Original subtitles

So I get a phone call out of the blue,

from Larry Cohen.

He had seen on television a piece about Bad Robot,

our production company, where they showed this...

the "It's Alive" baby.

And Larry was calling to find out if I'm a fan

and where I got the baby and, you know,

I told him I bought it online years ago

from a guy who apparently makes a living

making "It's Alive" babies,

and, uh...

and he was just so sweet and gracious.

I said, "You know, we actually...

we've met before."

He's like, "What?" I said, "I was 15 years old,

and I was going to the bus stop

to go into Westwood to go see a movie...

Was in L.A...

and there at the bus stop

is Larry Cohen, which I couldn't believe,

and I'd seen him in an interview before,

so I recognized him,

and I got to introduce myself

and say I was a huge fan of his work,

and he was sort of in a state

because he was, you know,

needing... his car had broken down.

He needed to go somewhere. That's what I remembered.

But of course I didn't expect him to remember that meeting.

And what he says to me is,

"You were with Dom DeLuise's son", which is true.

I was with Peter DeLuise, my friend at the time,

and he said, "You gave me directions."

He was apparently on his way to a meeting

with Sidney Poitier and Gene Wilder.

His car broke down.

He was freaking out,

uh, sweating bullets, as he says.

And he was at the bus stop, and he said,

"You guys gave me directions

to how to get to the meeting."

So, anyway, now Larry Cohen and I

are going to have lunch next week,

which I couldn't be more excited about.

And I might bring this.

Here I am walking down the corridors

of the convention,

lonely as a cloud,

unrecognized, unrewarded

for my lifetime achievement

on the cinema screen.

If you had never seen a Larry Cohen film,

and asked me what you were in for,

you're going to be in for

some really radically unique entertainment.

A true filmmaker legend...

"The Stuff," "God Told Me To,"

"Q, The Winged Serpent."

There's so many.

I would hardly call him the John Cassavetes

of exploitation movies,

but he does have a certain raw, visceral,

realistic style.

Yeah, shut up. We don't need all this bullshit.

His movies have this energy

and this attack

that's uniquely Larry.

It's like a student film, a lot of money,

and a real good script.

It's a...

Pow. What was that?

They're not made with a lot of money,

but they pack a hell of a punch.

He's a one-man movie studio. He's ready.

He can produce them. He can write them.

He can direct them.

Together we can start a new species.

He's a mad man, but he makes these great little films,

and there's really nobody like him.

Oh, shit!

The greatest daredevil Hollywood has ever seen.

Perhaps over the top, but...

There's a brilliance. There's a child...

sort of a childish naughtiness about him.

He's pretty delicious.

I'm just sitting here waiting to be adored by people.

Anybody here like me?

I grew up in New York City in Manhattan.

I was born in Lenox Hill Hospital

on the east 70s,

then we lived in Washington Heights

for most of my formative years.

It's erroneous on the Internet.

It says I was born in Kingston, New York.

I... I know nothing about Kingston, New York,

so it's all wrong.

When I wanted to go to the movies as a kid,

I used to carry groceries

in front of supermarkets

till I got enough money to go to the movies,

And he went to every movie that ever was.

He knew who was making the pictures,

what pictures played at Loews,

what pictures played at the RKO, all of that.

Back in those days,

people went to the movie theater

any time they felt like it.

The picture was usually on already,

and usually it was a double feature in those days,

so you end up seeing four movies in one afternoon

until they finally turned the lights on

and threw me out of the theater

and said, "Little boy, you have to go home now.

It's dark outside."

At home nobody noticed I was missing anyways,

so, you know, I was the only really creative one

in the immediate family,

although my grandfather had been in show business.

He'd been an eccentric banjo player,

and on her deathbed

his mother made him promise

that he would give it up,

and I think he was sad

that he didn't get to do what he wanted to do,

so I knew when I saw that,

that I was going to do what I wanted to do,

and I'm not going to let anybody talk me out of it.

I went to CCNY,

New York City College.

I had a good time in college,

doing my thing

rather than paying much attention

to what they were teaching.

His early life desires,

I'm sure, was to be a writer

but also, really to be a stand-up comic.

He'd be in front of the mirror

doing, like, Danny Kaye songs.

You know? All by himself.

That's what he really wanted to do, I think.

I used to put a show on every other Thursday afternoon

where I thought I was Sid Caesar or someone.

I had this fixation I was on television.

Back in New York I used to play Monday nights upstairs at the Duplex,

which was in Greenwich Village.

He has a very wacky sense of humor.

I don't know that everybody

would expect or know that about him.

And he is like the Borscht Belt comic

that he once aspired to be.

Now to introduce your master of ceremony,

your M.C. for the evening, Mr. Larry Cohen.

All right!

And of course there's another film being prepared.

It's about a young producer

attempting to collect his net profit participation

from Paramount.

It's entitled "Mission: Impossible."

I changed my mind after a while.

I wanted be off and have a good time and have fun

and socialize at night.

Larry was definitely a frustrated comedian.

Well, I think he decided not to do it

because it wasn't as successful as he had hoped.

And if I couldn't have my own show every week,

I thought right away I should have my own show on television.

And it was just a drag. You know?

It wasn't fun for me.

- Here at New York's - Rockefeller Center

is homesite and hearthside

for the NBC family.

I had got a job as an NBC page,

so these were rather low-paying jobs,

but somehow maybe you'd bump into somebody

that would give you a chance.

He wouldn't stop. He kept taking his scripts and he would go in and say,

"I want to write for you." "Well, write about this."

And the guy who gave me the chance was Al Levy

at Talent Associates.

He was partners with David Susskind.

Four days later he would show up

at the producer's door with a full script.

I figured if I kept... keep writing stuff for this guy for nothing,

some day he's going to feel bad enough about it

to give me a job.

Larry was getting in on the Golden Age of Television

and is really one of the only people I know personally

who was there.

One thing that's very striking

when you look at the timeline

of Larry Cohen's life

is that he sells his first story to television

when he's, like, 17 years old.

...play with a fine cast

on the Kraft Television Theater.

The first thing that actually got on the air

that I got paid for

was "87th Precinct," Ed McBain,

but at that time there was only one of them, "Killer's Choice."

So I wrote an original,

and the next thing I knew they were building the sets.

That was a big thrill, going over to the studio

and seeing the scenery being built

that I had thought up in my head.

Clearly Larry was a prodigy.

You can see that in his TV work.

I mean, you can see that he was fully formed early on,

that he was working at the highest level,

that he was as good in these scripts

as the people who had been writing dramatic anthologies

for a decade before him.

- "The United States - Steel Hour,"

live from New York.

In the days when they're doing live TV,

the writer was always around

because you had to be there for rehearsals,

to do rewrites,

and then the day of the show

you had to be there for the run-through

and the dress rehearsals.

So the writer had to be there,

and you were welcome,

and you felt like you were part of the production.

That was what was great about live television.

I was happy as could be,

and I knew there was a future ahead.

Writing is his first identity.

He has never ceased to be a good idea man.

I've worked with Larry on scripts,

I've worked with Larry on projects,

and he comes up with stuff,

full of fascinating ideas,

and he's an idea machine.

There are eight million stories

in the naked city.

This has been one of them.

I wrote a story for "Naked City."

I tried to get them to buy it.

They didn't buy it.

I was very disappointed.

30-some years later,

I sold the same story

to "NYPD Blue."

And it was a big success.

In show business,

every success is followed by a rejection.

There's no guarantee

that you're going to be accepted.

I built up an immunity

to having any hard feelings

about rejections

and just slough it off.

Who cares? What do they know?

The best sign you can have

that you've written something good

is if it gets turned down by everybody

because that means it's original, it's different.

It's really impossible

for him to pump out anything that's boring

or that's been done before, and I think he knows that,

and I think that's one of the frustrations

he has with Hollywood today.

Larry Cohen is so much the invisible man,

in relation to mainstream Hollywood,

that it's entirely possible to have seen a lot of his work

without knowing you were seeing his work.

I've created a couple of shows

for Talent Associates, but those shows never got on.

Although one of them did get on,

but they didn't acknowledge that it was my show.

That was a show called "N.Y.P.D."

And that was more or less based on the series pitch

that I wrote,

but they weren't crediting me,

and I wasn't going to do anything about it

because they'd been very good to me,

giving me my start,

and I wasn't going to sue them or anything.

We're both, on a personal level,

really enormous fans.

"Branded," especially the early episodes,

was truly a source of inspiration.

If you could take all of the TV episodes

from all the different shows from the '50s and '60s

that were written by Larry, and watched them all in a row,

you'd see a lot of themes and fully-formed techniques

that are common to them

no matter what the show was or who the producers were

and left an imprint to a greater or lesser degree

on a lot of them.

Larry was the main force behind "Branded."

It ran for quite a while, and it had this great theme song,

which I'm not going to sing for you.

♪ What do you do when you're branded ♪

♪ And you know you're a man? ♪ You know?

♪ Branded, scorned is the one who ran ♪

♪ What do you do when you're branded and you know you're a man? ♪

You know, you got Chuck Connors

holding up that pointy little broken sword.

♪ Wherever you go, for the rest of your life ♪

♪ You must prove ♪

♪ You're a man ♪

I was sitting in a waiting room

to pitch something,

and there was a catalog of old movies,

and I saw a movie called "Four Feathers,"

about a guy who was branded a coward by his friends.

So I went in the meeting, I said,

"How about a Western about a guy who's branded a coward?"

They went for it right away. So that's how it came about.

I didn't have any idea what I was going to sell them until I got there.

Larry Cohen is the master of the premise.

