, unlike De Palma, “remained obstinately true to himself . . . at the cost of virtual obliteration,” Wood wrote. Lately, some have even wondered whether Cohen is intentionally self-destructive. Last September, as his sister was lobbying Twentieth Century Fox to shell out the money to create an Oscar campaign for Cohen’s “Phone Booth” screenplay, Cohen sued the studio for a hundred million dollars, claiming that it had ripped him off on another project. The studio launched no Oscar campaign. (Cohen, being Cohen, did it himself.)
