Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  ABC invited me to come in and pitch some ideas, and I pitched them The Invaders. I just made it up, you know? I had always liked the original versions of Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where you had these alien creatures arriving on Earth and taking on human form. In those movies, it was difficult to distinguish the humans from the aliens, and that was a scary idea. So, I came up with the similar concept of this man, David Vincent, who discovers that alien beings from another world have invaded the Earth and are hiding out amongst the human race. ABC went for the idea right away and made a commitment to do the show immediately. The Invaders was originally envisioned to be two half-hour shows a week, like a serial with dramatic cliffhangers. Each episode would end with our hero in jeopardy and viewers would have to tune in to the next episode to see how he got out of the situation. Now, at that time, there had been no nighttime TV serials like Peyton Place, and so the idea of whether that would be successful was doubtful in the minds of the executives. So, they decided that they wouldn’t do The Invaders as a serial, but as a regular one-hour show. Shortly after that, they decided to bring in Quinn Martin’s company to produce it, as he had enjoyed a lot of success with The Untouchables and The Fugitive. Quinn Martin was one of the major suppliers for ABC, and he came in subsequent to my writing the pilot.

  To what extent did you have creative control over The Invaders?

  I wrote thirteen or fifteen storylines for them, and they took most of them and used them in the series. I didn’t take credit for any of them, but that was basically it. The Invaders was bought when the pilot wasn’t even finished. They were only a couple of weeks into shooting the show and it was already confirmed that it would be on the air. Everybody said that it was the best pilot ever done. They just loved it and they programmed the show right away, so I had achieved what I had set out to do — I had got another series on. Amazingly, I had now managed to get Branded, Coronet Blue, and The Invaders on the air and, in all three cases, there was no pilot finished at the time. That really was incredible. Back then, nobody else had a track record like that in television — getting three shows bought based mostly on the scripts without having a pilot. I consider that to be the major achievement here, actually getting the shows on. I must tell you that once they were on, I was always looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. I would be restlessly thinking, How am I going to get out of this? How can I move on with my career and do what I really want to do? My objective was to make movies. That’s what I really wanted to do.

  So, who was creatively in charge of The Invaders?

  The producer, Alan A. Armer, who is deceased now. [14] Alan was okay, but he never came up with a truly original idea in his life. Like most producers, he could effectively recycle ideas. A lot of producers don’t have any affinity for, or ability to, come up with something that is new. Alan eventually quit the business and taught television at a university. I don’t know this for a fact, but I heard that Quinn Martin ended up kind of stabbing Alan in the back. Alan had produced many shows for Martin over a long period of time, and I think when it came time to share the profits — or whatever the situation was, Quinn Martin would not give him a fair shake. Alan was so disillusioned by this that he gave up the business. I don’t know whether that story is true or not, but I think it’s what must have happened. Alan just walked away from television completely. He could have continued to work, but he just threw his hands up and said he didn’t want to be part of it anymore.

  What would you have changed if you had secured creative control?

  Firstly, I would have insisted that there be fewer Invaders, that’s for sure! Every other person in the show seemed to be an alien. Roy Thinnes, who played David Vincent, would sometimes end up killing ten or twelve of them in a single episode and the aliens would always die so easily. He would just be knocking them off right and left, and that ensured that there was no real suspense or fear. I would have made the aliens much tougher and harder to kill. I mean, the Invaders were so vulnerable to Vincent — and there were so many of them — it negated the threat. There needed to be fewer of them. The whole basis of my original concept was that you had to guess which one of these people would turn out to be an alien. The Invaders had managed to successfully infiltrate our society and they weren’t meant to be that easy to spot. That idea was intended to generate paranoia and suspicion because here was this subversive group, much like what we have today with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, hiding within our society, ready to suddenly reveal themselves and attack us. You don’t know who they are or where they are going to show up next. That was part of the fun. Unfortunately, they took all of that uncertainty and unease out of the show by having numerous Invaders popping up everywhere.

  What did you think of the special effects created for The Invaders?

  I thought the special effects were quite repetitive and tiresome. Every time Vincent killed an alien it would glow red and burn up before vanishing, each and every one of them, over and over again. There was never any variation to the Invaders’ deaths and no attempt was made to find a clever way of depicting the actual process of the burning up. If the aliens had to burn up each time they perished, I would’ve had them burning up the furniture, the floor, or the walls. Wherever they happened to be at that moment, the surroundings would have also caught fire, and that would have been more spectacular and threatening. As it was, they just went poof and were gone! After you saw that three or four times, so what? Show us something new! I also thought the alien spaceship was kind of hokey. It should have been more awe-inspiring. What can I tell you? Ultimately, The Invaders was executed with a lack of imagination.

  Is there anything else you would have done to remedy the show?