And that's why those shows he created

stick with you.

"The Invaders."

Alien beings from a dying planet.

Well, "The Invaders"

is probably the most fully-realized

Larry Cohen concept

out of the four TV shows that he sold

in the late '60s.

It's truly paranoid.

It really has this foreboding in every scene.

There's danger. There's menace.

For a TV series to sustain that kind of feeling

I think was unprecedented

when "The Invaders" debuted in '67.

I just don't think anyone had tried to do that.

Everybody thought the communists where everywhere

and spying on everybody

and infiltrating our society.

Well, you can't do a show about that,

but suppose you turn them into aliens?

You know, if you think about what he was dong

and what the rest of the TV landscape was at the time,

it was really quite remarkable.

"The Invaders."

Then Quinn Martin came into the picture.

...A Quinn Martin Production.

And he was one of the top producers at ABC.

Quinn Martin and Larry Cohen

were going to be oil and water.

I mean, that was not going to be a mix

because Larry was this sort of very opinionated,

very brilliant maverick,

and Quinn Martin was a real Hollywood establishment kind of guy.

He was not going to go for some of Larry Cohen's wilder ideas.

I guess he said,

"I want to distance myself from this guy.

I wanna run the show, not this young Larry Cohen."

The pilot script that I'd written

was kind of reworked into what they did.

I really had very little to do

with the actual show after that.

There is a narrative of Larry

sort of getting forced out of these shows against his will,

but there's also the fact that he got what he wanted out of it.

And, hey, he's got plenty of other ideas

that he can work on tomorrow.

Can't remember anything except two words...

"coronet blue."

Coronet blue.

♪ Coronet blue ♪

I was one of the few who watched "Coronet Blue."

It was a serial. I mean, you really had to keep watching it

in order to be able to follow it.

It was supposed to be about a guy

who's found floating in the Hudson River,

and he has amnesia,

and nobody can identify him.

And, to my recollection, it just stopped.

It didn't... They never had an ending for it.

It just... It got cancelled,

and nobody ever found out what happened.

It was because he wasn't really an American at all.

He was really a Russian

who'd been trained to pass as an American,

and he was part of a subversive group

called "Coronet Blue."

He decided to defect,

and now they're trying to finish him off

before he can get his memory back

and name the other members

of the the spy organization.

"Bourne Identity" before "The Bourne Identity."

So that's what "Coronet Blue" was.

The solution never was revealed

because the show didn't stay on the air long enough.

I think the show may have been a hit,

but Frank Converse's contract had run out,

and he went off to do the other show

that I had come up with originally also,

"N.Y.P.D."

They couldn't get him back,

and so they couldn't do any more of them.

Larry was not going to become someone

who was a rank-and-file TV producer.

I just didn't want to write the same show every week.

You know, people stay with shows three, four years.

They're so sick of writing

because they've written the same show

over and over and over again.

He was going to work outside the system

and not get stuck on that grind.

He doesn't really need to be producing 26 episodes

of even a good TV show.

He's got better options.

"El Condor" was an interesting event.

The company National General called me in.

"We need someone to go over to Almería

and write a new screenplay

based on the sets that they've already built."

When I arrived in Almería,

I was the guy who was going to save the picture.

My job was to save their jobs.

Then there was a problem when I got back to Los Angeles.

They said, "Lee Van Cleef won't get on the plane.

He won't do the picture."

There's a story that Lee Van Cleef had to be talked into "El Condor"

and that Larry Cohen was the one that talked him into it

by saying, "Lee, it's a comedy."

"Well, that's great! I'll play it without my toupee."

I said, "Now, that's an idea. That's great."

Next thing I know he's on the plane,

he's happy as a clam, and he made the picture.

That's all.

He just managed to safe crack

something that Lee Van Cleef had always wanted to do

and didn't realize that this was the opportunity.

And that's what really convinced me

to go ahead and start directing films.

I remember him complaining about

directors ruining his material,

especially after "Daddy's Gone A-Hunting,"

and he was so frustrated.

You could see the pain he felt.

I was so sick and tired of writing good material

and having it ruined by people.

I just figured, I gotta do my own pictures

because, after all,

I can go through the next 30 years of my life

with all these awful pictures to show for it.

And I remember saying to him,

"Larry, why don't you direct?"

He basically said, "No one's going to hire me,"

and I said, "Why don't we hire you?"

He would start out with our money,

then raise money.

I wrote the script for "Bone"

in maybe a week or something.

I didn't have an outline.

I didn't have a plotline or anything.

It all just came about as it was written.

You're from the exterminator.

Well, of course.

What a coincidence.

That's why it was great,

because when you work at the studios

with, uh, TV or movies,

they always wanna know the whole story

before you start, and that's what I did.

And I had a good time writing it,

and then afterwards I really had to make the picture.

I was hooked.

In a way it's sort of like a racial version

of something like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf".

And he's sort of turning those ideas upside down

and seeing how far he can push his characters around,

but it's very funny, and I think it shows

a more character-driven side of Larry

where he isn't trying to sort of deliver action sequences

or horror thrills.

Why didn't you listen to me?

You listen. You got the biggest house here in the neighborhood.

Bones is a strange character.

Even though he was black, he wasn't black.

He was like a spirit of some kind.

I don't even know if Larry knew

who or what Bone was

or where he came from

or what he was about.

No one knows. To this day I don't know.

The first picture of Larry's I saw might have been "Bone",

uh, a.k.a. "Dial R for Rat",

which is certainly one of the great titles of all time.

I never saw that title or heard that till now.

I probably would not have done it

if I knew that was the title.

I found a producer named Nick Vanoff,

who wasn't really interested in producing the movie

but was willing to give me the money,

and I said, "Look, Nick,

"If you don't get your money back,

I'll write you a free screenplay."

The first time I really had the freedom

to do anything I wanted with a film

without worrying about dealing

with the director or producers or anybody.

This house was built in 1929

by the family of William Randolph Hearst.

The house was often used in a lot of the movies.

It turned out to be even a better investment

than I thought it was going to be.

I knew it was a darn good investment.

I didn't know it was going to be a studio as well.

I think Larry bought his house

based on what he could get away with

in shooting scenes.

I had this house before I ever made the first movie,

so when I made "Bone,"

I was already living here for a few years.

We shot a couple of days in 16mm

with Pippa Scott as the wife.

At the end of the three days,

I didn't like the way it looked.

I said, "If I'm going to make a movie,

I want to make it 35mm, Panavision cameras,"

and that's when I got George Folsey.

People didn't want to hire old people to work.

Folsey was an MGM cameraman.

The crew was all old guys.

They had done hundreds of pictures.

I mean, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

and Larry Cohen.

I can't believe it.

I said, "This is... This is wonderful."

Larry is not a pretentious man.

He doesn't come with a chair and nine guys.

There isn't all kinds of assistant directors around him.

I don't want to confer with people.

I don't want to collaborate with people.

I want to do the whole picture myself.

That's it.

Larry gives you the script,

and he disappears.

You're on your own.

He was allowing me to do something

that few directors would let me do... let me be myself.

Oh, come on. I'm not gonna fall for that old leg.

- I think there really is something wrong. - No, are you ready? Hey.

And I had a lot of question

in my mind what they were going to do

with the scenes where there's a black man

making love to a white woman

or, as it really was,

a white woman making love to a black man

because she was the aggressor.

This is called...

the superior position.

A black guy's wrestling

on the couch with this woman and threatening right after.

It's got sales potential? Are you crazy?

Isn't it different?

People were shocked by the movie

and amazed by the performances,

but they were terrified

of the idea of trying to distribute it.

There it is on the screen.

How about that?

Mixed couples all over the place.

When the picture was finished, then I had to try and find

somebody who would distribute the film,

and I took it all over the place.

And finally I got to California

and showed it to this Jack Harris.

And we tried it,

and the white audiences...

it wasn't working.

We went to the black audiences,

and to my great disappointment,

that didn't work either.

They were first trying to do it

as a black exploitation sort of movie.

It's nothing like that. It's not "Shaft."

And then the review came out

that the film was laughed at.

One of the critics wrote,

"The most unintentionally funny movie of the year."

He was furious, I was furious,

and... wanted to destroy the reviewer,

tell you the truth.

It was... it was ridiculous.

Some day people will see the picture

and finally appreciate it

and be amazed that it could've been made in 1970.

It's pretty timeless

with all the racial stuff going on now.

For a debut movie,

it doesn't get much better than this.

"Bone" is kind of intellectual in a way

that some of his later films aren't.

I mean, it feels like it starts with an idea.

It's like, "Oh, I have something to say

about race and gender."

All the themes that it's dealing with

are still incredibly relevant,

maybe even more so or more pronounced.

It contrasted the haves and have-nots

in a way that was gonna continue

through a lot of the things that Larry would do.

You know, Larry started as a writer,

eventually became a director

to protect Larry the writer, eventually became a producer

to protect Larry the director and Larry the writer,

and thus became a triple threat.

Larry Cohen is very rare for being a triple hyphenate.

There are very few writer-producer-directors.

How could Larry move between mainstream TV

and independent filmmaking?

And I think it's because he was a commercial artist.

He was a very intelligent, clever, smart,

weird, idiosyncratic commercial artist,

but he worked in modes that were saleable

and that were able to reach

a popular audience.

Sam Arkoff of AIP

called me up and said,

"We wanna make black movies here.

Have you got anything like that?"

So I said, "It just so happens

there's a treatment for a 'Black Caesar, '

a project that I was developing

for Sammy Davis Jr."

