Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  Oh, it was — and continues to be — an interesting relationship. I think Fred actually wore some of his costumes from That Man Bolt in my movie. I got a kick out of the fact that Universal was helping us out, even though they didn’t know about it! But things were always lively when you were working with Fred. As I said, when we were making Black Caesar, Fred would not perform a single stunt or action that had a degree of risk to it without asking me to do it first. This situation also continued into the shooting of Hell up in Harlem, as well. When we got Fred back to New York, we shot the scenes where Tommy runs through the airport and has the shootout with the people in the coal yard. During the coal yard scene, there is a point where Tommy gets buried in a big pile of coal. When we wanted to shoot that stunt, naturally, Fred wouldn’t do it. Just as he had done on Black Caesar, he looked at me and said, “You do it first.” So I had to have this machine literally scoop me up, carry me along, and then bury me in this pile of coal. When I climbed out of the coal, I was blacker than Fred was! We actually took a picture of us together, playfully comparing the colours of our skin. After I did that stunt, Fred did the shot.

  What do you recall about shooting the airport chase sequence?

  The chase sequence was shot at JFK Airport. While we were there, I suddenly heard a voice calling out, “Hi boys, what are you shooting?” I turned around and standing right in front of me is none other than Lew Wasserman, the president of MCA Universal. Now, I’ll remind you, Fred was under contract at this point with Universal and was supposed to be back in California filming That Man Bolt. He was certainly not meant to be in New York making our movie. Here was the head of the studio standing a few feet from me with his wife, asking what was going on. Oh, Jesus! It was a pretty surreal moment, but I had to think quickly. After a few seconds I said, “Mr. Wasserman, how would you like to be in the movie? You could play a gang-lord. Yeah, you are a gang-lord at the airport and you spot this guy getting on the plane and blah-blah-blah.” Wasserman immediately shook his head and said, “No, I can’t do that.” But I kept going, “Sure you can! Come on, Mr. Wasserman, you’d be great in this part.” He was already backing away from me as I was talking, so the ploy was obviously working. Wasserman and his wife turned and quickly fled down the hall and no more questions were asked. That soon got rid of him! After that, we went back to California and shot the other half of the chase. So, that sequence begins in New York’s JFK Airport and actually ends up in the LAX Airport in California.

  Was shooting at LAX any less perilous?

  Here’s the thing: when we arrived at LAX, we were supposed to shoot the big fight that takes place on the conveyor belt. We literally just turned up there with the crew and actors and didn’t have any permits or anything. We were standing at the turntable where all the luggage was coming down and literally just started shooting the scene. The two actors just threw themselves onto the turntable and started fighting amongst the luggage. A gun came out and people were just standing there waiting for their bags, watching this struggle take place. They couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. I then cried out to Tony King, who was playing one of the bad guys, “Hey, Tony! See the ramp going up to the airfield where the luggage is coming down? Run up there now!” So, Tony ran up the ramp, and Fred ran after him, and I ran after Fred, and the crew ran after me! [Laughs] We then all arrived up on the airfield and were actually running amongst the airplanes. It was insane! Again, we had no permission from anyone to do this. It was completely crazy. If we attempted something even remotely like that today we would either be shot on sight or jailed for at least five years. Of course, this was a different time in history when there were no terrorist threats in America. I’m sure that nobody present at LAX that day thought for one moment that we had the guts to shoot there without the proper permits. People just stood there looking at us, figuring, “Well, if somebody is doing all this with a camera crew then the proper authorities must have been informed and given their blessing.” When I think about it today, I can hardly believe what we did. Once again I got away with it, but I would never try something like that a second time. Never again!

  It must have been a logistical nightmare trying to arrange the shooting schedules for both Hell up in Harlem and It’s Alive?

