Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  How did you eventually make a breakthrough with the concept?

  This is the interesting thing: it suddenly occurred to me one day that I already knew exactly how to do Phone Booth as I had written the character of the sniper shooting people on the roof in God Told Me To. I realized that if I inserted the sniper from God Told Me To into the phone booth concept, I would not only have a plot that I could follow, I would also have a good reason for why the protagonist could not leave the booth. After this epiphany, I became aware that if I could have a communication going back and forth between the guy in the booth and the sniper, I would have a movie. That was the breakthrough I’d been searching for. Once I figured out how to do Phone Booth, it only took me one week to write the script.

  You then sold the screenplay to 20th Century Fox in December 1998 for a reported mid-six-figure sum.

  Uh-huh. Just a couple of months after I wrote it, I got $750,000 for the script. Since then, I’ve earned millions of dollars from Phone Booth on residuals and extras.

  What were the initial reactions in Hollywood to the screenplay?

  Well, many people in Hollywood loved the script, but the general consensus was that it wouldn’t work and would be impossible to pull off.

  Is it true that during the search for a director, the first thing Michael Bay [3] said during his meeting with you and the 20th Century Fox executives was, “How can we get him out of the phone booth?”

  “How can we get him out of the fucking phone booth.” That’s what he said, actually. That sentence virtually marked the end of the meeting, because the Fox executives and I exchanged a glance and we realized that we had the wrong director in Michael Bay. We then quickly moved on to somebody else and the studio passed it by several different directors. Unfortunately, when Phone Booth was sent over to Steven Spielberg’s company, his executive over there passed on the script. Spielberg subsequently got hold of Phone Booth, read it, and wanted to do it, but by that time it had already been bought by Fox. I later met Steven at an Oscar party and he told me how he was kicking himself around the block because he’d missed out on getting that particular piece of material. It was too bad, because Phone Booth would have been a great Spielberg production. But I must say that Joel Schumacher did a good job as director. I mean, he shot the entire movie in just eleven days.

  Who were some of the people being considered for Phone Booth before Joel Schumacher signed on?

  Previous to Schumacher’s involvement, I’d worked for a week with Mel Gibson. Mel wanted to direct Phone Booth, as well as star in it. That didn’t work out, but a lot of the changes and improvements in the script came from Mel. He did a lot of research and brought in an expert from the FBI on surveillance techniques and wiretapping. Mel also had somebody go to New York and photograph the locales and make a diorama out of it. He did a lot of prep before we met, and I thought we had him, but it just didn’t happen. Mel had his own company that would have taken over the entire project. He would have put his own producer on Phone Booth, but Fox didn’t want to give away the whole picture. Besides, at this point, they thought that Will Smith wanted to play the lead role, so they blew Mel Gibson off. Then, Will Smith backed out, and Jim Carrey stepped forward and said he would do the film. Then, Jim Carrey backed out, when he discovered that Schumacher wanted to complete the movie in a two-week shooting schedule. Finally, after Carrey was gone, we ended up with Colin Farrell, who had nothing to lose because he wasn’t yet a star. There was no downside to the project for him, only an upside. To this very day, Phone Booth remains Farrell’s most high-profile movie. Most of the movies he’s made since have been flops. He’s had a succession of failures including, Alexander, a disastrous historical picture he did with Oliver Stone about Alexander the Great. In fact, Farrell’s latest movie opened in America just two weeks ago to absolutely dismal box office. [4] I forget what it’s called, but it just went down the drain. So, he’s had no luck since Phone Booth. At any rate, I think we would have done greater box office with Will Smith or Jim Carrey playing the lead, as they are both very charismatic actors with box office appeal. Despite that, the picture was successful and it constantly plays on cable and on TV. There isn’t a week that goes by that Phone Booth isn’t on two or three times.

  Is it true you also considered Tony Curtis for the central role of Stu Shepherd?

  Well, the character of the publicist trapped in the phone booth is really Sidney Falco, the same character that Tony Curtis played in Sweet Smell of Success. [5] When I first wrote Phone Booth, my intention was to direct it myself and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to afford a high-budget actor for the lead. Tony Curtis was no longer a box office star and did not command a lot of money, so I thought I could get him for very little. If I was going to direct Phone Booth, I thought Tony could play the same character he had played so well in Sweet Smell of Success. It would have been interesting to see Curtis reprise the best performance he ever gave in his career. So, I sent him the script and he loved it. He thought it was the best opportunity that had come his way in years and was thrilled at the prospect of doing it. Then his agent called me up and said, “There’s a lot of dialogue in your screenplay. Tony would need a teleprompter or cue cards.” As soon as I heard that, it was the end of the negotiations. I knew that if I was going to direct Phone Booth, there was going to be plenty of improvisation and a lot of dialogue changes. I couldn’t have my lead actor trying to read teleprompters or cue cards in that situation. But when I bypassed Tony, he was a real gentleman about it. He understood that I just couldn’t work that way.

