I would indeed, but that’s not the trajectory that the sequel takes is it?
No, but I think Hell up in Harlem is probably a far more seductive movie than Black Caesar — seductive in terms of following the genre. Do you know what I mean? Even in its darker moments, the sequel is a little more forgiving and there’s a concentration on having more actions scenes. What can I say? Maybe it was celebratory in that way. We had a lot of great action scenes and I think the picture ultimately settles for the demands of the genre, but those are probably the best action scenes I’ve ever directed. Yeah, there was far less complexity and subtlety on other levels but some of the character development was good. In spite of his flaws, Tommy is in some ways a more typical hero in Hell up in Harlem. He gains his revenge without punishment, survives the criminal lifestyle and slips away to a potential new life with his son.
Yes, one very noticeable thing is that the climax of Hell up in Harlem is far more upbeat than Black Caesar.
Oh, absolutely, particularly if you had seen the uncut ending of Black Caesar. That was a pretty grim and difficult climax.
Were you concerned that the ending of the sequel threatened to descend into mawkish melodrama?
Well, we had to find an ending for the picture and that was it. I don’t have a problem with melodramatic and sentimental endings if they have been earned. I thought we had been building towards this conclusion as we went through the film, so it was somewhat authentic. It also had the cyclical element of the father and son reunited that I liked. I mean, Hell up in Harlem is really the story of a father and a son, and it ends with Tommy promising his boy that they will get out of town and start a new and better life together. In some ways, it’s a reconciliation of the father and the son after Big Papa’s death. The family is united again and that relationship lives on through them, so it’s a very hopeful ending. I think that’s a fairly unusual and unexpected conclusion for a gangster picture. The sequel reduces the power of Black Caesar’s climax, because we now see that Tommy has survived his beating by the gang, but that was an inevitable consequence of making the movie. There was nothing anybody could do about that. But at the time Hell up in Harlem was released, audiences wouldn’t have known anything about the downbeat ending anyway.
Although the on-screen caption that concludes the film states that Tommy and his son have vanished, “never to be heard of again,” I always felt that the climax was set up for another sequel. Did you ever consider making one?
We did talk about making a third movie, but it was never anything concrete. I certainly didn’t conceive of any strong ideas about what the story should be, although it probably would have concerned Tommy returning to New York with his son at some point in the future. I don’t remember any details about it because in truth I didn’t really want to do a third movie. I had already done two Black gangster films and it was now time to move onto different projects and tell other stories. So, there was no third Black Caesar movie but, interestingly, we did talk a few years ago about doing a project with Snoop Dog, which was kind of a loose remake of Black Caesar. It was more or less the same plot with a few nice variations: a boy grows up and doesn’t realize that he is the son of the famous gangster who once ruled Harlem. He comes back to New York but cannot understand why people are constantly trying to kill him. Of course, he gradually figures it out and learns of his ancestry. The kid then becomes every incarnation of his father and starts ruling the gang. The idea had some potential but we never really got very far with it, because nobody was particularly interested in Snoop Dog playing a dramatic lead in a movie. So, the project just dropped away.
That’s too bad.
No, it’s not. I’d really had enough of all that. No more gangster pictures for me!
After embracing Black Caesar, what did Arkoff and AIP think of the sequel?
They were very happy with Hell up in Harlem, particularly when it did a lot of good business again. Some of the reviews were surprisingly good, but the picture wasn’t as profitable theatrically as Black Caesar. However, later on, it did tremendously well on video. I think Hell up in Harlem has actually done better business on video than Black Caesar ever did, despite it being the inferior film. Hell up in Harlem is still respected and various people have done takeoffs on it. There were some filmmakers who used the Hell up in Harlem title as the prototype for a documentary done on all the blaxploitation movies. [4] Its always mentioned as one of the most enduring and successful of that genre and that period. There are a lot of people who like it but, again, I wouldn’t advertise it as one of my best works.
It’s Alive (1974)
How was the idea for It’s Alive born?
The story was born out of real life tragedy. The early 1970s saw a lot of changes in the relationships between parents and their children. Many people watched their kids growing up and began to see their personalities, appearance and habits change to such a degree the parents didn’t recognize them anymore. It was impossible for them to relate to their offspring in any meaningful way as they once did. Their children had now grown their hair long and were listening to this strange new music; they took drugs and had sex outside of marriage; they even talked differently. These kids also had a set of values that were vastly different from those of the previous generation. Inevitably, this not only caused parents to feel alienated from their children, it caused parents to be afraid of them because they didn’t understand the way these young people were now living their lives. Their children had suddenly turned into total strangers in the house and that was deeply unsettling. Some parents didn’t know how to deal with this situation. I’d read an article in the newspaper which described how one father had actually murdered his son because he’d felt so threatened by him. His child had been on drugs and I started to think about the fear these parents had of their own flesh and blood. The idea of killing one’s own child seems completely foreign to most people but I started thinking, Well, what if there was a normal happy family that suddenly had a monster born into their midst? What would happen? How would they deal with it? That’s when the ideas for the movie started to come together.
