It is, but I don’t feature children in my films strictly to generate a stronger reaction from the audience. I mean, there are children in our world and I’m constantly in contact with them. I also have a bunch of children myself and, as a parent, I can relate to the fear that exists in the audience when they see a child in jeopardy. But I don’t really show any violence towards children in my movies. Other than Perfect Strangers, which films of mine have featured children in jeopardy?
Both The Stuff and A Return to Salem’s Lot feature a child in jeopardy. God Told Me To also touches on the most terrible violence against minors. Then there’s the inversion of that idea in the It’s Alive trilogy which depict children as monstrous.
Yeah, but when the father in God Told Me To murders his own children you never see that happen. Yes, they talk about it, but it’s not used as a means to construct suspense about whether the children are going to survive or not. It’s a post-mortem thing, an after-the-fact kind of situation, where he is describing how he murdered his family. I see your point, but I don’t see any connection between them. As you say, the It’s Alive baby is an aggressor, but he is acting in self-defence. The baby immediately feels threatened, so I suppose you could argue that he was in jeopardy from birth. He was merely protecting himself by killing everybody in the delivery room, who would have probably killed him because he was born a monster. Maybe you could say that. I will admit that towards the end of Perfect Strangers, you do feel that the little boy is certainly in jeopardy. I’ll concede that we do play with that idea.
The confrontation between Sally and her ex-partner, Fred [John Woehrle], on the street appears to have been filmed live before an unsuspecting audience. Was this indeed the case?
Yes, it was. If you look closely at that scene, you will see me standing in there amongst the crowd, trying to keep certain people from attacking John Woehrle! People really thought that the husband had run off with this child and that the mother was catching up with him and desperately required assistance. People were trying to intervene and help. As a matter of fact, they wanted to start beating up this poor actor! I had to get in the middle of everyone and keep repeating over and over again, “It’s just a movie! It’s just a movie! It’s not real! Don’t get involved!” I really believe that if I hadn’t hastily told all those witnesses to back off, John would have been battered pretty badly by that crowd. We had the cameras hidden in different areas around Lower Manhattan, which was absolutely teeming with people at that time of day. I got the exact reaction that I was looking for from passers-by. I anticipated beforehand that staging such a dramatic confrontation on the street would provoke some individuals to intercede, but I didn’t want the situation to escalate to the point where John got punched out.
Early in the film Sally’s feminist friend, Malda, played by Ann Magnuson, talks about “feminist homicide” and how the kitchen — a place that is often viewed as a prison of domesticity for women — is also a potential armoury filled with weapons that can be used against violent men.
That little conversation sets up the ending where Sally kills Johnny with the kitchen knife. I thought that was good writing and I enjoyed putting that in. Of course, women do often kill their abusive husbands and partners using household implements as weapons. I suppose I made Perfect Strangers just to have that shot at the end of the film where Johnny comes back to Sally’s apartment and she has the kitchen knife behind her back. She doesn’t know if her child has been murdered or not and suspects that she may now be next. Sally opens the door and, thinking her son is dead, stabs Johnny and he falls forward. Then you see the little kid is standing behind him — perfectly safe — and is framed in the doorway. That was a good moment, I thought. I remember telling Matthew to hold his position and not move: “Just stay where you are!” And I’ll be damned if he didn’t do it! So, it was a perfect shot, my favorite shot in the whole picture. There aren’t many times in your career where you can say that you made a movie just for one shot, but that was the case right there. That’s the shot! I thought it was a classic shot, actually. Incidentally, unlike Anne and Brad, I should add that Ann Magnuson actually went on to have a fairly good career in films after Perfect Strangers. [5] She later appeared in a number of well-received pictures and was the only one who came out of that movie and did anything noteworthy.
Why did you include the feminist angle in the story?
Well, there was a lot of activism going on at the time. There was actually a feminist parade that had been organized in New York when we were shooting and I thought we could include it in the picture. There were many women in the movie who were lesbians, and we filmed the “Take Back the Night” parade, which is partly-straight, partly-lesbian, and partly-gay. We shot that sequence in Washington Square because I wanted to take the environment of Lower Manhattan as it was in those days and really capture it on film. I think Perfect Strangers succeeded in doing that. It really does authentically incorporate the milieu and atmosphere of that place and time. Also I wanted to give Anne’s character a point of view, rather than have her simply be defined as a mother — a single mother — and an ex-wife. I wanted to give her a personality and a cause, allowing her thoughts that existed outside of her daily domestic routine. So, I made her an activist who worked in a recycled clothes store, and amongst her friends were many lesbians and fellow activists.
It’s never made clear in Perfect Strangers whether or not Sally is a lesbian or bi-sexual character, or if she is merely sympathetic to their movement.
