Hollywood’s king of schlock
Originally appeared in The New Yorker February 2, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
In 1998, a script entitled “Phone Booth” started making the rounds in Hollywood. It had a simple premise: a smarmy New York City publicist picks up a ringing pay phone and learns that a sniper will kill him if he hangs up. The story, which takes place entirely in and around a booth on Fifty-third Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, was seductively “high-concept,” meaning that you could explain it in a sentence or less. Such scripts are relatively easy to sell to moviegoers, which is why Tom Cruise’s production company flirted with buying it, and why Twentieth Century Fox paid seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to take it off the table. Steven Spielberg briefly considered directing it, as did Mel Gibson, who also planned to star. Michael Bay, the king of blow-it-up cinema, was in line for the director’s job, and then the Hughes brothers were. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robin Williams were interested in starring, but the studio wanted to go younger, so Will Smith came aboard. After he dropped out, Jim Carrey stepped in, with Joel Schumacher as director. Then Carrey took a pass.
All this was difficult for the screenwriter, Larry Cohen, to watch. So as A-list actors and directors came and went, offering suggestions for rewrites, Cohen-who is more of a B-movie man-dealt with his frustration by doing something that has soothed him since he was a teen-ager. He wrote another script.
In 1999, as “Phone Booth” continued to linger in development, Cohen sold his new script, “Cellular,” for nine hundred thousand dollars. “Cellular” is “Phone Booth” turned inside out. It’s the story of a man who answers his cell phone and hears a woman say that a kidnapper will kill her if he hangs up. “Phone Booth” is a guy on a phone stuck in one place trying to save himself; “Cellular” is a guy on a phone running all over the place trying to save someone else. As far as Cohen was concerned, the two scripts were completely different. Fox executives disagreed.
“I was furious at Larry,” Elizabeth Gabler, the president of Fox 2000, says. She called Cohen after reading the script for “Cellular,” which was eventually sold to Dean Devlin, the producer and co-screenwriter of “Godzilla.” Devlin had a development deal at Sony Pictures. “I said, ‘What were you thinking? It’s exactly the same idea.’ ”
Even Cohen’s mother heard the echo. “She said to him, ‘Larry, enough with the telephones,’ ” Cohen’s sister, Ronni Chasen, a well-known Hollywood publicist, says. Gabler, meanwhile, alerted Fox’s lawyers, who threatened to sue. They exacted a promise from the producers of “Cellular” that “Phone Booth” could be released first, and it was, last year. Today, Cohen still doesn’t see why everyone got so worked up.
“So I’m in my phone phase-so what?” he says. “I want to do a phone trilogy, so that the people who write about movies and review them will think, Oh, that’s a Larry Cohen script,” he explains. “Now if anyone sees a telephone in a movie, they’ll know it’s mine.”
Hollywood is a place where wunderkinder are so prized that even twenty-eight-year-olds try to pass for younger, and people with any history-a writing credit from a hit TV show like “M*A*S*H,” a birth date before 1980, or even a slight familiarity with “Father of the Bride” (the one that didn’t star Steve Martin)-usually take pains to hide it. When you work in the entertainment industry, Botox isn’t just about vanity; it’s about parity.
This is part of what makes Larry Cohen a puzzling figure: he has been in the business for nearly half a century. Forty-eight years ago, when he was seventeen, he sold his first script, to NBC’s “Kraft Television Theatre.” Today, he is sixty-five and a grandfather. Not that he looks it: he has a full head of hair that he tints a sandy blond, and his five-foot-ten-and-a-half-inch frame is lean. Twice a week, he and his personal trainer climb the steep trails that crisscross the Santa Monica Mountains above Beverly Hills, where he lives, often while listening to tapes of Abbott and Costello’s classic radio show.
“Any writer in Hollywood who’s working past the age of forty is inspiring-let alone past the age of sixty,” says Andrew Kevin Walker, thirty-nine, one of many screenwriters (he wrote the thrillers “Se7en” and “8mm”) who are fans of Cohen’s earlier films. One of Walker’s first jobs in the industry was as a production assistant on a Cohen film. “His stuff is incredibly energetic and overreaching,” Walker says. “There’s a lot of P. T. Barnum in him.”