  We knew that we were shooting It’s Alive five days a week in Los Angeles. We also knew we would be shooting the L.A. portion of Hell up in Harlem on Saturdays and Sundays. That was understood. The main difficulty for me was making sure that it all fit together so that the stuff we shot in L.A. would fit seamlessly with the stuff we shot in New York. The reverse shots would have to match the other angles that Fred was absent for in which the double was used. If not, it would be very bad for us. I had to know exactly what every angle and cut was going to look like and where the cuts would be. I had all of that information stored in my brain. As usual, I had no shooting schedule and no boards prepared. Despite what they teach you at film school, I’ve never used boards or shot lists. I had both pictures worked out in my head, but that meant that nobody else on the crew knew what was going on except me. That was just fine with me. It simply meant that I could exercise full control of the situation and get everything done. The less people knew the more control I had.

  Did that approach end up complicating the process somewhat?

  No. In my experience, filmmaking is a simple process that can often be needlessly complicated by others. During the editing of Hell up in Harlem and It’s Alive, I was using the same editor, Peter Honess, for both pictures. I think poor Peter was sometimes a little confused about what film he was actually cutting! [Chuckles] Three days a week, we would work on one movie in the editing room, and two days a week, we would work on the other. Peter was never quite sure what was going on, but it didn’t make any difference because he didn’t have to know. I told Peter where to put all the cuts. All he had to do was listen to my instructions. I think Peter learned some things about editing from me, but he eventually became a major editor. He cut a lot of big pictures, such as L.A. Confidential, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, as well as a number of Harry Potter movies. Another talented editor I worked with back in those days was Chris Lebenzon. Chris went on to edit some of the biggest pictures ever made, like Top Gun, and later teamed up with Tim Burton and cut all of his pictures, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland. Chris started editing with me as an assistant, and I was the first to let him do some cutting. I always gave him the exact instructions of where the cuts should go, and I think Chris, like Peter, also learned a lot from me about what you can fake and cheat during editing. I’m pleased that both of those guys have done so well with their careers. When we were cutting Hell up in Harlem, Peter and I had to play around with a few things and discover what this movie was going to be; how we could best structure the film, and find the right emphasis on each scene. It wasn’t easy cutting two films at the same time, but it didn’t really matter to me. It all worked out in the end.

  One location you utilized in New York was the Harlem Hospital where Tommy is taken to treat the wounds he sustained at the climax of Black Caesar. Did you have any problems securing permission to shoot there?

  No, none at all. The hospital sequence was all shot using Fred’s double and we inserted the close-ups of Fred in pain that had been shot back in L.A. It worked rather nicely. I do remember that when the two guys grabbed Tommy out of the vehicle and dragged him towards the emergency room, there was a big glass door situated there. The double’s head was down low as we obviously did not want anybody to see his face. Unfortunately, these two actors then managed to walk the double right into the glass door and it shattered! There was glass flying all over the place and Fred’s double got cut a little bit and was bleeding. I think he even needed a couple of stitches. Fortunately, we were in the emergency room of a hospital, so we didn’t have to take him very far to receive medical attention. We quickly bandaged him up and just kept on shooting. That was the first mishap of the day, but
of course this was a working hospital and here we were running around the corridors with guns, having the time of our lives. Patients and staff were hastily ducking back into their rooms, wondering what the hell was going on. I really only wrote that scene because somebody told me they could get me Harlem Hospital for the film. I was informed that we could go there in the early afternoon and so I thought, Oh, great! Now we’ll have Tommy taken to a hospital! We literally grabbed our stuff, ran right over there and started shooting immediately. If we had not secured the Harlem Hospital, I guess Tommy would have been taken to a warehouse or a cellar to get patched up.

  Did any of the cast of Black Caesar require any coaxing to return for Hell up in Harlem?

