Did this lack of understanding also extend to your relationship with the film’s director, John Flynn?
I didn’t work much with Flynn. I hardly knew him and we had no communication. In the movie business — the way they run it out here — the writers very seldom have anything to do with the directors. The producer deliberately keeps them apart in order for him or her to maintain some kind of power and control. Also, directors often feel threatened by the writers because half of them don’t even understand what the hell they are shooting in the first place. All they know is where to put the cameras. They have no idea about the characterisations, or any understanding of what they should say to the actors. Some directors even make a concerted effort not to discuss the script with the actors that much. They just want to position the cameras in the right place, point them at something and shoot. When a pivotal character point or plot point does suddenly arise, they don’t know what the fuck to do about it.
I was surprised to learn that you once scripted a film version of Doctor Strange, based on the Marvel Comics superhero created by Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko. How did that opportunity come about?
I can’t remember his name now, but I was hired by a producer to write a movie of Doctor Strange. I also met with Stan Lee quite a number of times and we became very good friends. We had many dinners, many afternoons and days together, and Stan and I are still friends. I did write the script, but then the production company went under and the guy who was producing died. That was the end of the whole project and the option eventually ran out and went back to Marvel. At the time, Stan had been running around Hollywood for ten years trying to sell these Marvel superhero characters for movies and television, without any success. He just couldn’t get anything off the ground involving properties such as Spider-Man, The Hulk, Captain America, and The Fantastic Four. Roger Corman bought the rights to The Fantastic Four and made a real low-budget picture that was never released, just so that he would be able to hang onto the rights. [1] At the time, I remember Stan asked me, “Is there any way I can stop Corman?” I said, “I don’t think so. If you sold it to him, he has the right to make the picture.” But The Fantastic Four movie was so bad and cheaply made, it never saw the light of day. As I say, back then, Stan was having a terrible time getting anything made, and I realize that sounds rather incredible now considering Marvel’s incredible recent success. The company eventually changed hands and new management took over. Stan then became kind of an emeritus figure. They paid him for the use of his identity, but he didn’t really have anything to do with the organization anymore. So, Stan did not put all those huge deals together for the Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Captain America movies that have been made in recent years. They were done by the new management. The success of the first Spider-Man [2] movie changed everything and turned Marvel into an absolute goldmine. That film made all of those Marvel characters popular and viable again. Before that, it seemed audiences just weren’t that interested in superhero movies anymore.
Was your Doctor Strange script an original or did it derive from the storylines in the comic books?
It was an origin story, so it told a little of the beginnings of Doctor Strange that had been detailed in the comic books. It was similar to Batman Begins, where he goes off to Tibet to train and gain knowledge and eventually becomes wise and powerful. I don’t think I have a copy of my Doctor Strange script anymore. It’s now lost.
Did you have any affinity or affection for the character itself?
No, absolutely not. It was just an assignment, but I thought I did a good job.
So, you weren’t too disappointed that it didn’t happen?
There are always a lot of scripts and projects I’m either writing, developing, or thinking about, so I always just keep moving forward. There have been interesting projects, like The Apparatus and Doctor Strange, that have fallen by the wayside over the years but I don’t get too down about them. I just move on to the next one and the next one. Yeah, some of these things would have been fun to do but you have to be philosophical about them. I mean, I once thought about doing a new version of The Invisible Man with Marlon Brando playing the lead. The opportunity to have worked with Brando would have been wonderful, but it simply wasn’t to be. So, you move on.
Can you tell me a little more about your unmade Invisible Man project?
Well, I’d always liked the old Universal version with Claude Rains and I thought we could do something great with it. There had been other updates of The Invisible Man made since, but I felt the idea still had a lot of potential. So, I talked to Elliott Kastner about doing The Invisible Man with Brando as the lead. Elliott was a close friend of Marlon’s, and a successful producer, so I felt reasonably confident that we could work something out. [3] Brando was notorious for being paid millions of dollars to only make fleeting appearances in movies. He’d played memorable characters in films like Superman and Apocalypse Now, but he wasn’t onscreen for very long and would only show up in a few scenes. But he was such a powerful and magnetic presence, Brando would dominate the screen and compel you to watch. You just couldn’t take your eyes off him, which sounds a little ironic as I wanted him to be mostly invisible in my movie! [Chuckles] The basic idea was that if Marlon didn’t have the energy or interest to shoot an entire movie, we’d only use his voice in the part. So, we’d see the invisible man moving objects, opening doors, and everything as Brando delivered the dialogue. That way, Brando could limit his direct involvement and would only be required to appear in the final scene. Then, and only then, the audience could finally get a look at him. Of course, the movie didn’t happen and I later tried to get the idea started over at Paramount in a 3D version, but that didn’t work out either. It could have been really great but, again, I didn’t get too down about it. I just moved on to the next idea.
What was Desperado: Avalanche at Devil’s Ridge, which you wrote in 1988?