There are screenwriters who have decent careers selling scripts that never get made, and there are even writers who are highly sought after, yet end up with only two or three screen credits. Here, too, Cohen is an anomaly: he has written or directed (or both) more than a hundred motion pictures, television shows, and stage plays. His body of work includes the nineties whodunit “Guilty As Sin” (in which Rebecca DeMornay defends Don Johnson, who may or may not have killed his wife), the eighties Mob thriller “Best Seller” (in which Brian Dennehy writes the life story of a hit man, James Woods), the seventies blaxploitation classic “Black Caesar” (in which Fred Williamson is a Harlem crime lord), and the sixties Western “Return of the Seven” (in which Yul Brynner is magnificent-again). Before that, Cohen wrote and created network TV shows that often delved into controversial issues (homosexuality, euthanasia, “un-American” activities, movie censorship). Since childhood, when he made his first 8-mm. movie, about spies and stolen microfilm, Cohen has been a geyser of ideas both cheesy and profound.
Mostly, people have relegated his movies-typically made on the fly, with meagre budgets-to the schlock pile. Cohen hasn’t always disagreed. “You’ve got to hush some of them up, you know,” he says, when reference is made to “Maniac Cop,” a 1988 horror flick that was marketed under the slogan “You have the right to remain silent. Forever.” But he has just had a very good year. “Phone Booth,” which was made, with Colin Farrell, for just twelve million dollars, grossed forty-six million at the domestic box office, and millions more from video and DVD sales. Three hard-to-find movies have just been released on DVD: “Bone,” “Q: The Winged Serpent,” and “God Told Me To.” And this past fall “Cellular” was made, with a name star (Kim Basinger), a solid budget (thirty-five million), and a major distributor (New Line Cinema); it’s scheduled for release later this year. Cohen has three more scripts ready to sell, one of which he’s hoping to direct-something he hasn’t done since 1996.
“Traditionally, careers in show business run out of steam,” he says. “But I just keep turning scripts out. Some people, they stop. Even people who’ve had huge successes for years find themselves unemployed, going to film festivals and being told how great they are-but nobody’s giving them a job. It’s better to be me, who never got all that. I’m still working.” Cohen is referring to something that’s both a privilege and a predicament: he has avoided becoming a has-been, in part, because he never fully was.
When Cohen is writing a screenplay, there are certain things he will not do. He will not rely on an outline. Over the years, he has found that organization and planning make his stories fall flat. He will not drive a car. Once, in the late sixties, he became so distracted by thinking about a script-in-progress that he drove his Lincoln Continental the wrong way up a one-way street. He will not use a computer.
“Oh, no,” Cohen says on being asked if he owns a laptop. “When I write, I’m watching the movie in my head, imagining it. I want to be in it. I don’t like to see the words that I’m writing.” Instead, he usually dictates his scripts into a hand-held tape recorder. He often does this as he wanders around the eighty-seven-hundred-square-foot Spanish-style house that he shares with his second wife, Cynthia Costas Cohen, a psychotherapist and sculptor. The house, which has high-ceilinged rooms and is surrounded by sloping lawns, is situated in Coldwater Canyon, a secluded area north of Sunset Boulevard. It was built in 1929 by William Randolph Hearst, and used to be owned by Samuel Fuller, the genre director of the fifties and sixties. (Fuller was a good friend of Cohen’s, and even acted in his 1987 vampire picture, “A Return to Salem’s Lot.”) It’s not Xanadu, but it’s so grand and sprawling that Cohen has used it to film scenes in fifteen of the twenty movies he has produced himself. Sometimes, he will begin dictating a script as he walks around the swimming pool, where he floated a dead rat in “Bone.” Sometimes, he’ll climb the stairs to the bedroom that served as the mutant baby’s nursery in “It’s Alive!” Until the moment he pushes “record” and starts to talk, he doesn’t know much about the story he’s telling. Then, suddenly, he does.
