A continuing theme of our conversations has been your repeated determination to always be in control of every aspect of a film. You’ve suggested that this resolve has its pathological roots in your experiences working in television.
Well, it’s something I’ve always been conscious of. Many writers and directors are obsessed with having control because it’s so important. The lack of control and the question of true authorship can become the thing that destroys you. It can destroy you in your heart. Is this thing really mine? Why do they want to take it away from me? Why do they want to claim credit for my work? These thoughts can rot you out from the inside. Again, I didn’t want any input or help from anybody. I always wanted to do it all myself. I didn’t want anybody else receiving or claiming credit for my movies and scripts. I mean, I work in an empty room. You can come in and search the room because you won’t find anybody hiding in there. I’ve got the pages I wrote and that’s it. Nobody else could have written them. It was the same thing when I was directing: I was in charge of every element of the film and that is what has given me satisfaction throughout my life and career. I’ve turned out twenty movies that are more or less all me. Whatever anybody thinks of their faults and virtues nobody can deny that.
Finally, I must ask, how have you felt about spilling your guts for this book and recounting the minutiae of your career in such exhaustive detail?
It hasn’t been too painful. Let’s hope your readers feel the same way when they read it! [Chuckles] I think the difference between me and most directors is when people usually direct a movie, they go to the studio every morning and the process becomes like factory work. The filmmakers are merely going through the motions. If you read the biographies of most directors, they may pontificate about the meanings, metaphors, and methods of their work, but they have little to say about the actual production of their movies. This is because they have nothing particularly interesting to write about. Basically, the actors show up at the studio, put on their costumes, and do their makeup; walk out on set, say the lines, perform the action, and then they go home. The next day, everybody comes back and this machine-like process is repeated with little or no variations. They simply do the same thing over and over again for forty or fifty days until they eventually grind out the picture. There’s no story to tell because nothing ever happens. People just go to work. You could never say that about my movies. Nearly every working day, we were shooting out at some crazy location. We’d do something risky or insane, venturing into places we had no business going: shooting action scenes on a bustling New York City street and driving taxis on the sidewalk; sneaking into the Justice Department Building and the Attorney General’s office and closing down Pennsylvania Avenue; shooting a non-union movie in the headquarters of the Teamsters and making a picture in a dangerous city with 105 gang members. Directors don’t ordinarily encourage this kind of madness, certainly not today. In this troubled age we live in, half of the things we did would be impossible to repeat without getting shot in the head. But we were always overcoming terrible adversity and daunting situations with courage and creativity. On most movies, people simply sit around between takes, read magazines and books, or sleep in their trailers, only coming out to do a scene. They have nothing to talk about when the film is completed. On my pictures, people were always running around, going crazy, and having fun. That’s the stuff that is really worth reading about. The only reason there have been so many stories to tell is because we had so many adventures making these movies.
Notes
CHAPTER 1: YOUTH (1941-1958)
1. Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, at the age of seventy-four.
2. Cohen is probably thinking of Winter Carnival (1939), directed by Charles F. Reisner.
3. Max Steiner (1888-1971) was an Austrian composer for theatre, film and television who worked in America from 1924. His film scores include King Kong (1933), Little Women (1933), Jezebel (1938), Gone With the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946). He was nominated for twenty-four Academy Awards, winning on three occasions for The Informer (1935), Now, Voyager (1942) and Since You Went Away (1944).
4. Boston Blackie is a fictional character created by author Jack Lloyd (1881-1928). Originally a safecracker, jewel thief and confidence man, Blackie reformed his criminal ways and became a private investigator. Although there had been silent film adaptations made from 1918 to 1927, beginning with E. Mason Hopper’s Boston Blackie’s Little Pal, which featured Bert Lytell as Blackie, Colombia Pictures revived interest in the character with Robert Florey’s Meet Boston Blackie (1941) which starred Chester Morris in the titular role. This 58-minute “quickie” inaugurated a series of fourteen B-pictures, that all starred Morris, culminating with Boston Blackie’s Chinese Surprise (1949).
5. Michael Curtiz (1886-1962) was a Hungarian-American director, credited early in his career as both Mihály Kertész and Michael Kertéze. He moved to Hollywood in the 1920s to work for Warner Bros. where he developed a reputation for “arrogance and ruthlessness.” His final film, The Comancheros, was released six months before his death from cancer aged seventy-five.
6. Jimmy Durante (1893-1980) was an American actor, singer, and entertainer renowned for his trademark gravelly voice and heavy New York accent (“Everybody wants to get into de act!”) Known affectionately as “Schnozzle,” the mighty-nosed comedian enjoyed a long and successful career performing in Vaudeville, nightclubs, radio, and television. His film work began with the gangster picture Roadhouse Nights (1930) and ended with the animated feature Frosty the Snowman (1969), which has become a staple of seasonal entertainment for Americans. In between, Durante appeared in Hollywood Party (1934), Melody Ranch (1940), The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), It Happened in Brooklyn (1947) and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1962).
