Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  That was a really great script, which William Richert ruined. He really made a huge mess of it. The original idea was that the wife would fall in love with Jeff Bridges’ alter ego. She then plans to knock off her husband so she can live happily ever after with his double. Of course, the husband has created this second identity in order to rob the bank he works in and blame the double for the crime. Unfortunately, Richert abandoned much of my script and exchanged it for some puerile nonsense that was embarrassing to watch. I also thought that Jeff Bridges was the wrong choice for the husband. To be honest with you, I was just happy to get the damn thing made. I’d been through so many false starts with that movie. At one time, we were going to do it with Rock Hudson and Vanessa Redgrave playing the leads, but that didn’t work out. Then I went to England for a while and got Peter Sellers to agree to star in it. Sellers was on his downers at the time, so his agent, Dennis Selinger, gave him to me for just $100,000. I then came back to Hollywood, and I couldn’t get anybody to make the movie with Peter Sellers for $100,000. People kept telling me, “Oh, Sellers is all washed up! He’s made three unreleased movies and is just poison. We wouldn’t take Sellers if you gave him to us for free.” So, I had to go back to the agent and say, “Look, I haven’t got $100,000 for Peter, but I’ll give it to you out of my own pocket.” Selinger was then kind enough to get me out of the deal, so I didn’t have Sellers anymore. Then, as fate would have it, a few months later The Return of the Pink Panther was released and was a huge hit. Suddenly, Sellers was back on top again and those very same people who had turned him down with me were now giving him millions of dollars to be in movies. That’s just the way it works out sometimes.

  Didn’t you also approach Michael Caine for the lead role?

  Yes, that’s right. Another time we talked to Michael Caine about doing the film, but nothing came of that either. I think Caine would have been great in that role and would have really brought a lightness to it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. It was pretty incredible, really. I mean, we went through a roster of famous names but never got the picture made with any of them. Eventually, I just sold the damn thing and they finally put Jeff Bridges in it. Again, I think he was wrong for the part. They actually shot The American Success Company over in Germany because that’s where the money came from. The rest of the cast was very offbeat, including Bianca Jagger making one of her only motion picture appearances in the role of the prostitute. The sex scenes between her and Bridges where you have this clock timing him, oh, it was just terrible! William Richert cast his girlfriend as the female lead [15] and then proceeded to fuck around with the script. Richert changed almost everything and it was just a shambles, frankly. I think if The American Success Company is ever described as being awful, it is still being vastly overrated. It’s a terrible picture.

  The American Success Company plays like a satire on capitalism and anticipates the greed and excesses of the Reagan years that would eventually flourish in the 1980s. Did you see that coming when you wrote the story?

  Of course, that was what The American Success Company was about, for sure, but I don’t know if it was specifically about the Regan Administration or was anticipating what the 1980s would bring in terms of our values. I mean, there is no question that greed and selfishness and exploitation was rampart in every administration in the United States. They are all crooks, including Barack Obama, unfortunately. The inspiration for it came about simply because of my desire to write a comedy script.

  The film also seems to be satirising the American hero. Why did you feel you wanted to attack that as you seemed to have celebrated machismo as a virtue in Return of the Magnificent Seven, Branded, and Shoot-Out in a One-Dog Town?

  Well, in regards to the Westerns, you had to feature the traditional strong American hero, but I would argue that in Shoot-Out in a One-Dog Town the hero was more of an anti-hero. He was not a gunfighter, a marshal, or a sheriff; he was a banker. He was certainly not the typical tough guy you see in movies. In fact, he was the kind of character usually portrayed in Westerns as a meek and cowardly individual. Any picture you ever see where there is a banker, that character is never a heroic, dependable, and resolute figure. In that movie, the banker was all of those things, so in a way Shoot-Out in a One-Dog Town is an even earlier example of my subverting the traditional American hero. I don’t know if the hero of The American Success Company subverts or satirizes the American hero — or American manliness, whatever it is — but firstly it should have succeeded as a story. Otherwise, everything else becomes redundant. I must say that despite my misgivings about the casting of Jeff Bridges, he is a terrific actor. I met Bridges a year or so ago, and I think he actually agreed with me that it was one of his worst performances. The film just didn’t work for me at all. Not on any level you’d care to discuss.