So when Arkoff said, "Show me a black movie,"

I had a black movie for him,

and we made the deal the same afternoon.

♪ I paid the cost to be the boss ♪

♪ Look at me ♪

♪ You know what you see ♪

♪ You see a bad mutha ♪

Because of "Bone"

and because of "Black Caesar,"

a whole avalanche

of so-called black exploitation movies

started to roll out.

I don't what "blaxploitation" means.

Every movie's exploitation. So what?

So what if a few black actors

got a job for a change?

Why was that bad? Why was it harmful

that it was the same movie

as James Cagney in "Public Enemy"

or Edward G. Robinson in "Little Caesar,"

except that the actors were black. So what?

Larry Cohen was like the white Martin Luther King

for movies.

He had kicked the door completely off its hinges

when it came to the black character.

Blaxploitation pictures

were crossover pictures.

It was part of the atmosphere of the time.

They called them blaxploitation

because they had largely African-American casts,

but everybody went to see them.

A lot of the feel of Larry's blaxploitation movies,

for example, come out of the fact

that he's a New Yorker and not a Hollywood guy.

That's what's so special about him.

When he's really firing on all cylinders

is that he actually makes you see New York through his eyes.

I mean, New York was the greatest.

In "Hell Up in Harlem" and "Black Caesar"

we ran rampant over that city

Larry would not only shoot in the streets of New York.

He would drive cars up on the sidewalk on the streets of New York.

"Well, suppose somebody gets run over?"

I said, "This is New York City.

They just get out of the way when you're coming."

He would do things that were...

I guess you could call them dangerous,

and he almost always got away with it.

Larry and I did have a fight about that after.

And I said to him,

"Did it ever occur to you

we could lose everything!

Everything!

When you do a thing like this?

You've got to have traffic control.

You can't do this sort of thing."

You can't just go to Larry and say, "You know, you're being reckless.

You know, you're be... You know, this is not safe. This is not that."

"Don't tell me what I can and can't..."

You know, And so it was one of those.

And we... we got in a fight over it.

He's not trying to hurt anybody.

He's not trying to not care about anybody.

He's just trying to do what he believes

in his passion,

and he doesn't want to go over all the hoops to do it.

Larry was the most creative on the spot.

He wrote it on the run because that's how we shot it.

Larry is the greatest thief director in the business.

I learned a great deal about how to steal from Larry Cohen.

Fred Williamson is shot in front of Tiffany's,

and you know that Larry stole the footage.

Clearly, because he didn't have permission,

so he just stole the footage.

- Nobody's helping me. - People step over me.

They don't see a camera

because we had the camera up high.

Nobody said, "Are you all right? Can I help you?"

They stop and they look

and then they move on.

Crowd gathers and we got hidden cameras everywhere.

Everybody thinks the guy was really shot.

They don't know that this is a fake.

And you see people, you know,

go, "Are you all right?" Like try to help him.

They were going ape shit. They were...

They were screaming,

"Uh, the... the cop shot him! The cop shot..."

And I'm walking away.

I learned guerilla filmmaking from Larry.

He is the best guerilla filmmaker

in the business.

He is the true independent filmmaker.

He is jump out of the chopper, he is run-and-gun,

and not what they call independent filmmaking today.

I mean, he was the real deal.

This is not something that he just did for a little while and then stopped.

It was part of his ethos.

He always did this.

That was the way he worked.

Now, today with terrorism

and the fear of terrorists

and the police everywhere

and the cameras everywhere,

we'd never be able to get away this.

Jesus Christ, man, they got guns!

Every time there'll be a stunt that had to be done,

I would have to do it first.

Say, "Okay, Fred, you're in this cab.

When you get to the corner,

open the door and throw yourself out

onto the sidewalk."

"Throw myself out on the sidewalk."

"Yeah, yeah, that's it. You'll be fine."

"Okay, Cohen, you do it first."

Then I go in the cab.

I'd throw myself out of the cab

onto the sidewalk.

"Well," and that was it.

"No problem."

Well, he didn't fall out of no cab. I promise you that.

Larry did not fall out of a cab.

Then I go around the corner

where he couldn't see me anymore.

"Aah!

Christ, this is terrible."

Larry Cohen is no athlete.

No matter how he jumps out of a cab, it's gonna be wrong.

So it don't really matter.

He's going to hurt himself no matter what does.

Stepping out of the cab, he might hurt himself.

So, "Okay, let's do it, Fred."

Then he'd go around the corner.

He'd throw himself out onto the sidewalk.

He'd get up.

"You're right. Nothing to it."

And he'd go around the corner

where I couldn't see him,

and, "Aah! Gee, that Cohen, I hate that bastard."

That's a Larry myth. That's a Larry myth.

That's the whole picture.

We just... one-upping each other all the time.

I'd say, "I'll do any stunt that you want first."

Larry Cohen did not fall out of a cab,

and if he told you that he fell out of the cab first,

he's a liar.

We had a preview of "Black Caesar"

at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood.

Picture was playing great.

And then the ending came.

The audience hated that,

particularly the black people in the audience.

Well, they're cheering and going on.

Man, they're loving this movie.

And at the end, he dies.

I thought we were going to have a riot right there in the theater.

I was never intended to be killed.

You never saw me die in the fi... in "Black Caesar."

Well, I called Arkoff up on the phone.

I said, "Sam, it's a disaster.

Picture's going over great,

but the ending they don't like."

He said, "I told you not to kill him."

The fan reaction was really bad.

They didn't really like the idea

of seeing Black Caesar go down anyway

because they knew that would be the end of Black Caesar.

I said, "Well, I made a mistake. Can I fix it?"

He says, "What do you mean fix it?

The picture opens in New York in a couple of days."

"I'll go to New York,

and I'll cut off the last scene."

He says, "Can you do that?"

I said, "Yeah, sure. Don't worry about it."

That was it. Picture opened.

Huge hit.

Lines around the block.

"Black Caesar" is still making money.

I'm still getting checks for four-fifty.

That's $4.50.

Arkoff said, "Wait a minute.

You'd better make a sequel because this is a big hit."

Who made up all that bullshit

that black people don't know how to swim, huh?

I said, "Okay, we'll start shooting

the other one right away."

- The script for "Hell Up in - Harlem" was in Larry's head.

It wasn't as fully scripted as "Black Caesar" was.

This one was really kind of off the hip.

Larry's creativity was impromptu.

There was very little that was scripted.

Most of it I was making up as we go along.

If he saw a character was really happening,

he would just let him go

and write a scene right there on the spot

for that actor to let him shine.

Usually at the beginning of a shoot,

I have occasion to say to the actors,

"Wait a minute. I got another idea."

And then I'd sit down in front of them

at a table, with a pad,

and I'd write a whole different scene.

He had sort of a playfulness

and sort of a sense of awareness

that I don't think other filmmakers quite have

where he actually uses the locations as characters,

you know, and he actu... and he sort of morphs them into his own vision.

You could call him the quintessential New York filmmaker.

He has an eye for getting these angles

that other filmmakers wouldn't get.

Oh!

"This is perfect!" That's a Larry location scout.

Yeah, that's... that's how we do it. And that's how he does it.

Described by witnesses only as a black man

in his early 30s.

All the actors and everything

are off, standing around

with their mouths hanging open to say,

"What the fuck is he going to do next?"

Larry always believed that things would never work out

on the day the way you planned them,

so why bother planning them?

One of the big problems in low-budget filmmaking

is too much preparation.

Then when something goes wrong,

nobody knows what to do.

There's no prep. You cannot prep when you steal.

'Cause then people know you're shooting a movie.

When we get to California,

we went out to the airport,

and Fred has to run across the terminal.

We shot that in the parking lot. No permission.

Normally you have to have

19 permits to shoot in an airport.

We had none.

We shot all of this stuff on the steal.

That's my suitcase!

Nobody reached for their bags.

Everybody, like, backed away.

They thought it was a real fight

'cause, again, the camera was kind of hidden.

Every now and then somebody would pretend to try to reach and get their bag,

and we'd roll over their bag, and we were throwing bags all over the place.

Nobody came. Security didn't come.

Look out! He's got a gun.

- And then, finally, - I said to him,

"You see where the luggage is coming down? Run up there."

So we just did it.

We just ran up, and when we go up there,

we waited for Larry Cohen to come up there

so we could decide what to do next.

As a matter of fact,

when we finished fighting and roll...

and ran up the thing,

we could hear applause.

People down there are clapping,

like, "Damn, that was really good.

That was really real."

Let's face it.

Anybody will put up with anything

if they think a movie is being shot.

The idea of "It's Alive,"

that a monster baby comes out

and shreds everyone in the delivery room

but its mother upon its birth,

is pretty crazy.

And the fact that it went on to do two more sequels

after that is even crazier.

"It's Alive" derived

from my just viewing the behavior of babies,

how angry they get.

It's pure id. It's pure anger.

You know, pure frustration,

so I said, "Well, that's an interesting idea."

I love the exploration, though, he did

about that relationship,

of a parent,

his struggles, his views of being a father,

but also his being the child.

He was a gifted child.

A gifted child is as unusual

as a monster child, for instance.

You know, you don't think that, but it's true.

They don't fit into the normal pattern.

But he also meant it to be a commentary on ecology.

You know, it's all about what we're doing to-

polluting-at least that's what he said at the time.

I didn't want to specifically say,

"This is why the baby was born."

Nobody knows how this thing happened.

It... It's really a matter of speculation,

and I think perhaps that's for the best.

The reality of life is you don't know all the answers.

You don't know why these things occur.

