Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  As both writer and producer on all three films, surely you could have supervised or consulted on the final look of the Maniac Cop?

  Well, Bill is a very nice fellow, but he is extremely sensitive to any criticisms that are made or suggestions that are offered. I did not want him to think that I was trying to take over his movie. You know, when we were making Phone Booth, I suggested to the director, Joel Schumacher, that he replace the original actor who was providing the voice of the sniper. [5] Schumacher then went out and got Kiefer Sutherland for the role. He actually listened to my suggestion and it improved the picture immeasurably. Schumacher wasn’t averse to hearing a suggestion and then acting upon it, but to Bill Lustig any suggestions were taken as an assault. Unfortunately, he just can’t handle it.

  Lustig did act upon your suggestion to cast Laurene Landon in the role of Theresa Mallory, didn’t he?

  Sure, he did hire Laurene for the movie and she also appeared in the second film, too. Her character was supposed to appear in Maniac Cop 3 also, but once again, Lustig got up on his high horse and decided he was going to overrule me and not use Laurene again. I think they might have had some problems with each other on the set. I mean, she has a great sense of humour and he doesn’t, so Laurene may have said something to Bill that might have offended him. I don’t know. When he was doing Maniac Cop 3, Bill went out and hired an actress who looked exactly like Laurene. [6] He then had to alter the story to make her an entirely different character. So, he ended up getting a girl who was a former basketball player and also the girlfriend of Martin Landau. It’s funny, because Landau actually called me up and thanked me for getting her the part but I didn’t have anything to do with it.

  How actively involved in the productions were you?

  I tried to be as active as I could — without stepping on Bill’s toes. On Maniac Cop, I was allowed to re-cut the picture. The editor, David Kern, and I sat down and spent a week carefully re-cutting Maniac Cop. I actually think we improved the film quite a bit. I also had some input on the first sequel, as well. On Maniac Cop 2, Bill called me up and said that he didn’t know how to end the picture and required some assistance. He had finally reached out for help, so I went down to the location of the prison set that was in downtown Los Angeles. The stunt director, Spiro Razatos, and I worked out the climactic scenes where the Maniac Cop catches fire. Spiro is an extremely gifted second unit and stunt director. Together, we devised all the action where Cordell throws the other convicts around and catches fire. We also had the convicts catch fire, too, before Cordell tosses their flaming bodies up onto the second platform of the prison. I can remember asking Spiro, “Okay, how long can you keep these people burning for?” Spiro then figured out exactly how we could do it and it did look rather good on film. In fact, everything that is good in Maniac Cop and Maniac Cop 2 is Spiro’s work. He directed all the action sequences. That whole climactic fire sequence in Maniac Cop 2 wasn’t in my original script. That stuff wasn’t anything that Bill could handle himself, so he called me up and I did it for him. As for Maniac Cop 3, I had virtually no input whatsoever as the third movie was taken away from us by First Look, the production company. They put their own people on it; rewrote my script and fired Bill. First Look basically did what they wanted to do, and so Maniac Cop 3 bares very little resemblance to anything I wanted. However, the first two pictures followed my scripts almost completely, and I did enjoy some input.

  The critical reaction towards the first Maniac Cop was mostly negative.

  I didn’t know there was any critical reaction. I didn’t think anybody cared.

  The first film does contain a terrific opening sequence that in some ways the rest of Maniac Cop fails to match: we see a young girl fleeing from some street muggers towards the apparent safety of a police officer, only for the cop to suddenly break her neck and toss her body away.

  Yeah, that was a strong opening and a good way to introduce the Maniac Cop. Actually, my daughter, Jill, played the part of the doomed young girl. She wanted to be in films, and I suggested to Lustig that he use her for the part and he agreed.

  The world of the Maniac Cop trilogy is filled with violent criminals, scheming officials, and dirty cops — the cops often being the worst of a bad bunch. It seems apropos to ask you what the present view of the police is in America.

  People in America are generally scared of cops, particularly minority people. The police have always been a rather racist organization. Even the Black cops don’t treat Black citizens too well. I mean, once they get themselves over into the establishment, they have an intimidating role in the community. Now maybe it’s because there is so much crime, but the biggest victims of Black crime are Black people in the Black community. They suffer the most, but they are also very much afraid of the police. Of course, the police have earned that animosity by their behaviour. A lot of cops are basically small-time people, who only achieve some degree of authority by joining the police department. Then they have to prove that they are tough guys. They have to show everybody that they are the boss and that they should command respect. They don’t earn that respect; they merely demand it because they are now wearing a uniform. They can be extremely abusive and push people around. It’s not too pleasant to be on the other end of their abuse. So, yeah, people generally do not like cops.

  Have you ever been on the wrong end of abuse from police officers?

