Apparently, Cohen has hung in there long enough. During the past few years, there have been retrospectives of his work at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at the Art Institute of Chicago. His films are being studied by college students as far away as Northumbria University, in England. There a professor named Elayne Chaplin, whose Ph.D. dissertation was titled “Boys, Men and Monsters: Masculinity in the Films of Larry Cohen,” spends a week each semester teaching “God Told Me To.” That film and “Q” screened as a double feature this summer at the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, in Hollywood. Cohen was invited to speak, and when he walked into the lobby he was swarmed by admirers. “I’m anxious to get back to work every day,” he told the crowd inside. “I write because I have to. Because I want to know what’s going to happen next.”
Recently, Cohen got back the remake rights to “It’s Alive!,” from Warner Bros. He has written an updated script, augmenting the original movie’s enduring themes of parenthood and alienation with more modern twists: fertility drugs, artificial insemination, genetic manipulation. He would like to direct this one himself, and, because the original was set in Los Angeles, he thinks the remake should unfold in Manhattan. Instead of L.A.’s storm drains, which figured prominently in the original, Cohen would love to shoot in the subway tunnels-one of the rare New York landmarks he has yet to immortalize on film. “Even I wouldn’t go in there without permission,” he says. “I don’t want to get run over by a train.”
Joel Schumacher ended up directing “Phone Booth” on a street in Los Angeles that was outfitted to look like Manhattan. Cohen says that Schumacher did a good job, but that he can’t stop his brain from unspooling the version he would have made himself. He would have shot on location, and he knows precisely where: on the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street.
During his recent visit to New York, he stopped to get his bearings in front of the Playpen, a strip club on that corner. “That’s where I wanted to put the phone booth-right there,” he said, pointing to the spot he had imagined when he wrote the first script of his telephone trilogy. Over his head, a red neon sign flashed “Checks Cashed.” A twenty-five-cent peep show was just down the block.
“Look how great everything looks,” he said, holding his palms up and extending both thumbs, framing the shot. “It’s a great wide street. You’ve got a lot of cars and taxis going by. You could put cameras in those windows up there”-he pointed north, to the Milford Plaza Hotel, as a bus zoomed by, blowing its horn. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said, his eyes glistening. “It would have been noisier than hell.” He laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll just make ‘Phone Booth’ over again. I’ll call it ‘Kiosk.’ It’ll be really low budget.”