  What do you see the phone booth itself standing for?

  I always thought the booth kind of symbolised a confessional like in church, where Stu Shepard is forced to confess his sins.

  Considering the torments and terrors that Shepherd is put through in the film, one might suspect you have a problem with publicists.

  I don’t have any problem with publicists. I certainly don’t feel they should experience situations of extreme fear and jeopardy for any sins they may commit.

  According to some sources, the word “fuck” is used 143 times throughout the course of the film. Are you responsible for that?

  No, not at all. I might have had one or two profanities in there, but the rest of them came courtesy of Colin Farrell. I believe he was the one responsible for inserting so many in there. Frankly, I can live without them. Most of the greatest pictures ever made don’t have any profanities in them. There seems to be no benefit to having quite so many in a movie as far as I can see.

  How would you have shot Phone Booth? Would your version have been darker and edgier than Schumacher’s film?

  Probably, and it would have also been more chaotic and disordered. I wanted to shoot Phone Booth in New York City on a real street, on 44th Street and 8th Avenue, with real traffic, buses, sirens, police cars, and hundreds of people present. I wanted to shoot it partially with hidden cameras. I wanted to have one man trapped in the midst of all this madness that is downtown New York. Of course, that was lacking in Schumacher’s film, as the location was a fabricated set in downtown Los Angeles posing as New York. It might have been worse if Phone Booth had been directed by Mel Gibson, because Mel wanted to shoot it out on the back lot at Warner Bros. I kept telling Mel that we shouldn’t do that. I said, “This film is not going to work on the back lot because it looks phoney. We need the real intensity and vibrancy of a metropolis.” Mel thought he could bring it off, but I didn’t think so. Also, at the point in the story where the police arrived and shut down the street, I would have turned the proceedings into nighttime. We could have shot in darkness, because at night we would have been able to close down the streets and control them. We could have had police cars and searchlights and things like that, which would have given it a more threatening atmosphere. You could never have done that during the daytime because the authorities would never have shut down a metropolitan area for a movie shoot, at least not for a low-budget movie shoot. I would have had to
switch to night. I’d have the story start later in the day, then have the transition into darkness. By doing that, I would have been able to get the streets closed and we could have shot the last half of the picture. But I don’t think even I could have shot Phone Booth in eleven days as Schumacher did. I’ve never shot a movie in less than eighteen days, but Schumacher beat me by a week.

  In order to combat the problem of shooting at mostly one location and with the events supposedly unfolding in real time, Schumacher deploys the multi-camera technique, shooting scenes on the street from a variety of angles and using split-screen and cutaways to generate a more energetic, fast-paced feel. What did you make of his visual style?

  I thought it was pretty good. Of course, Schumacher used five camera crews that were shooting simultaneously and all the actors were present on the location. They were all performing their parts in concert and Schumacher was covering everybody like it was an actual news event. So, the cameras were shooting all the different actors from various angles and they were all behaving like it was basically a stage play. It was as if they were performing the play and were being photographed at the same time. It was an interesting approach to take with the material and it created its own unique energy. I was impressed that Schumacher was able to pull it off. I don’t think any director has ever shot a movie quite like that.

  You have received a lot of attention as the “creator” of Phone Booth, perhaps more than Schumacher has enjoyed. Do you think that’s fair and have you actively encouraged it?

  No, I haven’t encouraged it, but I don’t think it’s unfair. I feel the true creator of a movie — particularly an original screenplay — is the writer, and then the director comes in second. Something like Phone Booth, which is quite an original concept, is basically a writer’s movie, although, again, Schumacher did a good job in bringing the script to life. I don’t take anything away from him. I must tell you though, he did resent the fact that I was getting so much attention. When we had the New York premiere, I remember we held a party afterwards. As Schumacher walked into the room, he looked at me and the very first thing he said was, “I’ve just spent the entire day talking about you.” Obviously, during all the interviews and press he’d been doing with the newspapers and critics, all they wanted to ask him about was Larry Cohen. I don’t think he liked that very much. When we had the premiere for Phone Booth at the Toronto Film Festival, at first I wasn’t invited. So, I called Schumacher up and said, “Can you please get me invited? I’d really like to be there.” He showed absolutely no inclination in being helpful at all. Despite that, I did manage to get myself invited through some Fox executives. When I showed up in Toronto, Schumacher was clearly surprised and rather disappointed to see me there. In fact, his very words were, “What are you doing here?” Later that day, they held a press conference at the hotel for all the attending journalists. Schumacher, Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, and everybody else were there, everybody except me. I was not invited to be on the platform, but everybody else was sitting there answering questions. I found myself a spot in the audience amongst the reporters and watched it. When they asked Schumacher about me he said, “Fox bought a script from Larry Cohen, but I changed everything.” He didn’t identify me as being in the audience or acknowledge my presence at all. I just thought, “Oh well, that’s a shame.” I felt it just went to show how insecure Schumacher was, that he would do something like that. He was afraid that somebody would steal some of the credit away from him.