7. Tito Puente (1923-2000) was an American salsa musician and Latin jazz composer known to his many admirers as “The Musical Pope.” His compositions include “Oy Como Va,” “Ran Kan Kan,” “Salsa y sibor” and “Mambo Gozon.” Puente appeared in such films as Armed and Dangerous (1986), Radio Days (1987) and The Mambo Kings (1992), often playing himself. He made a memorable suspect in the two-part episode of The Simpsons, “Who Shot Mr. Burns?”
8. Hans Richter (1888-1976) was a German artist, author and experimental filmmaker. Born in Berlin, he moved to the United States in 1940 and became an American citizen. Richter later directed the films Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), 8x8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) and Dadascope (1961) in collaboration with such luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Paul Bowles, Marcel Duchamp, and others.
9. Otto Preminger (1906-1986) was an Austrian-American director. Beginning his career in his native Austria with Die große Liebe (1931), he arrived in Hollywood four years later as part of the “European exodus” which included Fritz Lang, Michael Curtiz and Billy Wilder. Preminger then began a tumultuous relationship with 20th Century Fox, helming such films as Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), Daisy Kenyon (1947), and Whirlpool (1949). The following decade saw him make a series of taboo-breaking pictures that dealt with such difficult subjects as drug addiction (The Man With the Golden Arm, 1955), rape (Anatomy of a Murder, 1959), and homosexuality (Advice & Consent, 1962). His legendary reputation as a “tyrant” on set was perhaps encouraged by his memorable turn as a Nazi prison camp commandant in Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1950).
10. Dominick Dunne (1925-2009) was an American writer and investigative journalist. After working in television, he contributed to such publications as Vanity Fair (covering his daughter Dominique’s murder trial in 1983) and went on to chronicle the “celebrity trials” of O.J. Simpson, Claus Von Bülow and William Kennedy Smith.
11. This NBC television version of Brief Encounter was filmed under its original title, “Still Life”, as a segment of Noel Coward’s Tonight at 8:30. First aired on October 18, 1954, as part of Producers’ Showcase, it featured Trevor Howard revisiting the part of Dr. Alec Harvey that he
had originated in David Lean’s 1945 film.
12. Li’l Abner was a satirical American comic strip written and drawn by Al Capp (Alfred Gerald Caplin, 1909-1979). It ran from August 13, 1934, through to November 13, 1977, and centred on the adventures of a naive country boy named Li’l Abner Yokum and the clan of hillbillies that inhabited the fictional mountain backwater of Dogpatch, Kentucky. Hugely popular with readers, the cartoon unfortunately assisted in cementing some of the Appalachian stereotypes often associated with the entire American South by popular media, namely impoverished, inbred, culturally ignorant mountain folk with no teeth or common sense. Li’l Abner was first adapted for radio in 1948 and was followed by the Broadway musical in 1956 and a film in 1959.
13. Stuart Gordon (b.1947) is an American writer, producer and director. He was co-founder and artistic director of Chicago’s Organic Theatre where his directing credits included the world premiere of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). Gordon made his outrageous cinematic debut with Re-Animator (1985), a gloriously gory adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 short story. His subsequent films include Dolls (1986), From Beyond (1986), Robot Jox (1988), The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), Castle Freak (1995), Space Truckers (1997), The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998), Dagon (2001), King of the Ants (2003), Stuck (2007), and Edmund (2008). Gordon also directed two episodes of Showtime’s Masters of Horrors – Dreams in the Witch-House (2005) and The Black Cat (2006) — and an episode of Fear Itself titled Eater (2008).
14. Lolita (1962) opened in New York on June 12, 1962.
CHAPTER 2: THE TELEVISION YEARS
1. Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) was Otto Preminger’s final film for 20th Century Fox under contract as a director-for-hire. The radio adaptation of “Night Cry” was first broadcast on Suspense on July 10, 1948. Lux Radio Theater then broadcast a second sixty-minute radio adaptation of William L. Stuart’s novel on April 2, 1951, in which Dana Andrews resumed the role of Det. Sgt. Mark Dixon he had originated on screen.
2. Cohen is in fact referring to the television movie The Million Dollar Incident, which was broadcast on April 21, 1961. Directed by Norman Jewison, this comedy-drama stars Jackie Gleason (1916-1987) playing himself, and concerns the legendary American comedian, actor and musician being kidnapped by two bungling crooks.
3. Brendan Behan (1923-1964) was an Irish playwright, poet and author. The son of a house painter, he came from a well-read family with Republican sympathies living in the slums of Dublin. He left Catholic school at the age of fourteen and was arrested in 1939 for his involvement with the IRA as a messenger boy. Sentenced to three years in Borstal for attempting to blow up a battleship in Liverpool harbour, Behan later drew on this period in his autobiographical novel Borstal Boy (1958). After his release he returned to Ireland, but in 1942 was sentenced to fourteen years for the attempted murder of two detectives. Behan started to write whilst incarcerated and, after his release in 1946 under a general amnesty, produced such works as his debut play The Quare Fellow (1954) which is set in an Irish prison on the eve of a hanging. His other pieces include The Big House (1957), a radio drama for the BBC, and An Giall (The Hostage, 1958), a sprawling tragi-comedy written in Gaelic about an English soldier, who is kidnapped and held hostage in an Irish brothel. Alcoholism ended his career and life in a Dublin hospital in March 1964 and his funeral (reportedly the biggest since that of Michael Collins in 1922) was awarded an IRA guard of honor. His third play, Richard Cork’s Leg, was nearly complete at the time of his death and was edited and directed by Alan Simpson in 1972 for the Dublin Theater Festival.