“The people around him cease to exist during that moment,” says his first wife, Janelle Webb Towey, who collaborated on many of the films Cohen wrote, directed, and produced under his own banner, Larco Productions. “He just goes bye-bye. His eyes glaze over, and he’s in a world of his own that he’s creating. He walks around with that little tape-recorder thing, talking. He’s all the characters. He speaks in their voices. His whole body gets into the act.”
“The best stuff, I don’t remember writing,” Cohen maintains. “The subconscious just takes over.” His subconscious generally fills up both sides of a ninety-minute cassette, which his conscious self then pays a typist to turn into about twenty-five pages. With “a fix-up here, a fix-up there-but surprisingly very little,” he says, five good writing days can yield a finished screenplay. Each year, he offers as many as six of these completed (or “spec”) scripts for sale to the highest bidder.
Most profit-minded studio executives would rather market a movie with a one-hook plot-a man racing to defuse a bomb implanted in his own body, say, or a housewife who bumps her head and remembers she was once a secret agent-than try to sell a literary adaptation like “The Hours.” This plays to Cohen’s strengths. “He thinks up really simple, strong premises,” Lauren Lloyd, a former executive vice-president at Sony Pictures, who is one of the producers of “Cellular,” says. “There’s no setup. On page 2, you already know what the issue is and what’s going on.”
“It’s the core idea of Larry’s films I find so intriguing,” says Michael Dougherty, a twenty-nine-year-old screenwriter (he has a credit on “X2,” the “X-Men” sequel) who has been a Cohen fan since childhood, when he discovered “It’s Alive!” on cable. “They always start off with reality-our world-and he just adds one little tiny twist: What if a family had been wanting to have a child and finally does, but it’s this mutated cannibalistic creature?” (The 1974 horror flick was so successful that Cohen went on to write and direct two sequels, “It Lives Again” and “It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive.”)
Cohen is a lifelong Hitchcock fan. As a young man growing up in New York City, he sneaked into the Plaza hotel to watch Hitchcock shoot Cary Grant being kidnapped in “North by Northwest.” A decade later, Cohen met Hitchcock at the St. Regis to pitch him a script-”Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting”-about a mentally disturbed man stalking a former lover who, years before, aborted their child. Hitchcock liked it but eventually passed, and the script, which Cohen co-wrote with Lorenzo Semple, Jr., went to the director Mark Robson (“The Harder They Fall,” “Peyton Place”). “He did a terrible job,” Cohen recounts. “That’s what finally made me want to direct movies. My wife said, ‘This is just too depressing for you to have a wonderful script ruined like that.’ So I said, ‘O.K., let’s try something small, like ‘Bone.’ And that’s how it all began.”
“Bone”-a 1972 satire about a working-class black man who becomes entangled in the lives of the wealthy white couple he’s trying to rob-had only three key characters, and Cohen shot the film for just eighty-five thousand dollars. But, from the start, when Bone (played by Yaphet Kotto) appears ominously beside a Beverly Hills pool, viewers were on notice that big issues were in play. The film is daring, both in its editing and in its dialogue. (“Don’t call me names, lady,” Kotto tells the woman at one point. “I’m just a big black buck doing what’s expected of him.”) Thirty years later, its portrayal of liberals trying to mask their prejudices still resonates.
To Cohen’s dismay, “Bone” was marketed as a blaxploitation picture, with posters that blared “Tougher Than Shaft! Meaner Than Superfly!” It did not do well. Cohen’s second film, however, was a hit. He made “Black Caesar” for Samuel Z. Arkoff, of American International Pictures, the prime purveyor of exploitation cinema. Arkoff had seen “Bone,” and decided that Cohen had a knack with black actors. Cohen dusted off a story he’d written for Sammy Davis, Jr., about a gangster who rises to power but loses his soul along the way. The movie, modelled on the 1931 classic “Little Caesar,” was shot in just eighteen days, with a budget of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
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.”
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.
“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.)
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.”
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.”