  In 1983, you furnished the story for Women of San Quentin, which followed the story of a young female prison guard, whose first assignment is one of the toughest prisons in America. How did this project come about?

  Well, interestingly, I had actually gone up to San Quentin to research a different project, but when I arrived there, I discovered that women were working as guards in a men’s penitentiary. I could never have imagined that would ever be possible, but there they were. I said to this one rather pretty girl, “Why would a woman want to work in a men’s prison?” She replied, “Why would a man want to work in a men’s prison?” I thought about that and quickly realized it was a pretty damn good answer! [Laughs] So, I came back and sold the idea to television, but they then rewrote it and changed it from the story I’d originally conceived. Basically, I had little to do with the actual film. It was just the basic plot that was mine, which is why I received story credit.

  You are also credited with devising the story for Ron Cohen’s disastrous 1984 crime caper, Scandalous, which co-starred John Gielgud and purported to be “A comedy about adultery, blackmail, murder — and indoor sports.”

  Scandalous certainly claimed to be a comedy of some kind, but I’m not so sure. It seemed pretty flat and tepid to me, and didn’t qualify as a comedy at all. It was based on a stage play I had done in New York and in London. [16] Eventually, I wrote a screenplay based on the play and sold it. Then, after acquiring the script, the company once again did me the favour of changing everything around and screwing everything up! I thought Scandalous was an utterly dismal movie, at least on a par with The American Success Company. If you have an actor as distinguished as John Gielgud in your cast, you should at least give him some material that is worthy of his talent. I don’t think anybody liked that film, including its director.

  In 1985, shortly after the release of The Stuff, you had a number of intriguing projects in various stages of development, some of which were never realized. Two interesting projects that were announced around this time were Crack in the Mirror and Master of Suspense. Were these film scripts?

  No, they weren’t. Crack in the Mirror was an idea for a television series, but it never got anywhere. I don’t believe I ever wrote a script; it only existed as a treatment. It was sort of a fantasy/science fiction piece that concerned two elements of reality, one that existed on one side of a mirror and one that existed on the other side of the mirror. Basically, you could literally step through the glass and enter this other world. Master of Suspense was an idea for another TV series I had that concerned a famous movie director, who, quite naturally, directs suspense movies, and a young would-be director, who has sneaked onto the lot and allied himself with this famous filmmaker. The older director was intended to be a takeoff on Alfred Hitchcock, and the would-be director was supposed to be a takeoff on Steven Spielberg. Together, these two characters would go off and solve real life mysteries. Unfortunately, that project didn’t get anywhere either.

  Did the idea for Master of Suspense later mutate into your acclaimed feature film screenplay, The Man Who Loved Hitchcock?

  Yes, it did. The Man Who Loved Hitchcock was the same thing again: Hitchcoc
k and a young would-be director trying to solve a bunch of mystery murders that have been stolen from Hitchcock’s files. The murder ideas that he himself has dreamed up are now actually being carried out by somebody. Joining Hitchcock and this young fellow in their investigation is Bernard Hermann, who appears as a character in it also, and the three of them set out to find the killer. The Man Who Loved Hitchcock was a terrific script and a lot of fun. Bernard Hermann’s wife, Norma, said it was wonderful; she absolutely loved it. Another person who adored it was Norman Lloyd. He had been Hitchcock’s sidekick and had co-produced the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series. He’d also acted in a number of Hitchcock’s films, famously playing the part of the Nazi spy in Saboteur who falls off the Statute of Liberty. Norman said that I had captured Hitchcock perfectly. Norman’s wife, who also read my script, agreed with him. They both thought that I’d done a marvellous job of recreating the reality of Hitchcock in a fictional story. Recently, there have been a couple of Hitchcock movies made that have tried to paint him as some kind of sexual psychopath or deviant, [17] but that is not what my script was about.

  Did you have any ideas for casting?

