Larry Cohen

by Michael Doyle

  16. The “American Bandstand kind of show” that Cohen recalls here might be Where The Action Is, which aired on ABC from June 27, 1965, to March 31, 1967.

  17. “Murder by the Book” concerns two bestselling authors who’ve formed a long and profitable association writing a series of mystery novels together. When one member wishes to dissolve the partnership in order to pursue a solo writing career, the less-talented partner murders him.

  18. Steven Bochco received an Emmy nomination for his “Murder by the Book” teleplay, but did not in fact win. The winner that year (1972) for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series was another Columbo episode from season one, “Death Lends a Hand,” written by Richard Levinson and William Link.

  19. James Farentino (1938-2012) was a dashing American leading man. His career was mostly sustained on television roles in the likes of Naked City, Ben Casey, The Virginian, The Bold Ones, Night Gallery, Police Story, Dynasty, and Jesus of Nazareth (the latter earning him an Emmy nomination for his role as Simon Peter). Farentino’s film appearances include Me, Natalie (1968), The Final Countdown (1980), Dead & Buried (1981), Her Alibi (1988), and Bulletproof (1996).

  20. Barnaby Jones was developed by Edward Hume and ran on CBS from January 28, 1973, to April 3, 1980. The series is renowned for being on the air for longer than any other Quinn Martin show, with the exception of The F.B.I, which ran for nine seasons (although the final two seasons were produced in association with Philip Saltzman and Woodruff Productions).

  21. The actor playing the lead role of Jess Sparrow in Sparrow was Randy Hermann. His few film credits include Rolling Thunder (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Our Winning Season (1978), and Little Miss Marker (1980).

  22. The character Cohen created on NYPD Blue was John Irvin, a gay administrative aide played by Bill Brochtrup (b.1963). Brochtrup would go on to become a series regular appearing in 156 episodes, including the final episode of the show, “Moving Day,” broadcast on March 1, 2005.

  CHAPTER 3: SCREENPLAYS PART I (1966-1986)

  1. Walter Mirisch (b.1921) is an American producer who started his career producing low-budget B-movies at Monogram Pictures before forming The Mirisch Company in August 1957 with brothers Harold (1907-1968) and Marvin (1918-2002). After signing a twelve-picture deal with United Artists, which was extended to a twenty-picture deal within two years, the company delivered such classic films as Some Like it Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), The Magnificent Seven (1960), West Side Story (1961), The Great Escape (1963), The Pink Panther (1963), A Shot in the Dark (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and Fiddler on the Roof (1971). His films have earned eighty-seven Oscar nominations, securing twenty-eight wins. Mirisch was also president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1973 to 1977. His memoir, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, was published in 2008.

  2. Burt Kennedy (1922-2001) was an American screenwriter and director. Originally a radio writer, Kennedy penned the screenplays for such Westerns as Seven Men from Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960), before helming his own as director with The Canadians (1961). For the next thirty years, Kennedy enjoyed a variable career which included such films as Six Black Horses (1962), Mail Order Bride (1964), Welcome to Hard Times (1967), The War Wagon (1967), Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), Young Billy Young (1969), Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), Hannie Caulder (1971), The Train Robbers (1973), Escape from the Dark (1976) and the Hulk Hogan vehicle Suburban Commando (1991).

  3. Andrew V. McLaglen (1920-2014) was an English-American director. The son of actor Victor McLaglen (1886-1959), he began his career with the revenge Western, Gun the Man Down (1956), followed by the Film Noir Man in the Vault (1956) and the crime drama The Abductors (1957). McLaglen also directed a prodigious amount of television, helming multiple episodes of Perry Mason, Gunslinger, Rawhide and Have Gun — Will Travel. Amongst his best-known works — which often star John Wayne or James Stewart — are McLintock! (1963), Shenandoah (1965), The Rare Breed (1966), The Way West (1967), Hellfighters (1968), The Undefeated (1969), Chisum (1970), Cahill U.S. Marshall (1973), The Wild Geese (1978) and The Sea Wolves (1980). A journeyman director, McLaglen’s Westerns were often derivative of John Ford in their scale, sentimentality and machismo but lacked the master’s delicate poetry and élan.