  As a matter of fact, I just came from the Academy Awards last week and they had all these off-duty policemen in tuxedos working the red carpet. These cops were telling people to move along in the most obnoxious and disrespectful fashion. I very seldom come into contact with police officers, but when you go to the Oscars ceremony there are all these off-duty cops acting like they are really somebody important. They are pushing you around and you don’t attend the Oscars to get pushed around. I’m a member of the Academy and I wish to be treated with dignity. They don’t know how to treat anybody with dignity. They are just cops, that’s all. Many times when you are dealing with cops, you would just like to sock them right in the face! Of course, you don’t want to go to jail, and so you put up with their ignorant behaviour. But they are really nothing. They are nothing guys. They probably go home, get drunk every night, and beat up their wives. They are not the most pleasant people to deal with and are usually rather stupid, to tell you the truth.

  Guilt, culpability, and corruption are themes present in all three Maniac Cop films, would you agree?

  I guess. Guilt is a powerful and destructive emotion and a great element to a story. The whole notion of guilt has been in several of my movies, actually. As a theme, it gives any dramatic writer a considerable weapon to wield. Characters afflicted with feelings of guilt, remorse, anger and vengeance can be interesting to write.

  How does that relate to the character of Matt Cordell?

  Well, I see Cordell as a tragic figure. A lot of the iconic monsters in movies, such as Frankenstein’s Monster and King Kong, have a desperately sad and tragic element to them. I view Cordell as being the same. He was a man who tried his best to be a good and honest cop, but people were conspiring against him. He has been taken advantage of by the dishonest politicians and the compliant cops within his own force who’ve sought to frame him. He has been discredited, incarcerated, and violated, and the poor treatment he’s received has turned him into something truly monstrous. The Maniac Cop has been born out of the corruption and deceit of the state that has betrayed him, transforming Cordell from a good man into a bad man. I’ve often said that the most terrifying bad guys are the ones who were formerly good guys. They have a bitterness and destructiveness to them that makes them even more dangerous. It’s that fall from grace which gives their tragedy an added dimension, I think. Of course, last year, Maniac Cop really came true out here in Los Angeles. We had a renegade cop actually running around shooting and killing people. Do you know about this?

  You mentioned this case to me several months ago and I did read up on it. The police o
fficer’s name was Christopher Jordan Dormer, but I believe that one or two media outlets actually referred to Dormer as the “Maniac Cop.”

  That’s right. It’s another case of art imitating life, not that Maniac Cop is art, but you know what I’m saying. This officer had been fired off the force and decided that he was going to kill as many policemen — and relatives of policemen — as he could. He claimed that he was forced out because he had informed on some fellow officers, who had committed acts of violence against people. He had turned them all in, but the result of his actions was that the LAPD punished him by firing him. This ex-cop then decided to get his revenge, and started off by killing the daughter of one of the police executives, as well as the daughter’s boyfriend. After that, he then went on a rampage and killed a couple of cops and wounded several others, resulting in every policeman in L.A. being on alert. They were hunting him all over the city and finally tracked him down up in Big Bear, California, which is a ski resort. The police would never have caught him if certain civilians had not given them information on this guy’s whereabouts. He was actually holed up right across the street from them — just a few feet away. Finally, some people the cop had spared and didn’t kill — he’d tied them up but they got loose — warned the police that he was there. They eventually ended up cornering the killer and burning him to death in a cabin. Apparently, he had already committed suicide, but he certainly was a maniac cop. So, there you go. One of my movies has come true again. It’s remarkable how your films can occasionally anticipate real-life events. The same thing happened with the Washington Sniper attacks occurring around the release of Phone Booth — art imitating life. In the case of the maniac cop, it was disturbing for people to have a police officer go crazy like that, but it was also terrifying for the cops. For a while there, it really created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia.

  Interestingly, there’s a scene in Maniac Cop where a paranoid woman shoots a police officer who has pulled her over, mistakenly believing he is Cordell.

  Yeah, and you know what? The events with this crazy cop resulted in police officers actually opening fire on a vehicle with two women inside it. They must have believed that this guy was inside. The cops fired countless shots at these two women, without even first identifying who was in the vehicle, and could have very easily killed them. It turns out that these women were simply delivering newspapers early one morning in a neighbourhood where the police thought this maniac cop might show up. The women weren’t even in a car that matched the vehicle that the suspect was in, but the cops were so scared they opened fire with all kinds of weapons. That tells you just how terrified they were of this guy. So, with all this murder and mayhem and paranoia, it really was like a scene right out of one of my movies.

  Let’s move on to Maniac Cop 2, which personally I think is an underrated movie. What led to the decision to make a sequel?

  I have no idea. For some reason, Bill found somebody in England who was willing to provide the dough required to make a sequel. They put up about $3.5 million, which was way more than the original picture cost — in fact, over three times as much. Unfortunately, the financer later went bankrupt and as a result never paid the residuals. They ended up owing me about $60,000 that I never received. We got a judgement against them from the Writer’s Guild, but we could never collect the money because the company went bankrupt over in England. So, even though Maniac Cop 2 continues to play, I’m getting cheated out of my residuals.