  Oh, sure. We had the great Peter Ustinov in line to play Hitchcock. I thought that he was just about perfect casting in my mind. If any actor could bring off that part, it would be him. When I met Peter at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he wasted no time in telling me he was crazy for the script. He just loved it! Peter said that he hated reading screenplays, but this was one of the best he’d ever read. He and his wife both agreed. Peter was going to do the picture, and I was thrilled at the prospect of working with him. We tried to raise finance for The Man Who Loved Hitchcock at the Cannes Film Festival, but we just didn’t get enough money to go forward right away. We kept trying and trying, but then Peter got sick and he died. So, sadly, that was that. Before Peter was onboard the project, I did get a brief commitment from Robert Morley [18] who was interested in playing the role. I do remember that Morley wanted Eli Wallach to play Bernard Hermann alongside him. For a while, we flirted with that idea but, to be honest with you, I liked Peter Ustinov much better than Robert Morley. Peter was very friendly, enthusiastic, and congenial, and Morley was always a little bit distant and haughty. One day Morley said to me, “I met Hitchcock only once and I did not care for the man.” I suddenly thought to myself, Hmmm, maybe this guy should not be playing this part! [Chuckles] Oh, but Peter Ustinov was a delight. He was a pretty remarkable man altogether. Peter was a great writer himself and had also directed movies and theater plays. To hear his approval of the material made the whole thing worthwhile for me. Even though the project never got made, I felt it was an invaluable experience just hearing the nice things he had to say about it. I feel privileged just having met him, actually. Maybe someday The Man Who Loved Hitchcock will get made. That’s the thing with all these great unmade scripts; you just sit around and wait and hope for the best. That’s all you can ever do.

  Bone (1971)

  After more than a decade of writing for television, you saw your chance for creative freedom and expression in low-budget cinema. Can you talk about what motivated those feelings and how you made the transition into movies?

  Well, by making my own low-budget movies, I could finally make every decision myself. That was the single motivating factor here. I could cast every part, frame every shot, edit every frame, and hire the crew and composer. That was my goal and that’s exactly what I did. My ambition was never to be the showrunner of a television series and stick with it for perhaps four or five years. I was going to be a movie director. Television was built on compromises and conflicts and concessions. You can’t survive intellectually, artistically, or spiritually when you are endlessly warring against people to maintain your artistic vision. It will simply destroy you. I wanted to do creative work, and I didn’t want anybody telling me what to do. I knew that I would make mistakes when I was doing movies, but that the movies would always be my own and I would learn from every mistake. I wanted total control, and that’s how you get total control in filmmaking — you make low-budget pictures. The only people who have absolute control in movies are people at the very pinnacle of the business, who are consistently producing huge hits. You can have a Steven Spielberg type of situation, where you can do anything that you want to do; or you can dwell at the lower end of the business, where you make pictures for such a low figure nobody ever bothers you. Nobody ever demands to look at the dailies. Nobody ever hounds you or bombards you with notes, suggestions, and directives. You simply make your pictures, and they release them. After my years in television, that was the place I wanted to be and that was the place I eventually went with Bone.

  Can you talk about the genesis of Bone, your first feature film as director?

  I was looking for a film I could do as my first directorial effort that required a small cast and a limited number of locations. That way, I would only have to worry about getting performances out of the actors and wouldn’t have many problems with the geography of physically moving the equipment and crew from one place to another. I eventually settled on something that I could actually shoot in my own house, and that something became Bone. I always wanted to do a story about racism in America, which I thought was a tremendous problem, and still is. At that time — it was 1970 — I settled on the rather inflammatory idea of a Black criminal who breaks into the home of a supposedly affluent White family. So, that’s how it all started and then I worked backwards, thinking in terms of the characters and developing their individual fantasies. The Black man’s fantasy was the co-operative and willing White housewife. The White housewife’s fantasy was the complacent Black man, who is basically going to come into the house as a dominant figure, but then gradually become a passive figure in her hands, which is exactly what happens. The husband’s fantasy is the young girl he is going to pick up on the street. The young girl’s fantasy is the older molester, who bothered her when she was a child in the movie theater. Everybody’s collective fantasy is the couple’s son, who is in prison on a drug wrap in a foreign country. The idea was that the son is actually fantasising the entire film in his head from his cell, and all the characters are becoming the fantasies of the other characters in the piece. So, it was quite a complicated theme, but I think we made it work.