  Did your relations with Schumacher thaw at all?

  Well, the very next night we screened Phone Booth in a 2400-seat theater in Toronto. Myself, Schumacher, and the cast and crew, were all backstage when, in front of everybody who was present, he put his arm around me and declared, “None of us would be here tonight if it wasn’t for Larry Cohen.” I guess that was his way of apologizing. I then walked out on stage with the rest of them to take a bow before the audience. I suppose Schumacher was ashamed of himself to some degree, and rightly so. It was too bad that he was so uncomfortable with the truth, which is that he was the director of this film but somebody else wrote it. We sometimes say that the writer is the father of the movie and the director is the mother. The director has to see the whole project through and endure all the pains of shooting on location, dealing with the actors and bad weather, and the problems with the schedule, all the same kinds of agonies a mother goes through in bringing a baby into the world. However, the father, who is there only at the inception, has an equal amount of input and occasionally more. Sometimes the baby comes out looking like the father after all the pain and effort the mother has suffered. I can imagine at those times the mother thinks, “What the hell did I have to do all this for?” But that’s the way it is with a movie, also. The worst thing any director can assume is that somebody is going to give credit to the writer.

  When we talked about Maniac Cop and the tragedies of art imitating life, you mentioned that the release of Phone Booth coincided with the Beltway Sniper Attacks in October 2002. [6] How did those violent events affect the film?

  The immediate result was we postponed the movie. After those attacks happened, there were some questions raised about releasing the film. I was called up by the press — The New York Times and some other periodicals — and asked about it. I said, “I think Phone Booth should be postponed because a movie about a sniper threatening and killing people might be extremely painful for the relatives of the victims to watch. I certainly don’t want to add to their grief, so I think we should delay the release for a while.” Well, 20th Century Fox were rather furious with me for my comments but that was the way I felt and I expressed it.

  The release date was pushed back from November 15, 2002, to April 4, 2003.

  Uh-huh, but I don’t think the postponement really hurt the business Phone Booth did. Of course, I don’t know whether or not the picture would have done more business if it was released in the midst of the killings. I certainly hope not. I also hope that the trailer for the film, which emphasised the sniper and had played for several weeks in theatres, wasn’t seen by the Beltway snipers. I certainly hope they didn’t get the idea for the attacks from it, because that trailer was out before the killings began. It’s very possible that the snipers could have seen the trailer and it put them in mind to do what they did. I hope not because that’s a rather terrible and troubling thought.

  I understand that Phone Booth was turned into a 2009 stage play in Japan, which ran successfully for several months.

  Yes, that’s true. They came to me and said they wanted to do a stage production of Phone Booth and I let them do it. It did very well and I made quite a bit of money from it. Of course, I never attended any performances because it was in Japanese and I had no intention of flying to Tokyo to see something I wouldn’t understand. Despite that, I did cash the cheques. Actually, there was some talk recently of doing a British stage production of Phone Booth, but nothing ever came of it.

  It’s interesting that the year after selling Phone Booth, you sold another telephone-themed screenplay in Cellular — again for $750,000.

  Yeah, I sold Cellular directly afterwards. 20th Century Fox felt that Cellular was too much like Phone Booth and they were rather annoyed with me for doing another movie that was a telephone related story. Of course, there was nothing they could do about it and I don’t agree that Cellular was the same movie in any way. In my view, it was like the abortion scripts that I wrote: there was a similarity in theme between things like It’s Alive and Invasion of Privacy in the same way there was some similarity between Cellular and Phone Booth. But then Cellular and Phone Booth are both similar to Sorry, Wrong Number, which was a story about a bedridden woman, who overhears a murder plot when her telephone connection is crossed. That story had been done many times on radio starring Agnes Moorhead back in the 1940s, and there was also a film adaptation starring Barbara Stanwyck. Even though Sorry, Wrong Number anticipates both Phone Booth and Cellular in its use of a telephone as a ma
jor element of the story, you would not say they were all the same film.

  In what ways did you attempt to riff on the idea of using a phone again as a focal component of the narrative that was different from Phone Booth?