Larry's subversive nature

just comes from that writer radar

that you have, of, "Wouldn't it be interesting"

if this innocuous thing

was turned on its head?

You'll see that in a lot of his movies,

even in his non-genre movies.

When Larry came up with the idea for "It's Alive,"

which was a movie that

was just on the border of bad taste,

depending on what you think about babies.

And he got Rick Baker to work with him, and it was a milestone thing,

which Rick did for very little money.

I think I got 250 bucks or something.

I was actually working on "The Exorcist,"

living in Dick Smith's house in New York

when Larry tracked me down and said to me,

you know, "I'm never going to show the baby.

I just want something to have on the set for the actors, and we need it, like, now."

I designed as I sculpted this thing.

And Larry loved the baby.

And he goes, "Well, let's shoot a scene with it."

And it's like, "You know, we discussed this.

You said you were never going to show it.

I just made something that was repositioning..."

He goes, "I love this thing.

I want to show it. What can we do?"

The first thing I came up with,

I said, "Since you don't wanna show it too much,

maybe what we can do

is I can do a makeup on someone

and do like a big head, that you can see a mouth move,

and, like, hands and parts of some shoulders,

and you could just get some shots in front of black velvet

and just a person going like this,

and you could cut that in."

In fact Elaine Baker is the killer baby,

his ex-wife.

A few close ups.

And my girlfriend had to, like, lay on her stomach

and try to crawl along

and not show the parts of the suit you weren't supposed to see.

Fortunately it was kind of dark.

There wasn't a lot of discussion about it.

And it was fast-paced.

"Okay, we're going in the basement now to shoot this thing.

Now we're going outside to shoot this.

We're going up here." You know.

I got to see Larry's house really well.

Larry Cohen did a beautiful job

of holding the monster away from our direct line of vision.

You feel it moving through the grass.

We see things from its point of view.

I felt, the more you see a monster,

the less scary it is.

Once you see it and you get used to it,

then you say, "Oh, look how well done it is,"

and, you know, "What a nice job."

But it's not scary anymore.

There are so many great scares in it,

but it's not really a very graphic film,

but you think it's a graphic film

because you're filling in all the blanks on it.

The milkman scene reminds me very much

of Hitchcock's shower scene from "Psycho."

If you're Larry Cohen

and you've just made a half-a-million dollar movie,

and 10% of that budget

is going to the music

and you get Bernard Herrmann,

you're gonna say, "Do what you want."

That almost never happened in that era.

In fact, it almost never happens today.

It's a measure of great respect

for a director to say to a composer,

"You have way more experience in this realm than I do."

It was a time of discovery

a time of realizing

that many of these people

that we had admired

from the classical Hollywood system

were still around and were working.

It's not surprising to me in retrospect

that he hooked up with Bernard Herrmann

because he would appreciate that Bernard Herrmann was not only Hitchcock's guy,

he was Orson Welles' guy.

Cohen was back in Los Angeles,

creating a title sequence.

Herrmann was over in London working on the score.

Herrmann said to Cohen,

"I need 90 seconds for kind of an overture."

Larry comes over to London

and brings this minute-and-a-half sequence,

this title sequence.

We gave him the footage

of the flashlights going on and off

and we put it up and we ran it with the music,

and it was amazing.

All the beats were right on time.

When those flashlights kept popping on,

every time they popped on,

it was right on Bernard Herrmann's beats.

So we looked at each other.

We said, "Isn't that amazing,

how that worked out?"

And we were friends for life after that.

A serious score for a movie like "It's Alive"

is a pretty remarkable achievement,

and it's a really good score,

and it's one of the last two he did.

That and "Taxi Driver"

were the last two Herrmann scores.

Can you hear me?

It can't be saved. It's gotta die!

Well, we had a screening over there

on Hollywood Boulevard,

some... one of the big theaters there.

The audience liked it, but they didn't want to put it out.

They thought it was beneath them.

So suddenly, you know,

we had these Warner Bros executives saying,

"Well, you can't expect us to release a movie

about a monster baby that kills people."

"It's Alive" just kind of offended everybody

when it came out, didn't it?

"A monster baby? What are you talking about?

And I said, "What's your biggest picture of the year?"

Don't you have a girl masturbating with a crucifix?

Is this in good taste?

He always compares "It's Alive" to "The Exorcist"

because they both came out around the same time

from the same studio.

What's going to happen?

Why can't I forget this?

Why do I have to keep pestering Warner Bros about this?

But I just couldn't stop.

He just didn't give up.

He didn't give up on things.

He's gonna do it no matter what.

Everybody tells him not to do it,

then he's really going to do it.

So now, next thing I hear,

everybody's fired.

A whole new administration at Warner Bros.

He went after them,

and finally they put it out a second time.

Very unusual.

They kept working with it,

and just with the tagline,

"There's something wrong with the Davis baby...

It's alive!"

That beautiful graphic image

of a baby carriage with a little clawed hand

hanging out the side.

I couldn't believe that after three years

of playing on double bills,

they opened the picture as a first-run picture.

Now it was playing at top prices,

big ads, saturation television.

Before you knew it,

the picture was the number-one box-office picture in America.

In 1976, May,

it was top of the box-office charts.

Unbelievable. Could never happen again

because today any movie will be put out

on home video after 90 days,

so this picture could never have had a second chance.

I was astounded.

I think he took me to a film festival in France,

and I saw "It's Alive,"

and I remembered looking at him and saying,

"Oh, my God, Larry, who are you? You're so weird."

I couldn't believe what had come out of his imagination.

There was motion

and the soft sound of engines,

and... I think I floated.

"God Told Me To"

is a really original and unique vision,

and not only that,

no more crazier than Scientology.

A crazy, pseudo-religious,

science-fiction horror film

about Catholic guilt, made by a Jew.

Your children would've been like me.

If you hadn't willed them to die.

I didn't!

Brothers with someone who comes

from a mating from an alien from outer space,

and his brother could be Jesus,

but he has a vagina in his side,

and wants to procreate with you and cre...

you're gonna go, "What the fuck?"

It's like, "Larry, what were you smoking?

I mean, wha... what?"

First of all, all the movies I do

are all basically taking something

which is considered benevolent

and turning it into some kind of monstrosity.

Larry Cohen confronting faith

and religion and God.

While we might get some sprinklings of that

through some of his other films,

this one is definitively all that.

And then the definition of what is God,

you know, is maybe a little lofty

for the exploitation markets

that the picture played.

But if you see the movie,

you see this great intellect at work,

with an outrageously dark sense of humor,

but a logic that, if you pick it apart on its own terms,

it makes perfect sense,

but it may not be on your terms.

That's a good example of where he's hiding his real message

sort of inside the genre,

or in this case two genres, in "God Told Me To."

And you think you know what you're getting,

then it sort of does this left turn,

and you find out it's actually

a dissertation on faith and religion.

- Throws you for a loop. - It's all about misdirect.

He thinks you're going one way,

and then he throws you with something else.

I love "God Told Me To."

And it begins with Andy Kaufman!

How great is that?

Well, "God Told Me To" of course is especially clever

because in a way that's his most guerrilla film.

Obviously the parade scene

is one of the standout sequences of his whole career,

that he had the nerve to actually do that.

That's just insane.

And Larry got the brilliant idea

of dressing Andy up in a police uniform.

And Larry pushes Andy in the middle of the thing,

and Andy starts marching along with the... the real cops.

Couple of guys recognize him. "Hi, Andy."

And they keep walking.

Only I would go down to an area

with 5,000 policemen,

with the police commissioner, the mayor,

and shoot a movie without permission.

And you know something?

Because of that, everybody thought

we had permission.

But Larry gave himself permission,

and Larry never gives up an opportunity

to get a shot that gives his film

production value

without it costing anything.

For me it was a lot of fun.

I like working fast.

And I like working Larry's way.

I like working right at the edge.

Can you tell me why you did this?

God told me to.

Don't!

The music in Larry's movies

is almost always good.

There's a guy named Frank Cordell

who does a great Herrmann imitation

in "God Told Me To."

It's a terrific score.

The whole picture is deepened

by the choices that the composer has made,

so Cordell's choral score

really helps to make the film

even more compelling.

Bernard Herrmann was supposed to do the score.

As a matter of fact, I ran the picture for him

the night he finished "Taxi Driver."

I loved Benny Herrmann.

He was a sweet man to us.

He could be a cantankerous old man.

There's no question about it.

I think he was kind of a grandfatherly figure to Larry.

Then we drove him back to the Universal Sheraton hotel,

and that's where he passed away that night,

in his sleep.

He was in good spirits and...

And he had died during the night in his sleep.

And it was very odd.

He was lying in bed like this,

with his two hands under his cheek,

like a little angel in a painting.

And of course it was Larry

who took the situation under his wing

and dealt with the beautiful service, funeral,

and it was a very, very sad time.

And I can't... I just have such great admiration

for what Larry did at that point.

Then the rabbi said,

"Hey, we have to have a circle

of ten Jewish men to say a prayer,"

and so we had to go in the living room,

and we didn't have ten Jews,

so the Italians all put on yarmulkes.

De Niro and Scorsese and De Palma

all were wearing yarmulkes,

standing in the living room in a circle

while the rabbi said the prayers,

and De Niro said to me,

"What do I do? How do I act Jewish?"

I said, "Well, no matter what the rabbi says,

just keep nodding your head. Just..."

- You know, - I'd always been a fan

of those FBI movies ever since I was a kid.

So I thought, "Well, how about doing an FBI movie

that really tells you about what the FBI really was like?"

Yeah, we carry guns now.

It has that absolutely direct relationship with the audience.

I mean, no budget.