  4. Cohen is not be mistaken for Lawrence D. Cohen, screenwriter of Carrie (1976), Ghost Story (1981), It (1990), and The Tommyknockers (1993); or Lawrence J. Cohen, screenwriter of Start the Revolution Without Me (1969), S*P*Y*S (1974), The Big Bus (1976), and Delirious (1991).

  5. Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (1928-2014) was an American screenwriter. His screenplays include Papillion (1970), co-written with Dalton Trumbo, The Parallax View (1974), co-written with David Giler, The Drowning Pool (1975), Three Days of the Condor (1975), co-written with David Rayfiel, King Kong (1976), Flash Gordon (1980), and Never Say Never Again (1983). Semple once maintained that his work on the much-maligned 1960s TV series Batman (he was responsible for the first four teleplays and consulted on all 120 episodes) was the best thing he ever wrote.

  6. Carol White (1943-1991) was an English actress notable for her early work with Ken Loach on the acclaimed television plays Up the Junction (1965) and the groundbreaking Cathy Comes Home (1966), the latter still considered one of the finest and most socially impacting single television dramas ever made. White continued her association with Loach on the feature film Poor Cow (1967) before leaving for Hollywood and appearing in such movies as The Fixer (1968), Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1969), and Something Big (1971). She died in Florida at the age of 48.

  7. The male lead in Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting was Scott Hylands (b.1943), a Canadian actor, whose credits include Earthquake (1974), The Boys In Company “C” (1978) and Death Hunt (1981).

  8. Lew Wasserman (1913-2002) was a powerful American talent agent and motion picture executive. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Russian immigrant parents, Wasserman’s first involvement with movies was as an usher at a Cleveland theater when he was seventeen. He later worked as a booking agent for the Chicago-based MCA, becoming the head of the corporation in 1946 when he was just thirty-three and building it into a successful outfit. Following the damaging impact of television on movie studios after World War II, Wasserman acquired Universal and Decca Records, merging them with MCA in 1962. This combined company dominated Hollywood for the next thirty years until it was eventually sold off to Seagram by its then Japanese owners, Matsushita, who had purchased the organization in 1990 for $6.6 billion. Wasserman continued to serve on the board of directors until 1998, three years after being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.

  9. John Michael Hayes (1919-2008) wrote four consecutive screenplays for Hitchcock: Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Their association was swiftly terminated after Hayes challenged Hitchcock over a credit dispute, although the two men had been discussing a potential new project tentatively titled The Man in Lincoln’s Nose. This idea would eventually become the basis for North by Northwest (1959). Steven DeRosa’s book, Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes (Faber & Faber, 2001), explores their working relationship.

  10. The biographical drama, Hitchcock (2012), which stars Anthony Hopkins as the filmmaker, is based on Stephen Rebello’s fascinating book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. First published in 1990, Rebello interviewed every surviving member of the film’s cast and crew, and was granted access to Hitchcock’s personal archives. Directed by Sacha Gervasi, Hitchcock co-stars Helen Mirren as Alma Hitchcock, Scarlet Johansen as Janet Leigh, Jessica Biel as Vera Miles, James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins, and Toni Collette as Peggy Robertson.

  11. Park Chan-wook is a South Korean screenwriter, producer, director, and former film critic, whose violent and impeccably crafted films include Sympathy for Mr. Ve
ngeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006), and Thirst (2009). The excellent psychological thriller, Stoker (2013), was the movie Chan-wook was making in America at the time he met with Cohen, and is his first in the English language.

