Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  What can you tell me about the marketing campaign devised for It’s Alive?

  The first ad campaign — the one that was created after the picture was first delivered to Warner Bros. — was severely damaged by the fact that the studio really didn’t want the movie. As I said, the people who had bought It’s Alive from me had all been fired and a new management were in their place. When the picture came in, they devised an ad campaign which did not reveal that the movie was about a monster baby. The first ads showed a dead woman on the ground and simply read: “Whatever it is — it’s alive!” I didn’t know exactly what that was supposed to mean and I doubted very much that anybody else would either. Warner Bros. then went out and tested It’s Alive in San Diego and it didn’t do very well. So, they only made something like fifty prints of the movie and decided to give it a minimal release. I flew into Chicago from London to attend the opening and the local Warner Bros. executive was very sympathetic to me. At one point I said to him, “Can I change the marquee outside the theater?” He said, “Do whatever you want.” So I went outside and put up a marquee which read: “It was born three days ago and it’s killed seven people. It’s Alive and its parents are human!” Then, I found a baby carriage and put a tape recording inside there of the baby growling. I had my wife wheel that carriage around the downtown area of Chicago with the sound of this growling baby coming out and a sign hanging on it saying: “See it at the Woods Theatre!”

  And what was the response?

  The response was terrific! People just flocked to see the picture. The second week did more business than the first week, and the third week did more business than the second week. By the time the picture had played, it had out-grossed the Clint Eastwood movie, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which had preceded it. So, we did some very good business, but that didn’t seem to make any impression on the Warner Bros. people in Los Angeles. It just didn’t matter to them. Nor did it matter that It’s Alive had won a prize at the Avoriaz Film Festival over in France — with Roman Polanski as chairman and François Sagan, Édouard Molinaro, and Claude Chabrol all members of a very auspicious jury. [8] That didn’t mean anything to the crowd back in Hollywood. Then, It’s Alive became the second-highest-grossing picture in the history of Warner Bros. in Singapore, which was a pretty decent market in the East. In fact, the only picture that ever out-grossed It’s Alive there was My Fair Lady. Nobody ever thought for one moment that my movie would have garnered such accolades and good box office in places like Singapore and France, but the Americans did not want to play the picture. It’s Alive then hung around for three years, playing as double features and triple-features in some places and at drive-ins. That’s when the new administration came into Warner Bros., and I contacted them and asked if they would take a look at the film. They agreed, and after seeing it, said, “Hey, this is a very scary movie.” They immediately checked out where the picture had been distributed, then came back to me and said, “We are going to give this picture another shot.” And I must say they certainly did. Warner Bros. organized a brand new release, and made 1,000 new prints, and came up with a big ad campaign. It’s Alive then went out again and went on to become the #1 box office hit in America. It was incredible. Now, this was three years after it had originally played! I mean, that could never happen today because the picture would come out on DVD ninety days after it played theatrically and that would have been the end of it. There would have been no opportunity to revive the picture theatrically, and certainly not as spectacularly as that. The millions of dollars it generated would never have come in. So, It’s Alive really was a complete once in a lifetime phenomenon in the history of the movie business.

  What kind of business did the film do?

  The picture did about $38 million, and that’s in 1970s money. Nowadays, taking into consideration today’s box office as the prices are triple of what they were back then, you’ve got a movie that is making between $120-130 million. So, it was a big hit for Warner Bros. and earned me a lot of money. I ended up becoming a millionaire out of that picture and it became a source of revenue for me for many, many years. I was able to buy a brownstone in New York with that cash and it was all because I’d kept pushing and fighting for the picture to be released again. I had faith in It’s Alive when everybody else thought, “Hey, this guy must be crazy! What’s he doing pestering Warner Bros.?” At one time, the studio was so fed up with me, they actually said, “If you give us $100,000 we’ll give you the picture back. How does that sound? Give us the money and we’ll give you the film and you can turn around and do whatever you want with it.” So, I went around with my hat in my hand to American International and several other places, saying, “Please buy this picture!” They all said, “If Warner Bros. couldn’t make a hit out of this movie, why do you think we can?” I finally found a company in New York called Bryanston that had put out The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They said they would give me the $100,000 for the picture. So, I then went back to Warner Bros. and said, “Okay, you’ve got a deal.” Then, a week later, Bryanston reneged on the deal. I had to go back to Warner Bros. again and tell them I couldn’t take the $100,000. Bryanston later turned out to be a Mafia-owned organization, and, eventually, they were investigated and went out of business. I don’t know if anybody went to jail — that I don’t know — but it would have been a disaster if they had taken It’s Alive. I probably wouldn’t have collected a nickel if they had bought it. At the time the deal fell through, I was despondent, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Just a year and a half later, all those management people at the studio were gone. I was then dealing with a new bunch of people headed by Terry Semel, who eventually became the chairman of the board at Warner Bros. He was the one who had the foresight to put It’s Alive out again and pick up all that money that was laying there waiting to be earned if the film was released properly. Once it was released properly, the picture went through the roof. For a while it seemed like an exercise in futility, but finally it came out the way I wanted and hoped it would. We managed to make a success out of the picture.