Uh, actually very little in the way of period detail.

It's just coming right at the audience in a very honest way.

And what you see is what you get.

Broderick Crawford is really very good as Hoover.

You see all these people

who'd won Academy Awards in the past

sitting on their mantelpiece,

but the phone never rings. Nobody calls them.

There's a lot of wonderful actors around,

and they're just looking for somebody to give them a job.

The way Larry cast his movies was kind of interesting.

"Who's available?

Who's behind on their rent?

Who... you know, who maybe owes a mortgage payment?

Who can I get cheap?"

- A distinguished - Oscar-winning cast

in a true story of political intrigue

at the center of power

from World War I to Watergate.

I did something really crazy.

I hired the actors

and I took everybody down to Washington, DC.

I had about enough money to shoot for a week.

And I figured somewhere along the line,

I'm gonna get the money to make this picture.

And I called up Arkoff, of course,

my usual sucker.

And I said, "Sam, I'm making this movie down here."

I said, "I got three Oscar winners,

but I won't tell you who they are."

He said, "You want me to give you the money,

but you won't tell me who they are?"

I said, "That's right."

Next thing, he sent me $400,000,

so I made the picture.

That's it.

I got away with it.

If it wasn't for the files,

there might never have been a J. Edgar Hoover

or an FBI as we know it.

We were in Washington,

and Larry was doing his thing,

running around, stealing shots,

guerilla movie-making,

just the way we did it in New York.

We first called up various facilities

and told them we were shooting a movie, and they all said,

"Yes, okay, you can shoot here."

And then when they found out it was about the FBI

and J. Edgar Hoover, then we get a phone call back,

saying, "I'm sorry but we changed our minds.

You can't come."

Something's gotta happen.

So the phone rings.

The White House is calling.

Betty Ford's office.

Betty Ford used to be a dancer

and in shows, and a chorus girl.

And her favorite actor was Dan Dailey.

And Betty and her husband,

the President of the United States,

would like to invite them for lunch at the White House.

Well, isn't that nice?

The two stars are going to the White House.

So now I get on the phone, I call up.

"Excuse me,

we'd like to use your facilities at Quantico,

the FBI Training Academy.

We can't shoot Wednesday

because the two stars are having lunch

with the President at the White House.

But we'd like to come the following day."

That was it. We got permission issued every place in Washington,

all thanks to President Ford and Betty Ford.

I don't care what you say, boss,

it doesn't look like real grass to me.

Larry found out

where J. Edgar Hoover's house was.

And we shot a couple of scenes

in J. Edgar Hoover's own house,

without anybody's permission.

If people told me these stories,

I'd tell them they were full of shit,

I gotta tell you. I couldn't...

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't been there.

I think it's the greatest steal in filmmaking.

The fact that Rózsa creates

a kind of sympathetic feel for this guy,

a little bit of an understanding of who he is

and why he's made the choices that he has made.

- And a wonderful man, - Dr. Rózsa...

I called him Mickey.

He was different than Bernard Herrmann.

He was soft-spoken and gentle,

and never looking for an argument from anybody,

a wonderful composer and a sweetheart.

I'll bug and burglarize whoever I please.

I'll be damned if I let somebody else do it.

Self-appointed cop for president.

That's right, junior.

Larry's movies are not necessarily subtle

but they are very detailed.

They're thoughtful. They're serious.

And they're reflections of the world around him

and the problems in that world.

A man doesn't have much in the way of morality

unless he's scared of somebody.

And I gave them somebody to be scared of.

I mean, my belief is that Washington, DC

is totally corrupt,

every way, shape and form.

Whatever he did,

he's no worse than any of the others.

You gotta watch those guys in the White House.

I don't mean just Nixon, all of them.

Given what we now know about Hoover's real private life,

which we didn't know in that time,

the picture's actually kind of mild

in its treatment of Hoover.

But for whatever reason, it didn't appeal to the exhibitors,

and people just didn't want to book it,

especially after it opened soft.

It was one of the less-distributed AIP pictures.

Most people saw it as a second feature at the drive-in

than ever got to see it at a hard-top theater.

And I think what was interesting about the film,

it had another danger to it, the way Larry's pictures usually do,

but another kind of danger, and I look back now,

and I think it's probably because of being tied directly

to the Nixon era, and there it was on television.

And it was the first time two stories

about J. Edgar Hoover were getting out.

Whatever we say, whatever we do,

the next morning it winds up in the "New York Times."

This had a resonance to it

and a prophetic nature to it.

It would have had a different resonance or accent to it

if it'd made it in a different era.

But it's a very special picture.

Larry Cohen does a Mickey Spillane,

"I, The Jury."

And he's got Armand Assante playing Mike Hammer.

I didn't know Mike Hammer was Italian.

Mikey Spillane's Mike Hammer

could have been a big, big series,

much like James Bond.

In fact, when James Bond first came on the screen in "Dr. No",

the "New York Times" said,

"This picture owes a great deal to Mickey Spillane."

And I wrote a screenplay.

And we ended up putting it together with a company,

American Cinema.

Larry was not someone that worked well

within the constraints of the Hollywood system.

Even though he was very good at Hollywood,

he didn't work well within it.

Any time you wanted to do anything innovative or clever

or set up an interesting shot,

all they wanted you to do was just shoot the basic coverage and move on.

He's earned a sense of cynicism

and a little bit of bitterness about Hollywood,

and yet he doesn't really express it.

I'm not sure how many days they actually got through,

but at a certain point,

there was a blow-up, and Larry was fired.

I'd never seen Larry like that before.

He was terribly upset.

So it hit him pretty hard.

But that didn't knock him down,

didn't knock him out- knocked him-

might have knocked him down briefly,

but he was right back up. It wasn't a TKO.

He was back on his feet and ready to go.

He called me up and he said,

"Paul Glickman said that you're a good production manager,

and I'm gonna stay here in New York

and make this movie that I want to make.

And I'm determined to finish it

before they finish 'I, The Jury.'"

Aren't you tired of being cooped up in the office?

Why? Am I being fired?

No, no, no. I got work on the outside,

- prove a lot more interesting. - Okay.

It's just impossible to believe

that somebody could come up with another story

and already be shooting that quickly

after what happened.

Conversely, I was not surprised

because the man is a genius.

The one thing about Larry is that he has his conviction.

And he really is a filmmaker,

and he's serious about that.

And as a writer as well.

And so when he believes something,

or believes in something,

nothing's gonna change his mind.

So he put himself in a foot race

with the new director of "I, The Jury,"

to make a picture called "Q".

I know you love me. I know you love me.

I wish you'd take a walk.

Huh? Hey.

What're you looking for?

Looking for the head.

Did you ever drop a cantaloupe from 40 stories?

So here you have

the familiar New York urban street crime cop-versus-criminal movie.

Suddenly, you've got

a monster landing on the top of the Chrysler Building.

That's the reality that everybody's dealing with.

The idea was...

what if there was a nest of a giant bird

on the top of the Chrysler Building?

And I think that gave rise

to this whole Quetzalcoatl mythological script.

I just thought it'd be an interesting idea

to combine cinema noir with a science fiction monster picture.

I thought the Chrysler Building

was better-looking than the Empire State Building

and deserved its own monster.

One day after I was fired,

I was shooting the other picture.

I wasn't working that day,

and we were sitting outside a restaurant,

and a man and his wife were sitting next to us,

and we just started talking to the guy.

It was Michael Moriarty.

Then he says, "I got a script...

I got a role you might like."

You better let us know real soon, Quinn.

Oh, you're not the only action in town.

He says, "Can I send the script to you?"

I said, "Yeah", and I give him my address.

I fall madly in love with Jimmy Quinn.

And it was only 60% there at that time.

Wow, can I eat this alive.

He's just a Shakespearean actor

and an incredible jazz musician,

which most people don't know.

I found out that he wrote music and played the piano.

♪ Go away, evil dreams ♪

We'll make up a scene

where he goes and auditions for a job,

taking him and basically putting him into the picture

and taking facets of his personality

and bringing it into the character.

You have a script, but there's always a possibility,

a wonderful possibility, which I'd never had before,

of a director, writer, producer

who had all the freedom in the world

to throw me anything he wanted.

When I saw "Q" and "The Stuff,"

I was kind of intrigued by how he worked with Michael Moriarty

and kind of guided him as he went along the course

and around the bend

and out over the bend, so to speak.

I mean, you feel like he really could spin out of control.

19 years old, I was bum-rapped by a cop like Powell

because he wanted to get a conviction.

That wonderful sense of really about to spin out of control,

maybe go out of control, on-screen, maybe off.

And that kind of erases the line

between the picture and the actual experience.

He's been set free inside himself

by this director who he trusts.

He can fly without a net

because the director's got the net, got his back.

In the '70s, we would say,

you know that expression, "He's far out"?

We don't use that expression anymore.

But Michael is far out.

He's somewhere else.

And I found out his concentration was so intense

that you could actually talk to him while he was acting

and give him new lines

and give him pieces of business to do.

When I'd say, "Tell them to eat 'em, tell them to eat 'em,"

and he'd just say, "Eat 'em, eat 'em," you know,

and he went into that whole tirade.

Eat 'em! Eat 'em!

Neither Larry nor I could do no wrong.

We couldn't make a mistake.

Feeding me these lines.

And it's heaven.

It's every actor's heaven.

And we're just burning it up.

It's almost like you're watching something

that has a truth to it that you don't expect.

Eat 'em! Eat 'em!

And that's somewhat dangerous, and it's always exciting.

Yeah, Larry's ability to really observe the actors

and bring in what's special to those actors

into their parts makes actors just love him.