  12. André de Toth (1912-2002) was a prolific Hungarian-American maverick, whose movies embraced a variety of genres: war films None Shall Escape (1944), Play Dirty (1969); Film Noir Dark Waters (1944), Pitfall (1948), Crime Wave (1954); romance The Other Love (1947); adventure films Tanganyika (1954), Morgan, the Pirate (1960); spy thrillers The Two-Headed Spy (1958); horror House of Wax (1953) and, most notably, the Western, Ramrod (1947), Man in the Saddle (1951), Carson City (1952), The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953), Riding Shotgun (1955), The Indian Fighter (1956), and Day of the Outlaw (1959). De Toth also worked as a second unit director for Alexander Korda on The Thief of Baghdad (1940), David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia (1963) and Richard Donner on Superman (1978). He was married seven times, most famously to actress Veronica Lake (1922-1973) with whom he had two of his nineteen children and stepchildren. His candid memoirs, Fragments: Portraits from the Inside, were published in 1994.

  13. Although he appeared in a variety of different films and television shows, Jack Elam (1920-2003) is indeed mostly celebrated for his appearances in Westerns. These include High Noon (1952), Wichita (1955), Jubal (1956), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Comancheros (1961), The Rare Breed (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County (1970), Hannie Caulder, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), Grayeagle (1977), and Bonanza: The Return (1993).

  14. Elam’s co-stars in Shootout in a One-Dog Town included Dub Taylor (1907-1994), John Pickard (1913-1993), Arthur O’Connell (1908-1981), and Henry Wills (1921-1994), all conspicuous for their myriad appearances in countless Westerns.

  15. William Richert’s girlfriend was Belinda Bauer (b.1950), who plays the role of Sarah in The American Success Company.

  16. The play Cohen touches upon here is Motive.

  17. A recent production that portrays Hitchcock as a manipulative and vindictive sexual predator is The Girl (2012), a BBC television movie based on Donald Spotto’s book, Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies (2009). Both works enact Hitchcock’s alleged obsession with actress and model Tippi Hedren, who starred in the director’s films The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Written by Gwyneth Hughes, and starring Toby Jones as Hitchcock and Sienna Miller as Hedren, The Girl garnered a mixed reception, drawing criticism from some quarters for its unflattering portrayal of the filmmaker and praise from others who regard it as a balanced and sensitive depiction of a complex relationship.

  18. Robert Morley (1908-1992) was a rotund, bushy-browed British character actor, who specialized in essaying pompous upper-class English gentlemen. Morley began his career on the stage in a 1928 production of Dr. Syn. His film career commenced a decade later, when he portrayed King Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette (1938), a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination. Notable roles followed in The African Queen (1951), Beat the Devil (1953), Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Oscar Wilde (1960), Cromwell (1970), and Theatre of Blood (1973). His turn as a food critic in Ted Kotcheff’s crime comedy Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978) won Morley both the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award and National Society of Film Critics (U.S.A.) Award for Best Supporting Actor.

  CHAPTER 4: BONE (1971)

  1. The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970) is a racial drama based on the novel by Jesse Hill Ford. The story of a well-to-do Black undertaker (Roscoe Lee Brown) living and working in the fictional town of Somerset, Tennessee, whose wife (Lola Falana) is having an illicit affair with one of the town’s racist police officers (Anthony Zerbe). Upon hearing that the undertaker is seeking a divorce from his philandering spouse, the cop fears the resulting scandal will damage him if the case is ever heard in a court of law, so takes matters into his own hands. Met with mixed reviews (Variety labelled it “not much more than an interracial sexploitation film”), Wyler’s swansong is a violent and intense film.

  2. Pippa Scott (b.1935) is the daughter of screenwriter Alan Scott (1906-1995). Her film roles include The Searchers (1956), As Young We Were (1958), Auntie Mame (1958), My Six Loves (1963), The Confession (1964), Petulia (1966), Some Kind of Nut (1969), Cold Turkey (1971), and Footprints (2009). Her many TV appearances include The Twilight Zone, The Waltons, Dallas, Falcon Crest, and Knots Landing.