But why a monster baby specifically?
I had seen infants lying in their cribs crying and having violent fits of anger. I mean, when you think about it, a baby is pure id without any restrictions. What I suddenly noticed was the intensity of a baby’s anger when they are uncomfortable about something or require nourishment. When you watch them raging, their faces turn red and they go completely crazy. I then asked myself, What if that baby could get out of its crib? What if it possessed considerable strength and agility from birth? What if it had sharp claws and fangs? I realized that such a thing would be extremely dangerous and furious, and would really come after you. That idea fascinated me and I thought, Yeah, what could possibly be more terrifying than a monster baby? You see, filmmakers are always making the monsters in their movies big, but I realized that people are actually more afraid of the small things. They are terrified of rats and bugs and snakes and spiders. The whole concept of a monster baby that was physically capable of moving around and killing people had not been done before. I knew that if the story was done right, it could be very frightening.
What kind of reactions did you get when you first pitched a movie about a homicidal mutant baby?
It’s Alive was a spec script, so there was never any problem about the film’s premise or subject matter. However, when we delivered the picture six months later the same executive who had bought it was no longer with Warner Bros. New people were in place and they were just appalled that somebody had walked into their studio with a movie about a monster baby. They thought it was in extremely bad taste and did not want to be associated with the film. They certainly didn’t think that anybody would want to see a movie with a premise like that. I liken the situation to being a waiter at a restaurant: they bring food out of the kitchen and the waiter delivers it to the table only to discover that new people are suddenly sitting there, saying, “We did
n’t order that.” I actually said to the new management, “Hey, what’s the problem here? You guys just had a huge success with a movie called The Exorcist, which features a young girl masturbating with a crucifix! Is that in good taste?” That observation made absolutely no impression on them. They were just looking to denigrate any project that had been initiated by the previous administration. It was all political, that’s all. We had to wait until those executives were replaced, but it actually took a couple of years for those people to get out of there. Then, when a new administration came in that had no axe to grind, we went back with the picture. So, the negative reactions and comments only came after It’s Alive was completed, not before.
The opening titles sequence with its drifting, pulsing lights strikes me as suggesting the beginnings of life, but maybe not life as we recognize it.
Yeah, that was sort of the idea. We did a similar thing in God Told Me To also, where we had this semen-like substance floating across the universe. We shot the title sequence for It’s Alive ourselves because I don’t like to farm out the titles to a company. Many of the big motion pictures over the years have employed somebody like Saul Bass to do the titles for them. [1] Bass devised many of the titles for movies back in the 1960s and ‘70s. You would just tell him what the movie was about and he would come up with the title sequence for you. I did not want to do that. I wanted to make every frame of the picture my own, so I insisted on making the titles myself. What I did was gather about four or five people over at my house and we all went down to the basement, which is huge. We then had ladders and positioned people on them in different spots. We gave each person a flashlight and pumped some smoke into the room before turning off all the lights. We then stopped, changed positions, and repeated the exact same procedure we had done before with the flashlights coming on in a different area. We repeated this process again and again and again. We then took the footage we had shot and multiple-printed those different takes and that became the titles sequence.
It very quickly establishes the appropriate mood, doesn’t it?
It does, but Bernard Herrmann’s music helps a lot, of course. As we were working on the title sequence, he was over in England creating a musical score for the film. Benny was working on the theme for the main titles, but he didn’t know what the titles sequence was going to be. He just told me to give him something for an overture in order to give the audience some kind of indication of what picture they were about to see. He said, “I’ll write something for ninety seconds so give me ninety seconds worth of titles.” Benny didn’t actually see the titles sequence until the recording session in London. By that time he had already recorded the main title before I’d arrived. I then brought the film over to the recording stage and we put it up and Benny played back the title music he had recorded just the day before. Amazingly, all the beats came at the right places. As the flashlights came on the orchestral beats were simultaneous and it was as if they had been scored directly to picture. The coincidence was remarkable and Benny was very impressed, as was I. We were both totally surprised and delighted that it had matched up so perfectly. That happy accident was probably what bonded us together. Benny and I became close friends after that and spent a lot of time together in the following years until his death.
Why did you decide to keep the birth of the mutant baby and its subsequent decimation of the entire maternity staff in the delivery room, off-screen?
Basically, I thought that seeing the aftermath of what happened in there was far more disturbing and scary than actually seeing those events occur.
Nowadays that sequence would have been shown in a very overt way.