  Were you deliberately choosing such incendiary material as a way of announcing yourself as a filmmaker in the loudest possible way?

  Yes. I thought if people got what I was doing; the outrageousness of it, Bone would be a picture that would get some attention. The tough thing with a small movie, particularly back then, when there was hardly any independent film industry at all, was what do you do with a picture like this once you get it finished? Where is it going to play? Will it get distributed so that people can actually see it? How do you attract their attention and what will the reaction be? Of course, I think Bone was so volatile as a picture and the material so hot; I may have gone a little too far in the direction of being provocative. Racism and race relations are such dangerous issues to deal with in cinema. Such a controversial subject matter might have scared off a lot of people, despite the fact they may have thought Bone was a very well-directed and acted film.

  How did the financing for the film come together?

  Well, I had estimated that I would need at least $85,000 to get Bone started. After talking to various people, I went to a very kind gentleman named Nick Vanoff, who’d made a lot of money on television shows such as The Hollywood Palace and the Country and Western series, Hee Haw. Nick had a lot of money, and he wanted to get involved in the movie business, so I approached him for financing. I told him that if he didn’t recoup his investment I would write him a free screenplay. At that time, I had a pretty good track record as a screenwriter and was getting good money for writing scripts, so it was my intention to help compensate Nick for any losses. He agreed and gave me the advance money to shoot Bone, which I used for principal photography. But then I still didn’t have enough money to p
ay the laboratories and equipment houses that had given me credit. So, I had to get completion money, and money to finish the editing, music, and get the answer print out of the lab. Only then could I go out into the world and try to sell the film. Incidentally, after Bone was released and didn’t do so well, Nick never requested that I write the free script that I had promised him. He never asked for it.

  How did you find Yaphet Kotto for the titular role?

  I saw Yaphet in The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones [1] which dealt with racism in the American South, and was directed by William Wyler. It was actually one of Wyler’s last films. Yaphet played this huge powerful Black man, who, at the end of the movie, takes this vicious sheriff and literally feeds him into a threshing machine so that he comes out squared-up in messy bails like stacks of hay. Yaphet was incredibly dangerous in that picture and physically imposing. I thought, This is the guy for me! He was my first choice and, thankfully, I got him. Even if I’d had $30 million to make the picture I’d still have wanted Yaphet to play Bone, regardless. He was electrifying.

  Was Kotto comfortable with delivering dialogue like this to the White middle class husband of a White middle class wife: “I’m gonna bang the hell out of her and cut her throat with your own gold letter opener?”

  Yaphet seemed very comfortable with the material. He understood that Bone was supposed to have a humorous aspect to it. He also fell right into the improvisations we did. The only thing that made him uncomfortable was the fact that the entire crew was white. In those days, there were very few Black people working as skilled technicians on a movie. It was a small crew anyway and consisted mainly of older people like my director of photography, George Folsey. George had been a cameraman with MGM for many, many years, and had received sixteen Oscar nominations for movies like Meet Me in St. Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, and Green Dolphin Street. He had also been the photographer on the first two Marx Brothers pictures, and had worked with great stars like Clarke Gable, Judy Garland, and Lana Turner. I mean, George had photographed everybody! Now, here he was, working as my first cameraman. George’s son, George Folsey, Jr., was the camera operator and editor of Bone, and went on to have a successful career as a producer on most of John Landis’ pictures, such as The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London. George Folsey, Sr. had actually retired by the time I made Bone, but I lured him back to work. I also called up a number of his old crew people who had joined him in retirement. They were all tired of just sitting around the house all day or going to the golf course, so they came out of retirement and worked on the picture. I had a fantastic crew on Bone and each of them had vast experience of working on high-budget movies. These were all older, White people and Yaphet was the only Black person associated with the film. One day, Yaphet told me he was a little uncomfortable about that but there wasn’t very much I could do about it.