  Oh, there would have been several things. I’ve always thought that David Vincent needed to have more of a sense of humour. He was a little too stiff and serious at times when he needed to be a far more engaging hero. The audience really had to go along with Vincent when he was fighting the aliens, so that when he was in serious jeopardy it would be a matter of concern for them. I also felt that Vincent should eventually have more believers to assist him in his conflicts with the Invaders, so there was more of a team situation. I mean, Vincent did have his believers. He had people who sympathised with him, like Kent Smith, who played a millionaire industrialist that was supposed to be helping him, but he was a rather ineffectual character. Those who believed never did anything to help Vincent or to progress the story. The series could have developed much further and gone much deeper. For example, the U.S. Government could have gotten in on it and there could have been a war against the alien infiltration. That would have given The Invaders so much more to play with, an even greater scope. None of these suggestions are rocket science. It could have all been very easy and simple to do, but it just didn’t happen.

  What inspired the notion of the aliens having a “mutated” little finger?

  It really came from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. I believe the villain in that movie is actually missing a pinkie, or a part of his pinkie. Robert Donat, who plays the hero, is looking for this super-spy and one of the things he must note is that this individual is missing a portion of his little finger. I thought, Oh, pinkies-Hitchcock, Hitchcock-pinkies! Now what distinguishing feature would Hitchcock give these aliens? I know, he’d give them a deformed pinkie! That’s what! Besides, I always saw British people drinking tea with an extended pinkie and I always found that somehow suspicious. I always wanted to grab that damn thing! [Laughs]

  Some critics have interpreted that distinguishing feature, and the aliens’ secret underground society, as a sly commentary on the homosexual community.

  Well, there was something rather effete about a pinkie, you know? Some people have read a lot of gay subtext into my work, such as in God Told Me To. The respected critic Robin Wood [15], who was himself gay and I think saw gayness in everything, read a homosexual meaning into the story of God Told Me To, the character of the
hermaphrodite alien, and into some of the other things I had written. I will admit that I did deal with gay themes in television way before anybody else did on shows like Sam Benedict with Edmund O’Brien and Eddie Albert. I wrote an episode called “Accomplice,” which was about two gay guys who are both charged with murder. Each of the accused had a lawyer, one was represented by O’Brien, the other by Albert, and both attorneys were attempting to get their client to turn on the other. The accused men were obviously gay lovers, and one was White and one was Black which made “Accomplice” even more controversial and politically charged. NBC aired that episode at 7:30 p.m., but they didn’t know what the hell they were putting on. They had no idea what those characters were really talking about and what their relationship to each other was. I sneaked it right by them. At any rate, if people do interpret a gay subtext into things like God Told Me To and The Invaders, I certainly don’t mind. People often do read different meanings and elements into my work and it just means that they are watching things very carefully. That’s a good thing.

  You have previously complained that the “Red Scare” subtext of The Invaders was neither recognized nor welcomed by the producers and actors on the show.

  No, they didn’t understand any of that. I don’t know about the actors per se, as I didn’t deal directly with them on a day-to-day basis. I’ve since become very friendly with Roy Thinnes, but back in those days, I didn’t know Roy that well. But yes, there was a reluctance or a refusal to engage with some of the themes and ideas I wanted to explore. The Invaders was definitely a show of its era. It related to the fraught times we were living in and the paranoia about communist infiltration in America. There was this palpable fear that a communist was hiding under every rock and that the Government was completely infested with them. People thought the country was going to be overthrown from within by spies and that the American way of life would come to an abrupt end. It was also a fact that the British Government was completely infiltrated by communist spies. Kim Philby and Donald MacLean were at the higher echelons of British intelligence and they were communist spies. Both Philby and MacLean fled to Russia and that’s where they lived for the rest of their lives. This meant that everything America knew and shared with the British fell right into the hands of the Russians. It’s probably true that we were infiltrated as well, although we didn’t want to admit it. You only have to look at the situation with Alger Hiss. Hiss was one of the top advisors at The White House and was accused of being a Soviet spy. It was this atmosphere of paranoia and communist witch-hunting that made me want to write The Invaders. The manner in which David Vincent was going about trying to unearth aliens who have permeated our society was mirroring America’s search for communists who had insinuated themselves into our society. Just like Branded was a way to comment on the blacklist, The Invaders was a way to explore the political climate and deal with the idea of an unseen enemy in our midst. I thought the subtext was obvious, but to some people involved with the show it clearly wasn’t.

  At what point did you learn that The Invaders had been cancelled?

  Uh, I don’t remember. I really don’t. I believe I just read about it in the trade papers, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. I was so removed from the show at that point; I really had nothing to do with it by the time it was cancelled. I thought for sure that it was going to be cancelled anyway, because it wasn’t very good anymore. You must understand, there are some people in television who don’t want to hear anything from anybody else. They don’t want suggestions from anybody, particularly, in this case, from the guy who had actually created the show. The problem with the business is that it’s all about personalities. It isn’t just the creative work; it’s the people involved and their irrepressible egos. Everybody wants to protect their ego and their position. They want to be in a place of authority and they feel threatened when that authority is challenged in any way. If you come up with a good idea, it threatens them. So, this was a time of great change for me personally. I wanted to get away from all of that argumentation and make my own movies. Television was too difficult and restricting, and there were other problems, too. Another unpleasant thing you have to deal with is people trying to take credit for your work and ideas. They’ll say things like, “Oh yeah, he did that, but he didn’t really do the show.” They try to wrestle the credit away from you simply because they can. There is no way that you can really protect yourself, other than to write, produce, and direct the show yourself. If you can do all that, there can be no question of authorship. Nobody can claim to have anything to do with it.

