As is often the case with smaller movies, Original Gangstas opened in 400 theaters and was then reduced to 200 prints after two weeks in release.
Yeah, that’s usually the way it happens. The business is in the first two weeks when there is money for advertising. After the first two weeks, they cut the advertising budget to almost nothing and so you lose a lot of theaters. Of course, it also depends on what is coming in next. The theaters will naturally move your film out if a big picture is coming in that they think will do better. After a couple of weeks, you lose a lot of theaters, but then every film does, particularly when there is this parade of blockbusters coming in, one after the other. For example, if there was a twelve-plex theater that has twelve screens, four of those twelve screens would be playing Twister. No matter what time you went to the theater, Twister was always playing. If you arrived at eleven o’clock, it was on; if you arrived at twelve o’clock, it was on; if you arrived at three o’clock or six o’clock, it was on. Naturally, if Twister was only playing in just one theater, we might have caught the overflow if they had sold out that screening. Some people would have said, “Oh well, let’s go next door and see Original Gangstas instead.” Unfortunately, when a movie is being shown in four theaters, it doesn’t matter what time the audience walk in. Twister will always be available to them. Ultimately, Original Gangstas just didn’t get the chance that it should have had. I mean, you just get devoured by these blockbusters because they release them in 3,000 theaters at the same time and they spend $25 million to open the picture. Something like Original Gangstas could not afford to pay that kind of money, so we got 400 theaters right across the country and maybe they were spending $10 million on advertising — if that! You get swamped by the other advertising and the array of theaters the competition is playing in. That more or less drowns you in terms of being able to compete. It’s not a fair playing field at all. In addition to all that, the television stations and the newspapers charge you the same amount of money for advertising if you have a $200 million movie as they would if you have a $4 million movie. So, you are in a difficult situation because they have the means to destroy you.
Can good reviews help a picture when the playing field is that uneven?
Well, we got some very good reviews on Original Gangstas. In fact, I have a poster on the wall that has wonderful reviews from The New York Times, the New York Post, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Everybody liked the movie and some critics even said it was one of the most entertaining pictures of the year. I was very pleased with the reviews, but as I always say, good reviews don’t mean anything unless the company is willing to spend the money to run the quotes in the newspapers — in big enough ads so that the audience actually sees it. They have to buy a full-page ad in those papers and run those quotes, but a full-page ad costs $25,000 — just for one day! To put in a full-page ad with good quotes on Original Gangstas, they would’ve had to have spent $25,000 for just one day. For a weekend, they would’ve had to have spent $75,000. That’s one city and one newspaper. So, the prices of advertising are so expensive that even if you receive good reviews on a small picture, the companies have to spend a lot of money to get the general audience to actually see those reviews.
Not all the reviews from the time of the film’s release were positive. Some critics felt that the message was overstated and confused, robbing Original Gangstas of its power and effectiveness. Do you think it was slightly contradictory sending out an anti-violent message in a violent film?
You had to have some violence depicted in the movie in order to address the subject of violence. It’s also important to consider that there is no way to fight violent gangs without fighting them violently. You can’t gently persuade gang members to disband and willingly retire themselves out of existence. They have to be forcefully quelled. As it was, we tried to have a compassionate approach to the violence and killing. I mean, the characters played by Fred and Jim did not want to kill these kids. They tried to stop them in other ways but, finally, there was no other option available to them except to retaliate with violence. The kid that Jim’s character kills at the end actually tells him: “You created me and now you want to kill me?” And it was true — Jim had created him and was now destroying him. It was very much like It’s Alive in a way: here is the father facing the monster he has created and he has the choice of letting it live or die. But yes, I can certainly understand why some critics were saying, “Look at these old guys viciously killing these kids!” Sadly enough, history has repeatedly shown us that violence can only be halted by further acts of violence. That’s why we seem to be going to war all the time. It’s the only way of stopping the bad guys, because you can’t just talk them out of being bad. The bad guy’s ability to be ruthless and cruel is the source of their power and you can’t remove that power simply by talking to them. You have to crush them and keep telling yourself that what you have done is right. Ultimately, good and evil are merely different points of view. In reality, there are no absolutes in terms of what is good and what is evil.
Did you think there was an audience out there that could have embraced the nostalgia and sense of celebration Original Gangstas was offering?
Oh, absolutely. I think Original Gangstas was recognizable to some members of the audience as a revisiting of an older genre — an older type of movie experience — but one that embraced modern movies, as well. There is an audience out there that are tuned in to nostalgia and are very knowledgeable about cinema history. Each year, we see the success of movies that are remakes, or are based on an old TV show, a comic book, or a celebrated novel, whatever it may be. Each of these films has a brand name and a built-in interest and reputation. Perhaps the blaxploitation genre was a little too obscure and far-reaching than some other things to have had a real mass appeal, but as you know Tarantino was chasing a similar audience with Jackie Brown, which came afterwards. Original Gangstas didn’t break out into the public consciousness and do business like a mainstream movie would. That mostly occurred for the reasons I stated earlier: Twister and the reluctance of Orion to supply revenue for advertising. Actually, Orion was very close to going out of business as this point, and within six months of releasing my picture, they ceased to exist and was sold to MGM. I think Original Gangstas was a pretty good movie and I still do. In my mind, it more or less finishes the cycle of those Golden Age blaxploitation films and it’s a rather fitting end.