  Not that I recall. Fred, Julius, Gloria, they all came back, as did D’Urville Martin, who played the Reverend Rufus. D’Urville was quite a character. He was more trouble than anybody! He was this feisty little guy that would occasionally give me a problem. I do remember that one day he was whining about something and I said, “Hey D’Urville, would you please lie down on the ground there? I want to get a quick shot of your character lying down.” So, he got down on the ground, and we set the camera up, and I took a shot of him. D’Urville then got back on his feet and asked, “What was that all about?” I said, “Well, basically, you just died. If you give me any more trouble on this picture I’m going to kill you off with that shot. Do you understand?” After that, he never gave me another problem. I find that ploy often works when you are dealing with difficult actors. [Chuckles] But no, D’Urville was a lot of fun. I enjoyed our times together. Sadly, he’s also departed now. He died at quite a young age and that was very unfortunate. [3] We also had some new additions to the cast, not only Gerald Gordon and Tony King but Margaret Avery, who plays Tommy’s love interest in the film. Margaret was a terrific actress. Several years after Hell up in Harlem, she went on to play one of the leads in Steven Spielberg’s The Colour Purple. She was the beautiful woman who moved in with Whoopi Goldberg’s character and they fell in love and had a lesbian affair. Margaret had a great part in that picture and I really thought that The Colour Purple would graduate her to A-class movies. I expected her to get a lot of high-profile jobs, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have happened.

  What else comes to mind when you recall location shooting in New York?

  Well, you literally never knew what was going to happen next. We went all over the city — all over Harlem and Manhattan — and found the locations and simply shot the scenes there. In most cases, we hadn’t previously scouted these areas or made any attempt to secure permits. We simply went there, and if I saw some place I liked, I’d simply say, “Okay, this is it! Let’s go!” Then we’d stop, get out, and shoot there. Most productions arrive at a location and have a period of preparation. They bring all these trucks, portable dressing rooms, portable toilets, and by the time they get through unloading and setting up their equipment, they’ve already lost half a day before they’ve shot anything. In those days, we used to just leap out of the cars, set up the cameras, shoot the scenes, and move on — and that was it! What was most interesting to me is that usually these locations that we chose, often almost instantaneously, would turn out to be great. Again, I never knew what was going to happen next. Everybody would urgently say to me, “Larry, what if we have some terrible disaster here? What if nothing works out? Are we really going to go to Coney Island and shoot on the beach? How do you know if they will allow us to do that?” I said, “I don’t know, but why worry about it? If I’m not worrying, then you shouldn’t worry. We are going to do this and we’ll be gone before anybody knows we were even there.” And we did go there, and we did shoot our scenes, and it didn’t really take that long. And, just as I’d promised, as soon as we were finished, we were gone. There is certainly a high risk to that kind of guerrilla filmmaking, but that’s just the way I operated.

  Much of the film’s third act is consumed by Tommy’s mission of vengeance after the murder of his father, resulting in a number of violent set-pieces.

  Yeah, but I don’t think the violence is too excessive, not when you compare it with what you see now in action movies. Directors like Quentin Tarantino, Tony Scott, and James Cameron have made far more violent films than me. If you look at a picture, like The Terminator, you have Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing away dozens of police officers right and left. That is far more brutal when you weigh it against the violence in Hell up in Harlem. In most of these movies, it’s usually cops getting killed by the bad guys in a hail of bullets. Police officers seem particularly expendable for some reason. Everything descends into a bloodbath, or a series of explosions and car-wrecks. That is what the action genre is built upon. Even though Tommy does embark on this mission of revenge and starts killing people, I think Hell up in Harlem is fairly mild by today’s standards. The violence in modern action cinema has — I won’t say evolved because that’s not the right word — but in terms of intensity and realism it has certainly continued an upward trajectory in becoming far more explicit. Everything is louder and louder [raises his voice] and louder! The death toll has gotten a little higher, and the explosions have gotten a little bigger, but very few of these pictures address the causes and effects and consequences of violence in any meaningful way.

  Does Tommy’s spearing of the bad guy with a beach umbrella address the subject of cinematic violence in any meaningful way?

  Oh, I don’t know. If we’re talking about the violence in Hell up in Harlem, that scene is actually one of the things I don’t like about the movie. I don’t like the moment where you see the guy getting stabbed in the chest as he’s lying on the beach. I tried to put a visual effect in there of the blood spurting out of his chest. Unfortunately, it looks like a cartoon. I should have cut that out, but it’s still in the picture. That effect takes you out of the reality of the moment. The violence is too fake-looking to be truly effective or gratuitous. That’s the only big technical flaw in the film as far as I’m concerned. It would have been better to have thrown some fake blood on the guy and have it be a physical effect. The violence would have been more potent, I think.