  Were you concerned, even at this premature stage of your career, that the immense success of It’s Alive might typecast you in the public and industry’s minds as a horror director? I know that George Romero and Wes Craven have felt confined in the genre after enjoying early successes with horror movies.

  Frankly, at that point, I was just happy to get any type of movie made whether it was a horror film or anything else. I was never afraid of being viewed as a horror director. I just wanted to make movies and that’s exactly what I did. It’s always been tough to get a movie approved and into production, so if that was the kind of picture that people wanted from me, I was more than happy to deliver it. Nobody ever forced me to go out and write these stories. I wrote them because I wanted to write them. That was as true of It’s Alive as it was of my next film, God Told Me To. It was also true of a spec script like Black Caesar and even in meeting the demands of creating a sequel in Hell up in Harlem. Although they weren’t horror movies, I did what I wanted and always had the choice. In fact, I never really considered the It’s Alive films to be strictly horror movies. I always thought they were defined as much by the strong performances of the cast, the rich personal stories of the characters and other dramatic elements, than by any of the horror that was depicted or suggested.

  It’s Alive is often read as an anti-abortion tract, but there are some who view it as a pro-abortion film. Would you like to clarify your intentions?

  What I think or don’t think, or what I intended or did not intend, isn’t important. It’s Alive is whatever you want it to be. Whatever feelings or beliefs or attitudes you have are merely reinforced when you see the film. So, it works both ways. That is why I thought the picture was okay, because if It’s Alive had been staunchly pro-abortion or staunchly anti-abortion it would have quickly turned off a large portion of the audience. As it was, it worked for everybody. The movie allows the audience
to decide for themselves and that’s the way movies should be. Once you fall heavily on one side of an argument, everything becomes too literal. That’s less interesting dramatically because the drama comes from the doubt and the debate. It’s the ambivalence that draws out the viewer’s feelings and lays them bare. If you take that away and just make a strong statement about something, the film is diminished.

  What was the extent of your involvement in the 2008 remake of It’s Alive other than delivering an early draft of the script?

  I was not involved. I merely sold Millennium Films the rights and took the money. Yes, I gave them a script, but that script was completely ignored. My story was pretty similar to the original, only it was modernized slightly. I built up the part of the baby’s brother, who was now a high school student, and had some switches where the various events and action occurred. The climax was going to take place in an abandoned swimming pool in the basement of the high school. It was a very good script and contained some interesting touches, strong scares and good dramatics. All of that was absent in the finished film. The remake didn’t have the drama or the emotion of the original; it had nothing! They threw away what I had written and devised a completely different story, which was dreadful, and shot the movie in Bulgaria. Their problems were then compounded by lousy sets and terrible performances. The remake was an absolute piece of unadulterated garbage, and I would certainly not advise anybody to see it. Even the producer of the movie, Avi Lerner, approached me on the street in Beverly Hills and apologized for making such a terrible film out of my property. He said, “I’m sorry, we really fucked that one up.” What can you say? The only positive things are that hardly anyone saw it and I did get to keep the money. I also have the rights to make another It’s Alive picture in time, so there is always the possibility that we’ll get around to doing another one again in the future. Of course, it’s going to be a while before we can live down the disgrace of this last effort, but it could happen. It’s just a shame that they did such a terrible job. It could have been good but, sadly, it wasn’t.

  Interestingly, there have been a whole series of new issues and scientific advancements in pregnancies since the original It’s Alive was made that could be integrated into a remake.

  Oh yeah, there is all that stuff. Think about the concerns we now have as a society about pregnancy, about DNA, about cloning, about how science has impacted on our lives, and the way we have babies. A lot has happened since the 1970s. People have information and choices they can make nowadays that would have seemed like pure science fiction not so long ago. There are tests that can be performed, which reveal certain defects in the foetus that were not available to parents back when we were making It’s Alive. If there were, perhaps the monster baby would have been terminated before it could have even been born.

