Still, Wood and others have argued that Cohen’s audacity and the tossed-off quality of his work are strangely linked to his greatness. When “Phone Booth” was released, the Times movie critic Elvis Mitchell wrote a paean to Cohen, whom he called “a born showman” with a “mastery of the paranoid premise.” The critic praised the “grungy bravura” of Cohen’s irreverent films and TV shows, singling out several, like the 1965 series “Branded,” that commented on the blacklist. “Branded” featured an eighteen-eighties cavalryman (Chuck Connors) who, unjustly court-martialled for cowardice, travels the Old West trying to restore his good name. “Mr. Cohen has mined a career out of one simple question-what’s the worst that could happen?” Mitchell wrote. “Even when the projects aren’t great, the ideas that fire them are.”
Cohen can be pleasantly surprised by praise, but he seems almost impervious to criticism. As his sister says, “Larry really loves his work, and if other people don’t like it, he always thinks that they’re stupid, not that they’re right. That’s the beauty of him. He believes he’s right.”
In his breakfast room, Cohen has posted a list on the wall. “Unsold Screenplays,” it says in block letters. There are eleven titles-”Anonymous Call,” “Bad Deeds,” “Captivity,” “A Conjugal Visit,” “A Cruel and Unusual Punishment,” “Fallen Eagle,” “Innocence,” “Momentum,” “Movie House,” “Optical Illusion,” and “Wisecrack.” Some of these won’t be on that shelf for long. “Man Alive”-in which a fugitive tries to save the life of his alleged murder victim-was sold to a major production company last year and is in development. “Captivity,” about a beautiful model and a nerd who are kidnapped and chained together, has been making the rounds to potential buyers.
Recently, Cohen completed the third script in his telephone trilogy, “Messages Deleted.” It’s about a guy who comes home one night to find a message on his answering machine from someone who is about to be murdered. Then he receives a message from another victim. And another. The mystery unfolds. Those who read it will enjoy, at least, this inside joke: the main character teaches screenwriting at the New School, and has never sold a script in his life.
“So many things that are very good get turned down,” Cohen says, lamenting that the young people whom studios pay to do “coverage”-or summaries-of spec scripts often subscribe to rigid formulas about what a screenplay is. “If a script reader reads something that doesn’t fulfill that structure, then it’s immediately a ‘bad’ screenplay and has to be rejected. Once that report goes into the computer, it’s always going to haunt you.” Unless, of course, you change the name of the script and resubmit it. Cohen does this occasionally. “The chances are that the script reader won’t be there anymore,” he says. “Chances are that all the executives will be gone.
“It may take eight or ten years, but you’d be surprised, when you look back, how almost everything gets sold,” he says. “Sometimes they get made, sometimes they don’t. But if I write the script I’ve had the fun of making the movie in my head, without interference. No one can take that away from you.”
If Cohen were to write a script about his own life, it might go like this: A man yearns for glory and doesn’t get it. The hook: He ends up better off. Cohen is currently finishing a script called “The Man Whose Prayers Were Answered”-about a man who is persecuted for having a direct line to God. A script about Cohen could be called “The Man Whose Prayers Weren’t Answered.” It would have a happy ending.
Cohen knows what he has missed. If things had been different, he says, “I would have been directing Jack Nicholson instead of Michael Moriarty. And that’s what it’s all about in Hollywood. If you direct big stars, then you’re a big director.” De Palma, he says, “got what I thought I was going to get, or hoped to get.” But Cohen made a great many more movies. “I was making one picture after the other, turning out a few movies a year, a couple of scripts a year. I wanted to be more like the directors in the old Hollywood who worked continually. I figured if you hang in there for the long haul doing what you want to do, maybe someday someone will pay attention.”