  To what extent would you say Hell up in Harlem is conscious of the causes and effects of violence when compared with Black Caesar?

  It’s difficult to say. I mean, Tommy commits violent acts in Black Caesar, but then he ends up becoming a victim of violence himself in the uncut ending. In Hell up in Harlem, Tommy is trying to avenge the death of his father and appears somewhat more justified in his actions — somewhat. In other words, the violence is prompted by the behaviour of others rather than being instigated by Tommy himself. Maybe that’s the difference, I don’t know, but these films are full of violent men doing violent things. They occupy a violent world and sometimes the only way to survive a violent world is to commit acts of violence.

  At one point in the sequel, you try to approximate the ferocious power of McKinney’s humiliating death in Black Caesar by having Tommy lynch DiAngelo at the end. Do you think you succeeded in matching it?

  No, frankly. The “shoeshine scene” in Black Caesar is much, much better. I’m sure I did consciously attempt to do something in Hell up in Harlem that was the equivalent of it, but we didn’t succeed. DiAngelo had to be dispatched in a dramatically satisfying way, but I don’t think we even approached the ruthlessness and visceral power of Tommy blackening McKinney’s face with shoe-polish. Seeing a Black man utterly degrade and destroy a White man in such a devastating way was never going to be matched by Tommy simply stringing the villain up in a tree, although, of course, lynching was a common way for racists to callously murder Black people in years gone by. So, the anger is naturally still there in that ending, but not the subversive savagery. Personally, I don’t think anybody can top the “shoeshine scene” in Black Caesar. For me, it’s one of the great sequences in film in terms of paying off a villain and giving him his comeuppance. It’s so grandly over-the-top, there was no way we were ever going to better it.

 
; So you think Hell up in Harlem compares unfavourably with Black Caesar?

  It doesn’t quite measure up to Black Caesar, and, again, that’s probably because I didn’t have enough time to properly prepare it. I actually think Hell up in Harlem is one of my poorest films. Of course, another unfortunate thing was the whole situation where we couldn’t use James Brown’s wonderful score for the movie. That was very disappointing. The score we had for Hell up in Harlem was composed by Fonce Mizell and Freddie Perren. Freddie is most famous for writing the song “I Will Survive” for Gloria Gaynor. What they gave me was okay, but what James wrote was far superior and would have improved the film. A great score is like salt to food — it improves the overall taste. Hell up in Harlem is certainly a more conventional blaxploitation gangster picture. I mean, we were not really moving away from the formula we established in Black Caesar. We were not trying to do something experimental or unusual. It was a straight, down-the-line action film.

  So you were celebrating the gangster and action genres rather than stripping away the metaphorical trimmings and accoutrements? You weren’t subverting the conventions as you have done in some of your other films?

  I guess we were celebrating them, but Hell up in Harlem is what it is. It was made during the full flowering of blaxploitation, the Golden Age. I like to invest my pictures with some political and social commentary, but there simply wasn’t enough time to really give the sequel as much depth and shading as I would have liked. But I would argue that in Black Caesar Tommy is not the conventional blaxploitation hero. He is haunted by his childhood experiences, his poverty, the abuse he suffered at the hands of McKinney. He gains revenge on McKinney in the “shoeshine scene,” but then he becomes a victim of the very poverty he has escaped. His origins reclaim him and he is in effect killed by those he has left behind — the kids who are still wallowing in poverty. He has tried to play the White man’s game and live the White man’s life, but he has failed and his failure costs him his life. The unfortunate thing for Tommy is that after he has acquired all this money and power, he has no place left to go but down. He’s conquered his poverty and his low social status, but he has not conquered the demons that exist within him. He has not conquered himself or resolved his personal relationships. That’s a very complex scenario, wouldn’t you say?