  How exactly was this period one of change for you?

  Around the time of The Invaders, I had been offered a daytime serial by ABC. They wanted to do a teenage soap opera in the afternoon for the kids when they came home from school. They already had a rock show, an American Bandstand kind of show that they were putting on in the afternoons. [16] Their thinking was that they would follow the rock show up with another offering that would appeal directly to teenagers. They were going to call this project Never Too Young and they wanted my company to deliver it. Basically, ABC wanted to turn me into a supplier like Aaron Spelling and Quinn Martin. They brought me in for a meeting and we discussed it, but it soon became apparent that I had a choice to make: I was either going to follow the road that would take me into being a producer of television shows, or I was going to continue my work as a writer and someday become a director of movies.

  And you chose movies over television?

  Well, not immediately. I chose to do the show, but I didn’t really put much heart into it. I didn’t like Never Too Young and writing teenage dialogue was not something that I really wanted to do. ABC later scheduled the show at one or two o’clock in the afternoon. I told them, “How can you schedule a teenage show at that time of day? The kids don’t get home from school until three o’clock. It should be on at four o’clock so they can actually see it. You are programming this show at a time that excludes its target audience.” They said, “No, that is the time period we are giving it.” I knew at that moment Never Too Young was doomed. The only good thing I did on that show was to hire Patrice Wymore to play the mother. Patrice had been a contract star at Warner Bros. and had done a few movies. She had married Errol Flynn; in fact, she was Flynn’s last wife. I was absolutely crazy about Errol Flynn movies, and as soon as Patrice walked in, I gave her the job right away. Everybody in the casting department was aghast that I’d just awarded her the part. They said, “What are you doing? We are supposed to be interviewing people here?” I said, “I’ve made my choice. I’m the producer and I’m hiring her.” So, Patrice came to work and she did a fine job. Unfortunately, the Internal Revenue Service showed up and took her salary every week to pay for Errol Flynn’s back-taxes. Of course Flynn was dead by this time, but it didn’t matter. Patrice was stuck with his back taxes because she had been his wife when he died. So, the IRS ruthlessly came after her every single week, which was very sad. That’s really the only memory I have of Never Too Young. Some of the episodes are at the Paley Museum of Television, but it wasn’t much of a show. It was on for a year and after a while I kind of abandoned it and turned the show over to other people. I didn’t want to be a showrunner, or producer, or supplier of TV shows. So, that was a time when I entered a crossroads and made some big decisions about my career. I wanted to be a movie director and I started following that road.

  Although you did indeed spend the 1970s making features, you continued to dip your toe in episodic television, furnishing several stories for Columbo in its first few seasons. How did you get roped into contributing to the show?

  I was friendly with Richard Levinson and William Link, who were the creators of Columbo. They kept pestering me to help them out and write some episodes for the show and, finally, I relented. I gave them a story which was eventually made into a show called “Murder by the Book.” That was actually one of the first episodes of Columbo ever telecast and perhaps one of the most memorable. [17]
I gave the story to Levinson and Link and they brought in a story editor named Steven Bochco to write the script. Bochco got the credit for my work and also received an Emmy Award for his trouble! [18] Tragically enough, to compound matters, “Murder By the Book” was directed by Steven Spielberg. I’ve never forgiven myself for giving that story away. Never! It was a mistake. Peter Falk heard about what had happened and he demanded that Levinson and Link hire me to write some more episodes of Columbo. So, they both came back to me and asked if I wanted to do some more shows. I said, “Well, I’m going to live in London for a year, but this is what I’ll do: if you’ll pay me X amount of dollars I’ll mail you some storylines. Either you use them or you don’t, but I’m not attending any meetings or doing any rewrites. I’ll provide some storylines, you shoot them, and you pay me. That’s it.” I then went to London with my family for a year as planned and we lived at No. 9 Chapel Street, off Belgrave Square. We had a wonderful time there and, over that period, I occasionally sent Levinson and Link stories for Columbo. They shot three or four of them and that was it, really.

  I recently discovered your name connected with developing the 1972 pilot for an unsold mystery-comedy series called Call Holme. It starred Arte Johnson as a private eye, who is a master of disguise. Did you have anything to do with it?

  I’ve never heard of it. That has nothing to do with me. Never even heard of it.

  How strange. I do know that you were heavily involved with the series Cool Million which went into production that same year.