4. Sydney Pollack (1934-2008) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. His films include They Shoot Horses Don’t They (1969), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), The Way We Were (1973), The Yakuza (1975), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Absence of Malice (1981), Tootsie (1982), Havana (1990), The Firm (1993), Sabrina (1995), and The Interpreter (2005). He won Academy Awards for directing and producing the romantic drama, Out of Africa (1985).
5. Gordon Douglas (1909-1993) began his career as a child actor. Moving to Hollywood in 1930, he began working for Hal Roach as a gag writer, producer and director. Douglas directed thirty Our Gang shorts, including Bored of Education, which won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject One Reel in 1937, before helming his first feature film, the Laurel and Hardy comedy Saps at Sea (1940). Proficient at most genres, Douglas’ uneven career includes Them! (1954), Up Periscope (1959), Follow That Dream (1962), Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), In Like Flint (1967), Tony Rome (1968), and Skulduggery (1970).
6. J. Peverell Marley (1901-1964) is one of only six cinematographers to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His first film was Cecil B. De Mille’s silent epic The Ten Commandments (1923), and he continued his association with the director on Feet of Clay (1924), The Golden Bed (1925), The Volga Boatman (1926), and The King of Kings (1927). Marley received Academy Award nominations for Suez (1938) and Life With Father (1948), later winning a Golden Globe for Best Cinematography (Color) for The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). His other films include House of Wax (1953), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), and The Left-Handed Gun (1958). The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961) was his final production before his death of a heart attack.
7. The writer of “Killer Instinct” was Elliot West.
8. In an interview conducted with Tony Williams for the book Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker (1997), Cohen reveals that he once submitted several story ideas to the producers of Alfred Hitchcock Presents without success.
9. The cast of “Medal for a Turned Coat” was rounded out by such seasoned British actors as Nigel Stock, Sylvia Kay and Catherine Lacey.
10. The sitcom that replaced Branded was Hey, Landlord. Created by Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson, it starred Will Hutchins as Woody Banner, a young man who inherits a New York Brownstone from his deceased uncle. Hey, Landlord ran on NBC for one season and thirty-one episodes from January 11, 1966, to April 23, 1967, before being cancelled.
11. Cohen is billed in the credits of Spies Like Us as “Ace Tomato Agent.” He appears briefly as an armed guard patrolling a secret operations bunker located beneath a disused drive-in.
12. The Americans is a television period drama created by Joe Weisberg which (as of this writing) has been renewed by FX for a third season. Set during the Cold War of the 1980s, it revolves around Phillip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), two KGB Agents posing as a married middle-class American couple in the suburbs of Washington DC, who live with their unsuspecting children Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati).
13. Custer was essayed by Canadian actor Wayne Maunder (b.1937). Maunder also played Scott Lancer in the Western television series Lancer (alongside Andrew Duggan) and made appearances in TV shows such as The Monroes, Kung Fu, The F.B.I., The Rookies, Police Story, The Streets of San Francisco, Barnaby Jones, and the films The Seven Minutes (1971) and Porky’s (1982).
14. Alan A. Armer (1922-2010) produced such television series as My Friend Flicka (1956), Broken Arrow (1956-1958), Man without a Gun (1957-1959), and The Untouchables (1961-1963). He then joined Quinn Martin Productions to work on The Fugitive (1963-1966), for which he won an Emmy, and then later The Invaders (1967-1968). Subsequent shows he produced were Lancer (1968-1970) and Cannon (1971-1972), as well as the TV Movies Along Came a Spider (1970), Birds of Prey (1973), and The Stranger (1973). His last involvement with television came with The Magician (1973-1974), which starred Bill Bixby as a wealthy illusionist who uses his skills to help people in trouble. After retiring, Armer taught at the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at Cal State Northridge, becoming a part-time faculty member in 1980. He retired from teaching in 1999, eleven years before his death from colon cancer.
15. Robin Wood (1931-2009) was a British-born film critic and theorist who spent much of his working life in Canada. His first book, Alfred Hitchcock, was published in 1965, at a time when few volumes on cinema w
ere available in the English language never mind one devoted to the work of an individual filmmaker. Wood subsequently wrote (or co-wrote) books on Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Michelangelo Antonioni, Satyajit Ray and Arthur Penn. In 1979, he co-edited a small publication with Richard Lippe for the Festival of Festivals in Toronto titled The American Nightmare. One of the first serious academic publications focused entirely on horror films, it included a glowing overview of Larry Cohen’s oeuvre, as well as articulating Wood’s theory of the “Return of the Repressed.” Wood advanced that American family life is the product of the repression of natural instincts and the contemporary American horror film routinely presents monsters that function as images of what has been repressed that are returning to claim its own. Wood’s argument that horror dramatises this process of repression and its dissolution in ideological terms has proved influential in horror film criticism.
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