Actually, that was just on television over here the other day. That was a two-hour TV movie I wrote that co-starred Rod Steiger. There was a mini-series called Desperado that was created by Elmore Leonard and produced by Walter Mirisch. It was about the adventures of a cowboy on the frontier. Walter called me and asked me if I would like to write a two-hour film for this series of feature-length TV movies they were planning. I liked the series and the central character, so I wrote Avalanche at Devil’s Ridge and it turned out to be pretty good, too, I must say. When I watched it again, I couldn’t find any fault with it. I thought Rod Steiger was particularly good in it.
What was the extent of your involvement with Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers?
It was this: I was the first writer on the picture and the basic story of the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers taking over an American military base was mine. That idea seemed to make good dramatic sense to me because military people are very similar in their behaviour and look. So, in a way, they are already pod people to begin with. They are kind of unemotional and form part of a collective organization or consciousness. That was my starting point, conceptually. You can’t tell who the humans are and who the aliens are because they all conform. I thought that was an interesting and scary approach to take with the material. People are pretty much behaving like aliens even before they become aliens, so who can you trust? That aspect of the story — the paranoia, fear, and uncertainty — was always a major element of those movies; from the original movie that was made in the 1950s through to the excellent Philip Kaufman version, to the not so excellent version which recently starred Nicole Kidman. I thought that last Body Snatchers movie was awful, frankly.
In what ways were the themes and ideas you introduced in your draft of Body Snatchers modified or altered in subsequent drafts by the other writers?
They pretty much built upon or reworked my existing ideas and characters. In my script, the little boy was the lead character. He discovers that his mother has turned into a pod person and that humanity is now in peril. I wanted to tell the story from th
e point-of-view of a child, but Warner Bros. were more interested in centering the film around teenagers. They felt that approach would hold more appeal. You see, Body Snatchers was a studio picture and, as is often the case, the studio then proceeded to hire several other writers to work on the screenplay after I’d delivered my draft. When Abel Ferrara came in as director, he brought another writer in with him and they rewrote my script, particularly the dialogue. They still retained a lot of the elements I’d devised for it: obviously the military base setting, but also the stuff about the pills keeping you awake and all the business concerning the child. That all came from me and was what got Body Snatchers made in the first place.
Were there any interesting scenes that were discarded in later drafts that you felt worked particularly well in yours?
There was a nice scene in my script where the little boy attends the school on the military base. All the children have to lie down for their afternoon nap and then the teachers bring out the pods. The boy suddenly wakes up and realizes that all the kids are now aliens. That was very good, a very disturbing scene. I think they deleted that from the finished film. If they didn’t delete it entirely, it wasn’t in there to the extent that it was in was my original script.
Interestingly, Stuart Gordon and his writing partner Dennis Paoli are also credited as co-writers on Body Snatchers.
Stuart is a friend of mine, but I’ve never actually discussed that with him. It never occurred to me that he had a credit on Body Snatchers. Oh well, god bless him! The more, the merrier! [Chuckles] Let all writers get a job out of it, I don’t care. The most important thing is that I got the movie made. I went to Warner Bros., I pitched the idea, and I got the picture made. All the other people came in later.
Did you ever meet Abel Ferrara?
I met him once — very briefly — at a party some twenty years ago. I had done Special Effects with Zoë Lund, and so Ferrara and I had something in common there as they had also worked closely together on several projects. Apparently, the studio complained on Body Snatchers that Ferrara was under the influence of drugs the entire time he was shooting the picture and that he went way over budget. They were really pissed off at him and they penalized the producer. They held the producer responsible for letting it happen and took away his producer’s salary and producer’s points. He then quit the business as a direct result of that movie. [4] At any rate, he had a very bad reputation over at Warner Bros. for that particular picture.
Why didn’t you direct Body Snatchers?
Nobody asked me to. By the time it got in front of the cameras, Body Snatchers had been through many, many phases and many, many writers, and I was no longer associated with the project. Like the situation with Doctor Strange and The Invisible Man, I had already moved on to something else. But when something like Body Snatchers occurs, I just take my money and immediately push forward to the next project. I have too many ideas, and too many original scripts, and too much to do, to waste my time worrying about some movie that a bunch of studio executives have decided to screw up. I am still credited on the picture along with those other writers and I do like the film. I thought Ferrara made a pretty good movie.
In 1993, you returned to the familiar surroundings of the courtroom drama with Guilty as Sin which was directed by the unrivalled master of the genre, Sidney Lumet. How did Lumet become attached as director?