The next big job was to get to use the Chrysler Building.

It turned out that at this particular time,

the Chrysler Building was under renovation.

So they had baskets on all sides.

I said, "Who's in those baskets?"

They said, "They're steeplejacks.

They do repairs and stuff on skyscrapers."

He goes, "See if they want to be in a movie."

They're the people that are qualified to get into those buckets

that are hanging off of the pinnacle anyway.

Otherwise, we're gonna have to pay a bunch of stuntmen

and it's not gonna be affordable.

Then we hired a bunch of off-duty police officers

because they'd come in uniform.

The cops bring their uniform,

they just get their extra pay.

Looking good.

So cops were easy to come by.

Let her have it!

Empty shell cartridges.

It was blanks, of course,

but they were raining down into the streets of New York.

The brass fell but there was canopies up

because there was some construction going on the lower floors.

I told him, I said,

"People in the street are panicking

because they think that there's a terrorist attack," and he goes,

"Get a cameraman and get on the street

and shoot somebody panicking."

I said, "Okay."

I was shooting "Trading Places" in New York City,

and we were on Park Avenue

in front of the Waldorf Astoria,

so I had a lot of cops.

And all the cops went,

"We're very sorry, Mr. Landis, we have to go."

"What?" And all the cops went roaring off.

And they were back, like, 45 minutes later.

"What's going on?"

"Oh, some lunatic was shooting machine guns

on top of the Chrysler Building."

The police were summoned.

Lots of stuff happened.

And eventually, the city shut us down

because we created such an uproar.

Who's not gonna love

"Hollywood Terrorizes New York"

on the front page of the "Daily News"?

And then the next day, there were articles about it.

And I went, "Oh, Larry," you know.

We did scare people, I guess,

but only because the newspapers and the television stations

tried to make something more out of it than it was.

I took an ad in the trade papers,

apologizing to the city of New York

for scaring them.

It didn't mean anything.

I think maybe Larry couldn't have had the career he had

if it was post-9/11.

I think the stuff that Larry did

you just would never get away with today.

There are so many incidences

where we would be doing dangerous things,

and I think back now,

and Larry must have had angels on both shoulders.

This one was a wing and a prayer,

flying blind.

I'd never see a ruffled feather.

I mean, just... the riskier it gets, the calmer he gets.

That's Larry Cohen.

But it turned out that I was saved once again by fate

because had they not had the canopies,

I might be just getting out of jail now, so...

It's a very hip sort of non-Ray Harryhausen Ray Harryhausen movie.

I didn't think I could afford Ray Harryhausen,

but I didn't think about it when I shot the picture.

I knew where the monster's supposed to be,

and I shot all the scenes.

There's a way in which plates are usually shot

that allow the stop-motion guys

to be able to do their best.

And Larry, of course, ignored all of that stuff.

He shot stuff handheld, he didn't lock down anything.

They said, "Well, that's not how it's done."

I said, "I keep hearing that all the time.

Every time I make a movie, no matter where I go,

they always tell me, 'That's not the way it's done'."

But I do it and it works.

And it saves a lot of money and a lot of time.

It was a nightmare

to get this dragon to look as good as it does,

but it's pretty good.

You don't want to be thought of

as being dictatorial

or an unpleasant person or anything,

but if you don't exercise authority

and have confidence in your own ideas

and your own judgment,

then you're gonna be completely lost.

It's called pushing the envelope,

and Larry does it all the time

with the actors and with...

with the environments and the world,

and God bless him.

I would certainly say that "Q" is probably

the best big monster movie after "King Kong."

Okay, everybody hold their positions.

Everybody stay right where you are, okay?

Don't move.

Whew.

- Big. - Yes.

Bastard. You bastard!

- Cut. Print. - "Special Effects"

and "Perfect Strangers"

were similar in their style and their look.

And that's probably because they were similar in their budget.

When I was a child, I asked my mother about commerce,

and she said, "Well, you make a pair of shoelaces for five cents,

and you sell it to people for ten cents."

It always made good business sense for Larry, what he was doing.

He's just really a savvy show-biz mind.

I had the scripts for "Special Effects"

and "Perfect Strangers,"

and they were both makable at a reasonable price,

so I made the two pictures back-to-back.

There was a whole shooting thing going on,

which was "How do we do this as cheaply as possible?"

One of Larry's favorite techniques

was to get a cameraman up on a fire escape

where none of the people in the street actually knew

that a scene was happening.

There's a moment where Larry jumps in, just stops the guy and, you know.

Somebody figured he was running off with the child,

and I saw that somebody's gonna beat the hell out of him

if I didn't do something.

It's okay, folks. Do you want me to call a cop is that...

- Stay out of it. - You're gonna...

Larry was not above having

his Alfred Hitchcock moments in his films.

I think he recognizes the way, you know,

a good Italian neo-realist does,

that people and their environments are one.

He understands what it meant to be capturing value,

whether that was in shooting his movies in New York,

which is the greatest location in the world on the cheap,

which you're getting for nothing,

all this production value.

Or finding a young talent, like Anne Carlisle or Eric Bogosian,

who were just breaking at the moment,

and nobody knew them.

Paul Kurta had rounded me up for this feature.

I don't know what I thought a movie set was supposed to be

but whatever was going on on the Larry Cohen set

was different than what I had imagined.

I remember it was like 2:00 in the morning one night,

and Larry said, "You should be paying me to be here

because you're learning so much."

And at the time, I resented that comment,

but I actually do think I learned...

I learned a lot, fast.

A lot of our photographic choices

were predicated on the fact that we found this fantastic house

and it was owned by an artist named Lowell Nesbit.

He was obsessed with flowers.

We put this dialog in

where the detective asks the director...

Why are you so crazy about flowers?

I don't know.

They're just so beautiful, and they die so quickly.

I'm open to whatever happens, whatever comes along,

I'm happy to grab it and put it into the picture,

like it's meant to be,

like it was there for me all along

but I didn't know it until I saw it.

A guy like Larry,

he's working in a meat-and-potatoes style,

and probably thinks it's pretentious

to not work in that style.

Basically, everybody on the film crew

is the assistant to the director.

And if the director is a filmmaker

and is telling a story,

that's really all you can be.

I think that's why his movies are so special,

especially with "Special Effects"

because it's so gritty.

I mean, he even takes Zoë Tamerlis from "Ms. 45",

and she's sort of like the muse of New York underground cinema.

And here you have Larry sort of fracturing her

into sort of two parts, which is really interesting.

He's sort of doing Hitchcockian dual-nature woman,

but he's doing it in a very Larry way.

I think people think that it's easier to make a genre movie.

But in some ways, it's harder to make a genre movie

because the audience knows where you're going.

You have to keep surprising them.

I'm sorry, I mean, what am I asking you for?

How would you know?

Oh, I know.

Oh. Charlie.

Charlie, what's the matter?

Let go!

Hello, everyone.

Genius.

I've loved it since 1985.

I love it. I still love it now. It's one of those rare films

that you loved when you were a kid and you love as an adult.

A little faster pace, okay?

Let's get a little movement into this.

Talk about your high-concept movie.

- ...wonderful smiles. - This was gonna require an art department.

This was gonna require some product development

in order for it not to be laughable.

What's also terrific is you've got that "Stuff" jingle.

I mean, you watch it,

and you can't get that damn thing out of your head after a while.

♪ Enough is never enough ♪

♪ Enough is never enough of The Stuff ♪

Larry had a friend in the advertising agency.

He hired him to develop the Stuff cups,

so this was very different for a Larry Cohen movie

because we were doing a lot of thinking ahead.

Gosh, let me, uh... That's a sweaty palm.

That's two sweaty palms.

Let me feel you.

Oh, that's another sweaty palm.

When I wrote the script,

I didn't have Moriarty in mind.

But after I had done the picture with him

that was so successful

and we'd gotten along so well,

I thought, "Why don't I use Moriarty again?"

Uh, when you talk to the FBI,

would you tell them this for me?

He's sort of like Larry's version of James Bond.

And we'll make up a name for him like Mo Rutherford.

You know why they call me "Mo"?

'Cause every time somebody gives me money,

I always want mo'.

And I got him a new hairpiece for the part

and he looked much younger

and more like a leading man.

And then every picture we did afterwards,

I had to get him a hairpiece.

Stop. Not true, not true.

How dare he say that?

He wanted the hairpieces.

I didn't want... I never wore a hairpiece until then.

But he wouldn't wear the same one for each picture.

He insisted I spend the money on a different hairpiece each time.

So he buys me another hairpiece. What's your problem?

I think I've got them all stashed in the closet somewhere.

"The Stuff" was a great concept.

At that time, everybody was health crazy over yogurt.

And the fact that the yogurt was eating you

instead of you eating it was amazing.

I love "The Stuff" because it's this great satire.

We don't really think about what we eat.

If it was something horrible,

we don't find out until after the fact when they do a recall.

And then everybody's, like, "Oh, my God, am I gonna die?"

It's very tough to take material that's absurd

on its surface, make it threatening

but have the right kind of elbow-in-the-ribs moments at the same time,

without parodying yourself to the point of complete farce.

That's why we have the term "black comedy,"

which is what that is.

"The Stuff" is so hilarious.

You know, living killer yogurt.

What the hell are they doing?

That stuff comes right out of the center of the earth

and straight into our supermarkets.

If you're a good horror director,

you use horror to kind of hold up a mirror to society.

And you reflect either some of the anger

or or some of the political turmoil,

and you use that to channel and say something

about what's going on in whatever times the film is being made in.