It’s interesting that you should say that because as we were preparing the recent remake of It’s Alive, I actually included a scene in the delivery room when I rewrote my original script. What happens is the father comes in with a video camera — as fathers often do now in America — to videotape the birth. When the baby is born, naturally, all hell breaks loose, and you see this video camera go skittering across the floor. Then you get various snatches of what is happening as the camera is getting kicked around by the feet of frantic people. You see bodies fall into frame and get glimpses of something moving — a quick flash of the monster here and there. All of this action was being viewed through the discarded video camera and that was the central conceit of the sequence. When the remake happened, that scene was never shot, but it’s the way I planned it in the script. In the original It’s Alive, the monster only appeared every once in a while. In fact, it hardly ever appeared on screen at all.
I think that is one of the film’s strengths and I don’t say that to denigrate the excellent work of special makeup effects artist, Rick Baker. [2]
No, Rick did some great work on It’s Alive and the monster effects looked great. I just decided not to show the monster much, but instead show its point-of-view. It was all done with suggestion, with low-angle point-of-view shots, moving shadows, and shots of its claws. I think that was more effective and frightening than blatantly showing something and allowing the audience to get a good look at it. It was always important to make the monster baby a believable and frightening presence. There was always the danger inherent in the absurdity of having a baby as the monster in a movie. If the audience saw it crawling around, they might have thought it looked hokey and laughable and that would have killed us. Steven Spielberg used that same approach in Jaws. You see the shark’s point-of-view for the first half of the movie as it glides through the water attacking its victims. That approach really helps to heighten the suspense and terror. Steven understood, as did I, that sometimes what the audience doesn’t see is far more terrifying than what they do see. You can’t compete with people’s imaginations because imagination is not restricted by time, money, and technology. In their own minds, that monster can be as big and as scary as they want it to be. Once you fully reveal it, you reduce the monster to the piece of rubber that it actually is and the illusion is destroyed. Once the reality is gone for the audience you can’t get it back, and then you’ve lost them.
Tell me about your dealings with Baker and the creation of the mutant baby.
I first met Rick through John Landis, whom I’ve known since 1970. Rick had fashioned the gorilla suit for John’s film Schlock [3] and was already an accomplished artist. George Folsey, Jr. was also a friend of Rick’s, and had brought him onto Bone. Rick ended up doing all the makeup on the dead bodies that were inside the automobiles in the opening sequence. He then worked for me on Black Caesar and Hell up in Harlem, creating the various bullet wounds and injuries, including the effect in Black Caesar where Fred Williamson cuts off somebody’s ear and drops it in a plate of spaghetti. When it came time to do It’s Alive, Rick and I sat down and I drew a picture of what I thought the monster should look like. I wanted it to a monstrous version of the baby you see at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. So we gave it large eyes, sharp teeth, and an enormous forehead with the protruding veins, but we still didn’t make it an entirely unappealing creature. I wanted it to be something that would be enjoyable to look at, much like Boris Karloff’s Monster in Frankenstein is enjoyable to look at even though it’s still frightening. After I drew the monster baby, Rick went off and did his own rendering of it, which was pretty much derivative of what I had shown him. He then sculpted it, painted it, and made the creature, and I was very impressed by his work. The monster baby was probably one of Rick’s first big monster creations in movies and he ended up working on all three It’s Alive pictures. Of course, he’s now gone on to reach the very top of his profession and has won countless Academy Awards.
John P. Ryan gives a remarkable performance as Frank Davis, the father of the mutant baby. He firmly anchors the story in reality.
John was a wonderful actor. I actually taught him how to do the Walter Brennan [4] impersonation he does early in the film. [Speaks like Walter Brennan] “Sure, I can do the talking like Walter Brennan myself. All you do is you pick it
up and you do it like that and go dancing out on the prairie, that’s right!” John and I had gone to CCNY together, and then, a few years later, I saw him on Broadway with Irene Papas in Medea. Oddly enough, Medea is not too far away from It’s Alive; it’s an ancient Greek tragedy about a woman who slaughters her children. Anyway, I went backstage to see John and said, “I’m making a movie that you might like to be in.” I handed him the script and that was it. He agreed to do it and we made the picture. John’s performance is fantastic. He really added believability and compassion to the movie, which is exactly what I wanted. It’s Alive is really a dramatic movie about people and not just a straight horror movie, or monster movie. Unfortunately, several years later, John was involved in a serious helicopter accident whilst shooting a movie. [5] He was supposed to be in a scene located in a helicopter, but John was very hesitant to do it. The director finally convinced him and John reluctantly got inside the helicopter. They flew up in the air, but then the chopper suddenly dropped out of the sky and crashed down to the ground. Everybody in the helicopter was killed, except for John. He was very badly hurt and had to endure a lot of surgeries. I think he got something like a million dollars in compensation, but more or less retired from acting after that. John got to be very religious as he got older. He had been ill for a long time and, sadly, died about two or three years ago.
Larry Cohen Page 18