Screenplays: Part III (1996-2011)
After nearly three decades, you revisited the works of Ed McBain by writing the teleplay for Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct: Ice, a TV movie that aired on NBC in February, 1996. What did that feel like?
I found it amusing because, as you know, the very first show I ever wrote in live television — back when I was a kid — was adapted from an 87th Precinct book. All those years later, I was suddenly invited to return to that material again. Ice was based on a novel by Evan Hunter, who of course writes all of those 87th Precinct books under the name Ed McBain. It was about a dancer, who is found dead in a snow-covered street, and the detectives have to solve the case, which becomes increasingly more complex and deeper as it goes on. I don’t think I strayed very far from the book, but I did try to have some fun with it. I mean, Ice was an assignment and the opportunity to do it only came my way because I’d written the well-received episode of NYPD Blue. That show was very popular and widely watched, and soon after it was broadcast, I got a call from these people at NBC offering me the job. I didn’t tell the executives that I had written an Ed McBain story many years before. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t think it was important. Besides, I didn’t want to prejudice myself in any way, because you can’t always tell what people are thinking when they hear something like that. Maybe I wanted them to think I was entirely fresh to the material because that takes some of the pressure off — not that there was much pressure. My involvement with “The Eighty-Seventh Precinct” was a long time before when I was just star
ting out, and so I just took the job. Ice was relatively successful, and so they quickly asked me to write a second movie, which then became Heatwave.
Did Heatwave turn out as well as Ice?
I thought Ice was better, actually. Ice was set during an incredibly cold and bleak winter in the city, and, naturally, Heatwave was set during a blisteringly hot summer in the city. So, both movies were set in opposing extreme weather conditions. The films were okay, and I liked some of the moments between the detective and his mute wife who communicate with each other by sign language. That was pretty good, but once again the leads were not particularly interesting actors. If those movies had been better cast, 87th Precinct might have been turned into a series. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way and it isn’t very difficult to see why.
I agree that the casting wasn’t inspired. Dale Midkiff played McBain’s famous Detective Steve Carella and he is a rather limited performer in my view.
He was adequate, that’s all. If they had hired better directors as well as better actors, NBC would have probably been able to do something with it. In Heatwave, Erika Eleniak was cast as a woman detective, and I thought she was very good in the part. I had no complaints about her. She played a female cop, who is raped by the very rapist she is pursuing. She doesn’t want to admit that it has happened because she doesn’t want her career in the police department to be ruined. She allowed the rapist to get control of her and have sex with her, so she lies about it and is wracked with guilt. Of course, the rapist knows what he has done to this female detective and is kind of blackmailing her. Actually, the second movie was pretty good. The problem was that they shot both Ice and Heatwave in Canada and neither movie had the distinctive flavour and feeling of New York City to them. They didn’t have any trace of the grittiness of the New York metropolis, which I felt was extremely important and integral. The atmosphere of both films was just too bland and insipid.
That same year, you adapted John Lutz’s novel, The Ex, into a screenplay, which was directed by Mark L. Lester. [1] Were you satisfied with his direction?
I thought, up to a certain point, The Ex was pretty good. I just used the basic idea of Lutz’s book: the mentally unstable ex-wife comes back after several years in an asylum to hound the husband and his new wife and child. She’s just completely nuts and has the capacity to kill people. Pretty much everything else in the movie was original. Unlike Ice and Heatwave, I thought the cast for The Ex was much stronger. Nick Mancuso was good as the husband, and I thought Yancy Butler was excellent in the part of the psychotic ex-wife. The second wife was played by an actress who has since married James Cameron. [2] With that cast and my script, everything was in place to make a really good movie. Unfortunately, Mark Lester is not a very good director and he seriously limited our chances of delivering something great. Again, as in the case of Best Seller and Invasion of Privacy, Lester followed the script all the way up to the end. Of course, then, at the climax, somehow or other that same demon that possesses some directors also possessed him. Mark suddenly had to do something “creative” and he screwed up the ending. It was a real shame.
The Ex concludes with the architect’s young son setting fire to the ex-wife as she terrorises the family in their home. Was that your ending?
Yeah, that’s the way it was in my script, too. She is consumed by flames. The manner in which Lester staged that scene was so awkward and poorly directed; it destroyed any sense of tension and suspense. The rest of The Ex was okay, but that ending really exposed Mark’s directorial inabilities. It was rather sloppily put together, when it could have had real power. Lester succeeded in losing the whole subtext of the climax: that the child has now become psychopathic due to the events of the story. In effect, one psychopath has been destroyed by fire, and another one has been born in fire. That was the idea, anyway. It would have been nice if Mark had retained that element, but I don’t think he understood the script. He clumsily inserted a few things into the story that were contrary to good logic, which led me to believe that he didn’t fully comprehend what he was directing. This was also evident when I wrote another movie for him afterwards called Misbegotten. Incredibly, he screwed up the ending of that picture, also! I mean, once is unfortunate, but twice?