To Larry, what's important is the moment,

the idea, the concept,

the thing that he wants to say.

It's always important that he's saying something in a movie.

It was about consumerism

and the unscrupulous practices of big business

and the fact that people will sell you anything,

even if they know it's gonna kill you.

Look at the new campaign for "The Taste."

Only 12% of Stuff in it,

just enough to make the public crave more.

And Madison Avenue doesn't care

it's killing people.

Madison Avenue will only do what they got to do,

which is make it look like a lovely thing to get addicted to.

These people at companies

that manufacture cigarettes and products that kill you.

Are you eating it?

Or is it eating you?

They're bad people.

They go back to their big homes

and their kids and their Ivy League schools

and all the other bullshit.

They're the ones who belong in jail.

If we speak about Larry as a prescient guy,

as a guy who's very foresightful,

I think what you're really seeing

is somebody who looks deeply at the present moment.

That's why I would like to see what Larry comes up with now

because we'll have a good template

for what's going to go wrong, like, ten years from now.

This is your wake-up call, your honor.

Shit! We've been had.

I would compare Larry to Sam Fuller

in that style of filmmaking,

where it's deeply personal and it's very visceral.

They both grab the audience

with a kind of movements that are...

actors' movements and camera movements and gestures that,

you know, feel like, you know, bold headlines.

There was an audacity and a wild maverick sense

that was certainly in the tradition of the handmade picture,

of a film that had to be made

because he felt the passion for it.

So I did my own pictures,

and I did them the only way I could do them at a low price.

If I'd made them for a higher price,

I could never have made my own pictures the way I made them.

The price of a higher budget is interference from a studio,

executive producers or somebody.

I didn't want anybody around.

Fuller himself

was sort of a do-it-all- yourself kind of filmmaker,

which was very much what Larry Cohen was known for.

And he was having financial troubles.

Like so many people in the business,

he got old and out-lived his money.

I felt badly for him.

And then I was writing this script,

and I decided I write a part in for him.

And I sent it to him, and he called me up and he said,

"Gee, there's so much dialog."

I said, "Don't worry about it, Sam.

I'll be there. I'll make sure you get to say it all."

He and Larry had a very special relationship,

very much a teacher-student relationship,

enormous amount of respect.

I'm used to dealing with those son-of-a-bitches

that made a deal with the devil. You see that?

Now, there is a legendary experience,

the great Sam Fuller.

Just massive energy,

and I was just, oh, I'll stay out of the way.

I'm not a Nazi hunter.

I'm a Nazi killer.

And I remember some of the scenes that Sam did.

Larry's, like, "Yes." You know what I mean?

He just got it.

But unfortunately, because of his energy and his passion,

he can't hit his mark.

So I was his mark.

So he'd walk up to the spot where I was.

I'd be lying on the ground.

And then he'd stop right when he hit me.

Mister, you still not lost?

He could do his lines, but he was not very good

at cheating left or cheating right

or doing anything like that, so...

I was amazed that all the pictures he had done,

he wasn't aware of all that stuff.

Fuller's participation in the film

certainly reflects maybe Larry casting himself.

You can't look at any other film in Cohen's library

where you go, "That's Larry", or "That's Larry."

I think maybe in this instance,

Fuller's character is definitively Cohen's persona.

What do you mean it's not approved?

You gotta approval this goddamn license,

or else I'm gonna blow your goddamn brains out!

When Larry was in control of his movies,

then things would work well.

We'd end up making the movie.

Spread your legs, baby.

But if it was an outside company,

trying to manage Larry,

that usually went poorly.

Originally, I was gonna do another Mike Hammer film,

but when the first one was such a disaster,

then I rewrote it into a different private detective.

And apparently the Staten Island Ferry

is stuck in the mud here in the channel.

Reason being...

Stuck in the shit is more like it.

We're trapped here in the middle of New York Harbor.

What happened was it got stuck on a sandbar

in middle of New York Harbor

because it was so heavy on one side.

The entire crew and cast

were trapped on the ferry for the entire day,

where the Coast Guard and the Harbor Patrol

tugging on us, trying to get us off the fucking sandbar.

I said to the captain,

"Any chance this thing would sink?"

He says, "What're you talking about?

We're on the bottom now."

You realize the star of the picture now is trapped

on a tugboat because he stepped on for a shot.

Just as he stepped on, the tugboat pulled away.

And I called the producers on the phone.

"I don't know whether we can shoot this or not.

Are we insured for something like this?"

They didn't get back to me and they left the office.

Can't be contacted.

So now, whatever I do is wrong.

If I shoot, I'm wrong.

If I don't shoot, I'm wrong.

They've thrown it all back in my lap.

Last summer I wrote this.

Last summer I wrote this scene.

It was supposed to originally be a street fair.

Little did I know I was going to suffer the same fate

on this one as I suffered on the first one

that I was gonna only direct a portion of,

but before I would be summarily dismissed.

I was Larry's friend,

and I felt it was unjust, what was happening.

I said, "Well, Larry, you know, I'm going with you."

And he asked me to stay on the picture.

- At that time, - I said to myself, that's it.

I'm now gonna make these producers so fucking miserable,

they'll have to fire me.

One thing that really did shock me

was the frustrations that he expressed openly

about dealing with producers and studios.

The producers of this picture were so stupid.

God bless it.

No wonder I was able to make all these movies on my own

that I didn't have to deal with these people.

Most people don't know a damn thing about producing.

I got married.

With who?

Well, here's my gal.

Call me Mom.

I went to a Golden Globe award.

Bette Davis came out.

She was so skinny and dragging one leg behind her.

And I said, "Oh, Jesus, poor Bette Davis.

Look what's happened to her."

And yet, here she is, she has the courage to come out on stage

in front of everybody at the Golden Globes.

So I had a lot of respect for her.

And then I started seeing her on all these talk shows.

And I said, "She wants to work.

That's why she's doing these talk shows

is she's hoping someone will give her a job."

You know, God bless her.

He wrote the script for her

because nobody was giving her any work

and she was, you know, the ultimate legend.

That's another thing that's pretty special about him

is that he has tremendous compassion,

especially for the elderly.

And for movie stars. He loves movie stars.

So I had a tape recorder

and I dictated "Wicked Stepmother"

into the tape recorder.

And the phone rang.

And who the hell was on the phone

but Bette Davis calling me up

and saying, " Mr. Cohen, I read your script,

and I certainly had a few laughs.

You wrote it specially for me, didn't you?"

And I said, "Yes, Miss Davis,

I wrote it especially for you."

And she says, "Well, when can we get together?

Come on over and have a drink."

He decided to have us all come to his house

before we started to shoot

so we could all meet Miss Davis, Bette Davis.

Of course, I had gotten lost and I was very late.

I know this is an ungodly hour to show up, but...

So I arrive and there she was

and I threw myself in front of her

and hugged and said,

"I am so, so, so, so, so sorry I am late."

And her body was like a rock.

So stiff.

And I saw something in her eyes that was fear.

I saw fear in her eyes.

You have to keep in mind, she was, I think, 81 years old

or 83 years old at this point,

and had a stroke.

She was in pretty rough shape.

When I met her here a couple of times...

I met her here and read with her.

I thought that she had cancer, right away.

Unbeknownst to us, she actually was terminally ill at that time,

and she knew it.

We didn't know it but she did.

She couldn't even get the words out of her mouth,

and it was nothing to do with the dentures,

which is the real reason she quit the movie,

because her teeth kept falling out.

She was afraid to admit

something was the matter with her

because maybe the picture would be cancelled.

When she found out she couldn't perform,

then she said she had to leave to go

to New York to go to the dentist.

And I think maybe Larry may have made a mistake

in showing her some of the dailies.

She saw the rushes.

She saw how bad she looked.

And I think that when she saw herself,

she couldn't take it, and so she walked off.

She decided she wasn't gonna be in the picture.

She didn't look right.

Any ideas I had about performance,

well, he just wasn't interested in that at all,

so that whole first week, I was playing she's away.

Really, I wasn't comfortable and I was mad.

She opted to go in a different direction

as to why she quit the film.

I knew I couldn't go back.

I knew I could not finish it.

And then he started hearing on the news

and through the media and so forth

that she quit the movie

because it was a Larry Cohen script

and she decided she didn't like the movie at all.

And that devastated him.

She finally testified at a sworn statement

that she had to give at a deposition

for the insurance company

and admitted that her dentures broke

before the picture started.

Once again, I'm facing disaster,

so I've got to come up with some kind of a solution.

And what did Larry Cohen do?

Gave the lines to Barbara Carrera.

Changed the script around a little bit.

And we finished the picture.

I know there was a fear there for a while

that they would just shelve the whole project.

And I know Larry worked very hard to do rewrites

and politic with the executives

to get it still on track.

I said to the people at MGM,

every video store has a Bette Davis section.

That means you'll sell enough videos

to get back your $2.5 million.

As disastrous as "Wicked Stepmother" may appear to be,

the investors got all their money back.

And even made a profit on this movie,

believe it or not.

So it all worked out well.

What he did was a labor of love for her.

And perhaps she never knew it.

But those are the facts.

That's what happened.

- Josh! - Okay, I'm out here.

I had never heard of Larry Cohen

before I got the offer for "The Ambulance."

And my manager at the time said,

"They're offering you a great deal of money

for this really weird film."

And I read the script.

Thought it was really funny and really weird.

Larry told me that he wrote the script

because of his own experience in an ambulance

that was a ride he'll never forget.

And when I got out of that ambulance, I thought,

"This was one of the worst things to ever happen to me in my life,

riding in this ambulance."