Well, Sidney’s involvement began with my sending the script for Guilty as Sin to the producer Martin Ransohoff. [5] I think it’s well-known that Sidney had been making some pretty bad movies around this stage of his career. His previous film, A Stranger Among Us, had been about a female undercover cop who infiltrates the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn to investigate a murder. Melanie Griffith played the cop and she was absolutely the wrong choice for that part. I mean, you had this squeaky-voiced, air-headed ditz playing a female detective getting involved with Hasidic Jews. It was ludicrous! A terrible movie in every way. At that time, Sidney had not had a successful picture in many years. The last major success he had enjoyed was The Verdict, which was wonderful. Before that, Sidney had made some great films like Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon. He also made several good pictures after Guilty as Sin, but none of them ever caught on. As it turns out, Guilty as Sin was the most successful movie he’d made in twenty-five years. It was probably the most successful movie of the last phase of his career. That success allowed him to make a bunch of other pictures afterwards, including a wonderful film he did towards the end of his life about the robbery of a jewellery store by two brothers who end up killing their own mother by accident. I forget the name of it.
Before the Devil Knows Your Dead.
Yeah, that’s the one. Now that was a wonderful picture. Unfortunately, it didn’t do any business. The only movie that Sidney had later on that did any business was Guilty as Sin. It actually became the highest-earning video in the video stores in America for about six weeks. So, it was good for Sidney and it was good for me. I got about five or six writing jobs over at Disney out of Guilty as Sin. They were a variety of different pictures that I can’t really remember much about. Disney kept calling me up and asking me if I would come in and take over a project and I just couldn’t turn them down. They were so enthusiastic about my doing everything, but they never made any of the pictures! Anyway, I did make a lot of money. So, Guilty as Sin was a fairly satisfying and profitable venture for all concerned.
Tell me about collaborating with Lumet. What was he like?
Sidney was very friendly at the beginning, very nice. I think he became less than enamoured with me as we went to New York and worked on the final script. Sidney liked to think of himself as being very democratic and respectful towards writers but, just like everybody else, he started putting his own two cents in when I wasn’t around. He began rewriting dialogue and changing stuff, and I didn’t think that was necessary. I could have made any and all of the changes he wanted overnight, if only he’d called me up on the phone and asked for them. Sidney didn’t rewrite much, but the fact that he rewrote anything annoyed me because he had all this pretension about honouring the writer’s integrity. Naturally, I was a little disappointed when I discovered he was fussing around with my script. Most of the time what he was putting in didn’t make any sense, but we got by. Equally disappointing was the cast he assembled for the film. It was certainly not what I’d hoped for. It was really a second string cast. Sidney had originally tried to get Paul Newman and Sean Connery for the lead, but they both felt they were now too old for the part. That was too bad.
Lumet eventually cast Don Johnson in the lead role as the scheming wife-killer and Rebecca De Mornay as the doubting attorney assigned to defend him.
That’s right, and I thought those actors were merely adequate. I do remember that Sidney was trying to shoot a love scene between the female lawyer and her boyfriend in an office at night. They were supposed to have a tryst up there and what Sidney shot was so inadequate and awkward, they couldn’t use any of it. They pretty much had to cut the entire scene out of the picture. I couldn’t imagine why Sidney was unable to shoot a love scene. I couldn’t understand it at all. Sidney also had certain little oddities. For instance, he once told me, “I will not shoot a scene in a moving car.” I said, “But Sidney, many years ago you once shot a whole movie inside a moving car, remember? It starred George Segal and was about a bunch of guys going to a funeral.” [6] He said, “Well, maybe that’s why I won’t ever shoot a scene in a moving car again.” I said, “Okay, so we won’t put these characters in a car. They’ll be outside the club waiting for the car to be brought over by the parking attendants. We can do the dialogue with them standing in the street.” And, as easily as that, I fixed it. I later thought to myself, “What is the problem if we have a scene in a moving car? People do ride in cars and they do conduct conversations inside them. What’s the big deal here?” But if that was what Sidney wanted, it was fine by me.
Guilty as Sin was met with mixe
d reviews from critics. Most agreed that the battle between the debonair lady killer and his beautiful female attorney began rather cleverly, but devolved into little more than a series of melodramatic clichés involving a victimised woman. Is this criticism fair in your view?
No, I don’t think so. The picture got some very good reviews from other reviewers. Even the woman critic in the New York Times gave it a very good review. She said Guilty as Sin moved into Hitchcock territory and was actually one of Lumet’s better pictures. The guy in The National Review said Guilty as Sin was a fitting bookend to Twelve Angry Men, and The Verdict, so I was happy for the movie to be considered in that same illustrious category. So, you can’t worry about what all the critics say. If you collect enough reviews, naturally you are going to receive a few bad ones.
Whilst reading most of the contemporary reviews, I stumbled upon Roger Ebert’s notice in the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert attacked the plot as “preposterous,” describing the story’s logic as “faulty.” He also claimed that Rebecca De Mornay had an “inescapable resemblance” to the then-President’s wife, Hillary Clinton, adding an intriguing tone to the movie that was perhaps not intentional. What is your response to those criticisms?
Larry Cohen Page 42