Let’s talk about Misbegotten. You seemed to be a natural candidate to adapt James Gabriel Berman’s novel with its story of a deranged man, who fathers a child through artificial insemination and then tracks down the family and terrorizes them.
Yeah, there we have the same thing again — it’s birth again! It’s the same subject that just keeps popping up in my work. I guess Berman’s book and its concentration on the darker aspects of parenthood made a nice fit for me, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is about that particular theme that continually fascinates me. The subject of parenthood and birth — of bringing a new life into the world — is often celebrated and reaffirmed in movies, but in my films that experience often shades over into horror and fear and death. In real life, I do think the idea of killing children or killing babies is unfortunate, but I am not against abortion necessarily. However, I am against abortion as a means of birth control. I’m not against abortion as a means of preserving somebody’s sanity if they have been raped or incestually attacked by someone; or if the mother’s health and life is threatened. But people who practice birth control by having one abortion after another just seem to be unthinking and cold-blooded.
How exactly did Lester succeed in ruining the climax of Misbegotten?
Mark unfortunately went haywire again, just as he had done on The Ex. He turned the climax of Misbegotten into a huge gunfight in which the villain killed about a dozen cops. That shooting spree had people dropping left and right, and it had nothing to do with the story and the characters. I suppose Mark thought he needed a lot of action in the picture in order to sell it to foreign markets. Apparently, by his rationale, overseas audiences are only interested in seeing people getting blown away because there seemed to be no other reason for having all that violence at the end. Misbegotten was a psychological thriller and Lester seemed to lose the whole tone and thread of the picture. Instead of dealing with the characters and bringing the proceedings to a logical conclusion, he denigrated the whole film into a stupid shoot-up, where people were dying in such succession it became ludicrous. But again, Mark is an incompetent director and nothing is going to make him any better. When he followed the script, it was alright. I was pleased with half of Misbegotten. Half of it worked well when they stuck to the screenplay. When he went off on his own and got lost in the wilderness for a second time, naturally, it wasn’t.
In 1998, Showtime commissioned a series of films based on The Defenders TV series and even had E. G. Marshall reprising his role as Lawrence Preston. What was the extent of your involvement as I believe Andy Wolk adapted your original story for his script, Choice of Evils?
What happened was this: my mother called me up and said, “I was watching TV and I saw this movie on Showtime. It was called The Defenders and it was the first Defenders script that you wrote, back in the old days when you were a kid.” It turned out it was actually my teleplay for “Kill or Be Killed,” the episode that had been directed by Sidney Pollack. My mother informed me that Showtime had taken my script and turned it into a two-hour television movie — without giving me any credit at all! I then contacted the producer, and he said, “Yeah, we took your script, but call so-and-so and you’ll get paid.” He just said it like that, as if it didn’t mean anything. I was rather annoyed that they thought they could just get away with doing something like that and not suffer for it. So, I contacted the studio. Paramount had made the TV movie and also owned all of the old Defenders shows, and I asked them, “What are you going to do about this?” I then went to the Writer’s Guild and they arbitrated the situation. Paramount eventually had to give me $110,000, which is much more than I would have received had I actually written the script for them. When they later put the DVD out on the market, they forgot to
put my name on it again! That meant they had to pay me an additional $15,000. It just goes to show that the studios are so ruthless and uncaring towards people, they will try just about anything if they think they can get away with it. This happens all the time. They probably thought I was dead — I’m quite serious — because this show was written so many years ago. They figured whoever authored the script was gone by now. They didn’t realize that I was just a young kid when I wrote “Kill or Be Killed” and I was still very much around. I was fortunate that my mother happened to be watching television that night and told me about it. I thanked her for her vigilance. In fact, I believe I gave her $5,000.
Now we’ll move on to one of your most famous screenplays for the 2002 film Phone Booth. I know this project has a convoluted history but I was wondering how you first arrived at such a unique concept?
Well, the concept for Phone Booth had originally come to me many years earlier during one of my meetings with Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock and I had talked about various ideas and projects, and I kept thinking of things that could possibly appeal to him and his sensibilities. I then realized that he’d once directed a film called Lifeboat that was set entirely on a lifeboat and concerned the survivors of a ship that had been torpedoed. I thought Hitchcock would be interested in stories that could be done in similarly limited situations and environments. I then suddenly thought, Hey, what can be more restricted and confining than a telephone booth? It was such a ridiculous idea — making a movie in the smallest possible space — but Hitchcock was immediately sold on it. “Oh, that’s marvellous!” he said. We then knocked the idea around for a while, but we never quite figured out how to do it. The central question was always, “How can we sustain a story that is set entirely in a phone booth for ninety minutes?” It was such a difficult notion and we never really came up with anything concrete. When I met Hitchcock again on the opening night of Family Plot, he introduced me to his wife, Alma, by saying, “This is the young man I told you about who wants to make a film in a telephone booth.” He then asked me how the idea was coming along and I told him, “It hasn’t.” By this time, I don’t think Hitchcock was seriously considering doing it anymore, and a few years later he died.
Larry Cohen Page 59