I think she’s a borderline lesbian. I felt that made the character more interesting and offbeat. It also gave Perfect Strangers more depth as a movie and furnished the story with more layers of interest. I mean, the mother doesn’t really like men to begin with, but then she lowers her guard and allows this guy to come into her life and her bed, and, of course, he is a murderer. So, she has made another bad choice, although I’ve always thought that Sally’s ex-husband was also a tragic character in his own way. I can understand his position and point of view, too, as much as I understand the mother’s disenchantments with men. In reality, Anne Carlisle was a lesbian and it was very difficult for her to do the love scene with Brad Rijn. We actually had to get Anne a bottle of brandy so that she could get drunk. After that, she was able to bring herself to do it. However, Anne’s girlfriend, who actually plays the German-accented lesbian in the film, was very unhappy about her doing the love scene with Brad. In fact, she got very angry with Anne and they actually had a big spat over it.
I see the film being moderately concerned with veneers and surfaces under which other things lie. You have Johnny playing at being a family man when in reality he is a killer; you have Fred, who seems a little unhinged and angry, but who is finally revealed to be a decent guy who cares for his son; and you also have Moletti the gangster who has a respectable front as a hair-dresser.
I think that’s a good analogy and it’s partially true. Perfect Strangers is about a lot of things, but that sense of subterfuge is certainly part of it. Of course, I am interested in exploring the social masks that we wear. That’s really an inherent part of drama: discovering who people really are; removing the masks they put on and revealing their true faces. People are never really what you know and believe them to be. I’ve come to realize that everybody’s life is a performance: an act or a character they choose to adopt. It’s almost like the clothing that we decide to wear, or the manner in which we style our hair and fix our makeup, all helps to form the image we present to society. It’s really not who we are. Behind that veneer, when we are alone and the doors are closed and we look in the mirror, we see a different person staring back. We see a person that we don’t want anybody to know about, someone with their own private fears and doubts and desires. We very seldom expose our true faces, even to those who are closest to us. Our wives, husbands and children never truly know who we are and sometimes they only find out the truth of someone’s life after they are dead. They may go through a person’s papers and
belongings and discover things they hadn’t expected to find. Maybe the deceased had a secret life or identity, or a secret side to themselves. It’s fascinating because that’s probably true of most people.
The scene where Johnny visits Moletti’s barbershop is quite unnerving.
It’s uncomfortable because the gangster is laying down the law. He’s telling Johnny he must tie-up the loose end he’s left dangling by murdering this kid, and he holds the scissors dangerously close to Johnny’s nostrils as he does so. I thought the actor who played the gangster had an interesting voice. [6] He had this threatening little rumble to his voice, which I think also contributed to the underlying tension in that scene. I don’t remember where that actor came from or where he went, but I thought he was very good. Sadly, he wasn’t very good at cutting hair. He was supposed to be playing this tough, dangerous guy but he was a little nervous. He was afraid to trim Brad’s hair in case he made a mess of it! [Laughs] We shot that scene in a real barber’s shop in Lower Manhattan. In fact, all of the locations in the movie were real locations. I was happy with all the actors playing the villains, particularly the big, blond heavy that grabs Brad in the cemetery. [7] That guy was like six-foot five; he was just enormous, and had these huge hands. I mean, Brad was a big guy, but that fellow dwarfed Brad. I thought he was a suitably threatening reminder to Johnny that if he didn’t do what he was told, this guy would be the enforcer. He would then take Johnny’s place in the organization and that would be that.
Perfect Strangers closes with a shot of three spray painted silhouettes on a wall instead of one: a male adult, a female adult, and a child. Why?
That shot was meant to illustrate the dream that Johnny had. All through the movie, he has been spray painting a single figure on the walls to signify his own isolated existence. He’s a shadow, but the more Johnny gets involved with this woman’s life, the more he is exposed to other people: her ex-husband, her friends, the detective. At the end, we suddenly see that at some point he has painted a trio. In his heart, he had fallen in love with this mother and her child, and he wanted to form a family with them. He wanted them to be a unit together, so that he would no longer be alone. That shadowy image is as close as he will ever get. Sadly, he is dead now and the mother has killed the one that she loved. He loved her, too, and he didn’t mean to hurt the boy, so it’s a very tragic and bleak ending. I think we do feel some sympathy for Johnny despite the fact he is a killer. We do like him.
It’s hard not to like an assassin who insists on saying “I’m sorry” to each and every one of his victims.
Johnny is trapped by the circumstances of his life and his commitment to the codes of the criminal organization he works for. Does he have a compulsion to kill, or is it just his job? Can he let the criminal life go? Will the criminal life permit him to go?
How did you find working with John Daly and the Hemdale Film Corporation?