  Lustig once pitched Maniac Cop 2 as being “The French Connection meets Frankenstein with Robert Davi as Popeye Doyle.” Is that how you viewed your script when you were writing it?

  Absolutely not. How would he know what it’s about? He doesn’t know anything.

  So, Lustig had no input into the screenplay?

  Absolutely none. I wouldn’t say that was true of the third Maniac Cop film, because I don’t know exactly what he did after I submitted my screenplay. That was all done behind my back.

  I believe Lustig wanted the characters of Jack Forrest [Bruce Campbell] and Theresa Mallory to be killed fairly early on in the sequel. Why exactly?

  I don’t know.

  Did you think it seemed somewhat cruel and arbitrary that the heroes of Maniac Cop should receive such violent treatment? I mean, Forrest gets a nightstick blade callously rammed through the back of his neck as he is reading a newspaper and Mallory gets her neck broken.

  Yeah, but Laurene’s character doesn’t get killed right away. She doesn’t die until two thirds of the way through the picture — at least half way through. She is more of a supporting character in Maniac Cop 2, and, as I say, she would have also been in the third movie. Her character would not have died as a result of having her neck broken by Cordell. Originally, she was going to be stuck in a coma in the hospital as a result of that attack. Laurene would have played the unconscious, brain-dead woman in the third film that the Maniac Cop steals from the hospital and claims as his mate. Basically, he goes after someone he sees as being like himself — the living dead. This person is effectively dead, but like him is also very much alive. Cordell connects with her for that very reason.

  The spectre of Frankenstein falls over several of your films and all three Maniac Cop movies bear traces of its influence. In the third instalment, there are definite echoes of The Bride of Frankenstein.

  Oh, sure. In The Bride of Frankenstein, Karloff’s Monster is seeking a mate and receives one in the form of Elsa Lanchester’s Bride. It was the same idea in Maniac Cop 3. I think the addition of Laurene’s character in the third film would have been an interesting continuation of Maniac Cop 2, but they decided to make that person somebody else entirely. What can I tell you? I sometimes think that a decision is made not on the basis of what benefits the overall quality of a movie, but is simply founded on someone’s personal agenda. Bill knew that Laurene was a friend of mine, so he couldn’t use her in the picture, that’s all. It was an act of aggression, I think. He was going to prove that he didn’t have to do what I wanted him to do. That was the beginning of the end for him also as he was eventually kicked off Maniac Cop 3, too. So, justice ultimately prevailed and he got what he deserved.

  Getting back to Maniac Cop 2, the addition of Robert Davi’s Lt. McKinney is obviously as a replacement hero for Jack Forrest.

  Yeah, pretty much. I liked Robert Davi’s performance in Maniac Cop 2. His character was that world-weary type of cop and it fit him well. I mean, Davi also has a great Film Noir face. He’s not your usual handsome leading man type, but he certainly looks good in those kinds of dark crime movies, and he is a good actor. I know that Davi is now actually trying to be a singer. He thinks he’s Frank Sinatra! The last time I saw Davi, he dragged me outside to his car and played me a tape of himself singing. I must admit, it was pretty good, too.

  The first sequel sees Cordell teaming up with the vicious serial killer, Turkell [Leo Rossi], who is on “a crusade against the whores of the world.” I’ve always —

  [Interrupting] Don’t ask me where the inspiration for that came from! I just sat there and wrote the damn thing. I was making it all up as I was going along.

  I was about to say that the film seems to draw on Son of Frankenstein, and the relationship between Igor, as played by Bela Lugosi, and Karloff’s Monster.

  Yes, that’s true. I guess there is a history in horror films of one monster teaming up with another monster. I just thought it was a cute idea to have these two characters cross paths. I particularly like the scene where the Maniac Cop and the serial killer both show their weapons to each other. [Chuckles]

  Maniac Cop 2 features a remarkable stunt at the climax, where Cordell and Turkell fall from the prison and tumble down into the bus whilst on fire.

  Uh-huh, and that was all Spiro Razatos. Everything from riding the cars without the wheels and driving the car down the street with Claudia Christian handcuffed to the wheel — that was all Spiro. I could write those sequences, but Spiro could certainly bring them to life. In my o
pinion, he is the real hero of the Maniac Cop movies. I actually got Spiro a job directing a picture called Fast Getaway as a reward for all his efforts on Maniac Cop and The Ambulance, which he also did for me. I felt I should do something nice for him in return, so I came up with a storyline for a movie. The first script was written by Jim Dixon, who also acts in a lot of my pictures. I got Jim the job as writer on the film and Spiro the job as director. I didn’t take any money for it and Fast Getaway became a pretty good movie. Then the company made a sequel and, as usual, they stabbed the people who made the original in the back. They didn’t hire Spiro to direct the sequel, which wasn’t good, by the way, but they did have to pay me a substantial amount of money. My deal with them was that I wouldn’t take any money on the first picture but I had to be paid if there was a sequel. Spiro eventually went back to stunt directing and he works on a lot of high-budget movies.