  But then we wouldn’t have the movie.

  Exactly! I suppose It’s Alive is a film of its time — as any film is really — but it can also be a film for all times. I mean, people will always be having babies and sometimes those babies will come out wrong. It’s just the science and the technology that evolves and changes. The joys and despairs of parenthood will always be the same.

  God Told Me To (1976)

  It’s been suggested that only someone with their own production company could ever hope to make a film as brave and compellingly eccentric as God Told Me To.

  Well, that’s probably the case for most of my movies. [Chuckles]

  Was it an especially difficulty project to secure funding for?

  I don’t remember it being unusually difficult. I mean, it was always difficult getting the money to make every film, but then someone would always turn up to help out. In most instances, I would give them a budget that was way below what they thought I could make the picture for. The financers would then think they were taking advantage of me by under-financing the picture — meaning you would often have to lay out a lot of money on your own. I usually found some way to make the movie within the budget they gave me, so I wasn’t spending my own money and might even make a little on it, too. God Told Me To was financed by Edgar Scherick and Daniel Blatt, who were two producers of some note. Scherick had produced The Heartbreak Kid and The Taking of Pelham 123. He had formerly been head of the ABC Television Network and had bought a number of shows from me. Blatt had originally been Scherick’s lawyer and then later branched out on his own, producing movies like The Howling and Cujo. These two guys had managed to find this tax shelter group located in Georgia, who had given them the money to make God Told Me To. I never knew who or what this group were, but I was very happy that they’d been found. Scherick and Blatt then became the executive producers but, later on, when God Told Me To was finished, they both saw it and asked me to take their names off the picture. I said, “Okay, but this means I have to make the titles all over again and it’s going to cost $600.” They said, “We’ll pay the $600!” So, they actually paid to have their names removed from the movie and, in my opinion, it’s the best picture that either one of them has ever been associated with.

  What inspired the central concept of the film — that apparent acts of random violence are being willed and guided by a messianic hermaphrodite alien?

  If you read The Bible, it will certainly tell you what started the idea. There is no character — fictional or real — in the whole of literature as violent as God. Who else fucked up the entire human race and drowned everybody? I mean, come on! The violence that God has perpetrated on the very creatures that He created is infinitely more vicious and horrifying than anything you can possibly imagine. Consider what a fearsome creature God must be. If you get to Heaven, it must be terrifying to live in the shadow of this dictator. There has never been a dictator in recorded history that is as diabolical and vengeful as God is, and so this is a formidable creature indeed. Nobody has ever created a character in horror that is as extreme as God is.

  I presume that Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods? [1] was another influence on the writing of the script?

  Absolutely. The idea that the Earth was originally populated by an ancient extraterrestrial intelligence seems very feasible to me. It’s not outside the realm of possibility to consider that aliens may have come to our planet in prehistoric times and mated with the inhabitants of the Earth. I don’t know if they were Cro-Magnons or whatever, but they were certainly some lower, less developed form of the human race. These aliens may have helped create human beings as we know them today with their high intellect and imagination, bestowing upon them the power to envision and create technology. So, I think we must at least accept the possibility that we are the product of an alien insemination that occurred long ago. Certainly, there was a major jump in our evolution at some point.

  America has enjoyed a strong fascination with UFOs and alien abductions since the days of Roswell. Why do you think that is?

  People are always interested in things that are beyond the scope of their reality, like religion and extraterrestrial visitations. It’s that strong desire and need in each of us to know the unknowable. I’ve always enjoyed an interest in the possible existence of alien life and had dealt with the subject before in The Invaders. People always like a mystery, a conspiracy, and God Told Me To allowed me to combine the alien concept with the religious concept, and explore two areas that are increasingly baffling and fascinating at the same time.

  How much has religion played a part in your own life?

  Very little. I don’t believe in an organized anything. I do believe in a higher power of some kind, but I don’t think it looks like a human being. I certainly don’t think it looks like an old man with a beard and some kind of angry face that is looking down on us from above. If anything, in one of my more recent scripts, I depicted God as a creature who has created the human race for His own entertainment. We are all just articles of amusement for Him, something for God to pass His time observing. We’re like the TV show God watches to whittle away eternity, to enjoy Himself as He sees the
horrendous things that we are doing to each other every day. God only created human beings and gave us free will so that we could go out and screw everything up. We’re all just fictional characters devised by God, but we don’t ever realize this.

  Was the film motivated by your lack of spiritual faith?