John Daly was an extremely intelligent, tasteful, and notorious guy. I sold him about five different projects over the years, and they all got made, including Best Seller. Daly was the kind of guy you could go into a meeting with and in five minutes he’d give you a commentary on your script that was astute, concise, and insightful. Many studio executives can’t tell you anything because they don’t know anything. They often bullshit you, trying to make it appear that they know something when all they are giving you are these inane observations. Daly could cut through everything and very quickly tell you exactly what you needed to know. You would be in and out of any meeting with him because he was so incredibly bright. Unfortunately, he was also a terrible crook. Every time you dealt with him, you got swindled out of your money. He took advantage of people to such a degree that finally nobody would do business with him anymore, not just me but other people in Hollywood. Although Daly had produced Oscar-winning pictures like Platoon and The Last Emperor, it eventually came to the point where nobody wanted to touch a John Daly project. [8] He finally found it impossible to get pictures made and eventually lost Hemdale and pretty much everything else. He then directed his own movie, but couldn’t get it distributed. [9] Daly tried to distribute it himself and probably lost the remainder of his money in the attempt. I remember that towards the end of his life, I took him out to lunch at The Polo Lounge at The Beverly Hills Hotel. I bought him this expensive lunch and tried to be nice to him, even though he’d cheated me out of the back-end money on all of the pictures we had made together. At the time, I actually felt great because now it was Daly who was down in the dumps. I could still afford to take him out, ply him with food, and celebrate the fact that I’d managed to survive and he hadn’t. After all the dirty tricks he’d played on me, I was so furious with Daly I sometimes wanted to kill the guy! I’m not kidding. He’d taken serious advantage of me, but, in the end, he’d received his comeuppance. Despite everything, I was amazed to discover that I actually felt sorry for him. In fact, he died soon after that lunch. I didn’t poison him or anything, but I probably had thought of poisoning him many times. Daly was a talented man but, unfortunately, he couldn’t control his greed. He had been raised in the slums of London and I think he had been a boxer at one time. That fighting spirit must have served him well because he fought his way to the very top, finally owning his own independent film company and tasting stunning success. Daly had originally started Hemdale with the actor David Hemmings, but had apparently cheated Hemmings out of his share of the company; kicking him out and assuming full control, even though he was the “Hem” in Hemdale. I don’t think there was anybody who dealt with John Daly who didn’t have something bad to say about him. The joke around town was that if Daly was ever murdered there would be so many suspects, the police wouldn’t know where to look or what to do about it. They’d have to bring all of Hollywood in for questioning. I guess Daly never forgot his beginnings. He was a crook to start with and remained one all his life, but he was certainly a talented crook.
What kind of business did Perfect Strangers do?
It didn’t do that well. Perfect Strangers only received a token release by New Line Pictures. John Daly had sold it to some kind of tax shelter company and, like others had done with The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover and Full Moon High, was able to write off the cost of the film as tax deductions. This meant that Perfect Strangers, and my next film, Special Effects, only had to play a certain number of theaters to qualify for the tax shelter. Daly had sold them off in such a way that the impetus was not to make money in theaters, only to fulfil the commitment to the tax shelter. It was a very familiar story again. Naturally, they didn’t make enough prints and they didn’t spend a lot of money on advertising, so both movies quickly disappeared. You can’t put movies like Perfect Strangers and Special Effects out and simply expect audiences to discover them. You have to actively promote them on television and in print, and both movies were not advertised and more or less suffered the same fate. What’s interesting is that the critical reaction to Perfect Strangers was pretty good. Many people say it’s one of my best pictures and I always knew that one day both Perfect Strangers and Special Effects would find an audience. They are both out on DVD and have played here and there on cable and Netflix, places like that. So, they have ended up enjoying a nice afterlife and I’m happy about that. Better late than never, I guess.
Special Effects (1984)
Am I right in my understanding that you originally wrote the script for Special Effects in the late 1960s, before Bone?
Yes, that’s true. It was actually the first screenplay that I wrote for myself to direct and was intended to be my debut film. It was originally called The Cutting Room and was about a manipulative director, who makes a movie about a murder that he himself has committed — blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, and sucking several people around him into this disturbing project. Unfortunately, we never put the movie together at the time. There were a few people interested in it, but it finally just fell away. I had always kept that script in a drawer as something good
that was waiting to happen at the right time. When John Daly said we could make Perfect Strangers and Special Effects back-to-back, that was the opportunity I was looking for. I took The Cutting Room out, re-titled it Special Effects, and that became the second film of the two-picture deal.
Why exactly did The Cutting Room not become your debut film?
It was partly due to the notorious Polanski murders, which took place near the end of the 1960s. Sharon Tate — Roman Polanski’s wife — her unborn child, and several other notable people, were brutally murdered by members of the Manson Family. I felt that horrifying and tragic event drained all of the interesting humour out of my whole idea. It made The Cutting Room seem too harsh and painful, so I chose not to pursue the project at the time. I thought people would be repulsed by the movie coming out so soon after the killings as that crime did affect Hollywood tremendously. A lot of people out here in the motion picture business were very emotionally wrought over those murders and the fact they took place right in the center of the city, amidst all of their beautiful homes. I think my script just cut too close to the bone. I mean, that case involved a famous director in Polanski and a beautiful young actress in Tate, and the way she was mercilessly murdered like that — no, it would have just been extremely unpalatable and insensitive. I remember there were all these terrible stories that were floating about that maybe Polanski had something to do with the killings as he was such a weird guy. Of course, all of those rumours were completely untrue and unfounded, but they added to the disturbing and paranoid atmosphere that was brewing in Hollywood. People wanted to know who was responsible so they could sleep at night without having a gun tucked under their pillows. Then, the real culprits were eventually found and the community could stop worrying about who might be next. Anyway, back then, with that climate, I shied away from doing The Cutting Room because of the intense feelings that existed. The timing just wasn’t right.
Larry Cohen Page 36