  3. Elaine May (b.1932) is an American screenwriter, filmmaker, actress, and comedienne. Her initial success came as one half of Nichols & May, an influential improvisational comedy duo she formed with Mike Nichols (1931-2014). After the act was disbanded in 1961, May wrote several plays, including Adaptation, Not Enough Rope, and Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen, before making her movie debut as director with A New Leaf (1971), a screwball comedy that had an initial cut of 180 minutes before the studio hacked it down to a more acceptable 102 minutes. She followed this with the critically lauded comedy, The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and the troubled crime drama Mickey and Nicky (1976), which was delayed in release and damaged her reputation in Hollywood. More than a decade later, May returned with Ishtar (1987), considered one of the most notorious turkeys in the history of cinema, ending her directing career. May’s screenplays include Heaven Can Wait (1978), for which she earned the first of two Academy Award nominations, as well as The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colours (1996) for her old partner, Nichols.

  4. Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York (1975) was directed by Sidney J. Furie and adapted from Gail Parent’s 1972 novel by screenwriter Kenny Solms. Anticipating the rom-com likes of Bridget Jones Diary, it is the story of an awkward, introverted Jewish-American girl from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who arrives in The Big Apple in search of love. Although Furie’s movie (and to a certain extent, Parent’s book) now seem rather dated, it is not as bad as Cohen or the film’s reputation will have you believe.

  5. The picture Cohen was shooting at the time was Q — The Winged Serpent.

  6. At various turns amusing, excruciating, and disturbing, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983) is the story of celebrity stalker/wannabe comedian Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), an obsessive fantasist, who harbours dreams of becoming a superstar stand-up comedian. Pupkin graduates from rehearsing imagined TV appearances with cardboard cut-outs at home to kidnapping chat-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) in the hope of securing his shot at stardom. A box office failure upon release, the film is a stunningly prescient meditation on celebrity and media culture, and is perhaps more relevant now than it has ever been.

  7. The young Parisian girl in Last Tango in Paris (1971) is played by French actress Maria Schneider (1952-2011).

  8. On February 4, 2013, after the interview on Bone was conducted, Larry Cohen spoke at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony for Jack H. Harris, during which the producer and distributor was awarded the 2,717th star. In his speech, Cohen generously remarked: “Jack’s had a wonderful career and he’s really a pioneer of the business and one of the great showmen — not just a picture-maker but a showman — who knows how to advertise a movie, how to promote a movie, sell the tickets; he goes out and sells the popcorn. He’s out there, working the whole place!”

  CHAPTER 5: BLACK CAESAR (1972)

  1. Samuel Z. Arkoff (1918-2001) was a highly influential producer and distributor. Often credited as the inventor of the beach party and outlaw biker genres, he was once hailed by critic Roger Ebert as the man “who in some ways invented modern Hollywood.” In April 1954, Zarkoff and his associate James H. Nicholson (1916-1972), the former sales manager of Realart Pictures, founded the American Releasing Company, which later became American International Pictures. Their first film, The Fast and the Furious (1955), starring John Ireland and Dorothy Malone, would be followed by many other low-budget pictures released during the summer and aimed ostensibly at the te
enage drive-in market. AIP and a number of other independent companies were able to exploit the lack of seasonal competition and their monopoly continued until June 1975 and the release of Jaws. The unprecedented success of Steven Spielberg’s film convinced the majors that they should release their movies in the summer months, and thus the age of the blockbuster was born. After Nicholson resigned from AIP in 1972, Arkoff assumed full control until the company merged with Filmways seven years later. After leaving Filmways in 1980, he then formed Arkoff International Pictures. During an appearance on television in the 1980s, he famously revealed his “A.R.K.O.F.F. Formula” for making a successful movie: apparently, a movie should include Action (excitement and drama), Revolution (controversial or revolutionary ideas), Killing (a degree of violence), Oratory (memorable speeches and dialogue), Fantasy (popular dreams and wishes acted out), and Fornication (sex appeal to both sexes). His amusing autobiography, Flying through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants, co-written by Richard Trubo, was published in 1993.