It had very bad springs

and I was bouncing up and down.

I was going crazy back there.

Any injury you had felt 100 times worse

when you got out of that fucking ambulance.

So I guess that's what gave me the idea for "The Ambulance."

What'd I do wrong?

You weren't particularly convincing.

Oh, thanks.

And you're not very observant.

Not a good witness at all.

Larry did not take himself too seriously,

which is a great quality, I think, in anyone.

Certainly in any artist.

And he was kind of a big kid.

It's like going to camp working for Larry Cohen.

It really is. It's fun.

And every day's different.

And every day is some kind of cool event.

And you have to keep that alive in yourself, I think,

in order to do any kind of interesting work.

And his movies are fun. They're fun to watch.

It kind of invites you in, you know.

Larry sets the stage for that because Larry...

"You know, I don't really know what I want in this,

so I'm gonna try this. Do you have any ideas?"

That's how Larry is. Larry's, like, "Well..."

One of my bad habits that I've gotten from Larry Cohen

is not prepping for shows.

I still have it to this day

and I have Larry Cohen to thank for that.

Kill myself. Kill myself!

He came in prepared

just enough so that we could start the shoot

and then the rest just... just evolved.

You just see him. You just see his head just, you know, going, thinking.

And then all of a sudden, he starts telling you this stuff,

and it works.

I mean, sometimes you're looking like,

what's he talking about? Is this the same movie?

Next thing you know, it's some of the best stuff in the movie.

What're you in for?

Who the hell knows?

They say cardiac. I say indigestion.

Red Buttons used to love to spend

a whole evening with Larry, talking about old movies.

They would be in bliss together.

He always wanted to be friends with me.

During the show, he liked the way I was kidding around and all that stuff.

And I knew all the old jokes and everything.

Why did she have to go before me?

Aw, come on. Come on. We have to go...

41 years, she cooked for me, she cleaned for me.

She made love to me.

- I should have married her. - That's enough.

I didn't want to start in a friendship with him

and then have him be pissed off

that he didn't like the picture.

So after the picture was finished and he saw it,

and he loved it.

He was the best man in our wedding

and we spent a lot of time together.

And it was really a beautiful relationship.

And then I helped him with his Broadway show,

"Buttons on Broadway."

I wrote a lot of the routines for him

on "Buttons on Broadway."

It was a big loss for Larry when Red died

because I think he was, you know,

Larry's dad died when Larry was 19 or so.

And Red was very paternal and admired him.

Before he passed away,

I kissed him good-bye and sang him a little song.

And that was the last time I saw him.

Larry doesn't get enough credit for how kind he is.

You know, Larry is one of the sweetest, kindest,

most considerate people on our planet.

Drop your gun. Get back. Drop your gun.

Back up!

Get back, get back!

Get back!

Fred Williamson came to me.

He said he wanted to make a picture in his hometown,

Gary, Indiana,

which happens to be gang capital of the world.

Murder capital of the world.

Gary, Indiana.

It was a rough place to be,

especially if you lived there.

Law of the jungle. Life for a life.

Suppose I want more.

"Original Gangstas" was produced by me

and I had intended to direct it.

I decided at the last minute

to let Larry Cohen direct it as a favor to Larry Cohen.

I had no anticipation

that he'd ever be able to come up with the money.

Maybe because my name was attached to it,

he ended up coming back and saying he had the money.

He didn't know that I had already raised the money

from pre-selling the film.

Had nothing to do with Larry Cohen.

Larry Cohen's name came up at the end.

So then I thought to myself,

do I really want to go to Gary, Indiana in the summertime?

It was really, really bad,

and Larry does not do well in extreme cold or extreme heat.

It was so hot, you could barely even think and function.

Oh, and the actors were on oxygen

when they were off camera.

It was an experience, I'll tell you.

Larry wasn't someone who would direct other people's material.

You know, with "Original Gangstas,"

he took the script and essentially made it his own.

I did rewrite a lot of the script.

I didn't want to take credit away from anybody

so I didn't try and arbitrate it or put my name on it.

It's not a New York film, but it does have a very urban feel to it.

In this case, it's Gary, Indiana.

Might as well be New York, actually.

The change in setting alone makes it more interesting

that you're doing this sort of Midwest take on a New York film.

And Larry started inventing stuff.

He started inventing Larry Cohen stuff, you know,

which is... the script started to go like this.

And I'm saying, "Wow, man, we can't do that."

So, you know, we had some battles there.

That's the only way I could work.

I couldn't make the picture any other way.

He didn't see me as a producer.

He saw me as somebody he had worked with.

But I was the man and I was the one who had the final say.

And the truth of the matter is I was just working for the movie.

I was just trying to make the movie as good a movie,

a coherent movie, as possible.

So it wasn't fatal, so I didn't kill him.

I didn't beat him up, so it wasn't fatal.

We had a conversation, and we moved on.

And we hired about 101 gang members

to work on the crew and then the picture as cast members.

They all came on time, they all did everything they were asked to do.

He gave them something to do

and a reason to get up and make a time clock.

They were probably the safest people in Gary, Indiana

because of these gang members

that were kind of protecting the turf.

And they were very friendly to me.

And sometimes they'd come to my trailer

and they would hand me a bag of Famous Amos cookies or something.

During the four or five weeks we were in Gary, no crime.

Day after we left, it started again.

Ten days later, it was so bad,

they had to send the National Guard in.

They were killing each other right and left.

But when we were there, nothing.

Fred did it all.

It couldn't have been made except for him.

And he deserves all that credit.

The reviews on that picture, by the way,

were extremely good.

It actually doesn't feel completely like a Larry film.

It feels a little more muted.

Of course, you do realize eventually it is making a message.

It is about gang violence.

It's about the older generation

actually teaching something to the younger generation

and showing them the way to go.

It's just not immediately clear.

So that's very Larry.

Well, here we go.

Oh, no. No.

You offering me a ride?

That's the way it's supposed to go, isn't it?

You sure you got room?

Yeah. Sure.

Get in.

"Masters of Horror"

was an interesting experiment in television.

In 2005, Mick Garris decided

that he would have this anthology series.

But the title has two meanings.

"Masters of Horror"

refers to both the director and the writer.

I had never adapted my own short fiction

to any other medium,

like a screenplay or a teleplay,

so this was news to me.

The purpose of "Masters of Horror"

was to give people an opportunity to have

an unfettered hand when they're films.

That, creatively, they could be the final voice.

And he asked me if I would do one,

and of course I said I would.

He may not say so now,

but he was a little nervous about it.

Even said to me, "I'm not sure if I'm up to it."

And I knew he would be.

And it took a little bit of coercion,

but not much for an entertainer like Larry.

In fact, he actually brought Dave Schow,

who wrote the short story, in,

and then Larry would run his own ideas by him

and brought him out to Vancouver to consult with him.

I walked on to the set, met him for the first time

and learned the first lesson of Larry Club.

Always do what Larry says.

I said to him when I met him,

"I'm gonna ask you to come every day

and be on the set and be part of the production."

Just like I'd like to be treated

as the writer on other people's sets.

The great thing about coming out of writing into directing

is that you do learn the value of having a writer around.

He and I came up with stuff almost collaboratively in the moment.

Sometimes, we came up with stuff at the same time.

Hm. See this?

It's a hollow point.

Makes a teeny little hole going in, but coming out.

Oh. It's a big slice of cherry pie.

Of all my performances in horror films,

my best performance is this one,

because it takes a long time to find that perfect balance.

The way Larry worked with me,

he senses how far he can go,

and then I go and he's got to back off.

He's made all the other experiences with directors pale.

They pale by comparison. Why?

Well, an actor wants to be around someone who understands performing.

And of all the directors I know,

the one who understood performing better than any of them

was Larry Cohen because he's a performer, so...

And when you say, "Stella," I mean, you gotta say it.

Stella Adler we're talking now.

- Stella. - He teaches you

how to improvise in a certain way.

"Let's try it this way" or "how do you feel this way?"

So it's really directing you

and making the moment natural

and real and that's what he's great at.

Good directors throw you a little bit of license

and make you responsible for being the author

of that character.

He knows what he wants,

but he gives everyone their freedom and space.

He trusts his actors and they trust him.

And they make magic.

You know when you're eight years old

and you make plans with your friends,

and it's all very complicated and it's all very detailed.

Well, that's Larry. That's working with Larry.

It's like you're working with an eight-year-old friend.

It's really fun.

I think he struggles with the whole hardship

of directing a picture.

That's the part that makes him feel

like it's easier for me and more pleasant for me

just to write the script

and then give it to somebody else.

I don't mourn a filmmaker

who's left the director's chair

and is just writing,

if they're content that way,

because directing is a physically demanding act.

One...

Fuck...

This will count as a hang-up.

- Fucking expensive... - I can make him stop.

Just say the word. Can you hear me?

Yes!

- ...by the neck. - Whose street is this?

- Yeah, that's right, man. - Oh, my God. Holy sh...

He was fucking shot!

Oh, my God. He ain't breathing, man.

"Phone Booth" falls into that category

of Larry riffing on Hitchcock,

in this case, taking a narrative challenge,

sort of doing "Life Boat" basically,

where you have your character stuck in one setting.

In this case, doing it as extreme as possible

where your hero is literally trapped in a glass cage for the whole movie.

I didn't like the voice of the sniper.

So I went to the Fox executives.

"Oh, we can't do anything about that.

That's Joel's choice."

I said, "Well, I don't care what you say to Joel.

I can say anything I please to him. It's a free country.

I'm gonna tell him."

So I call him up on the phone.

I said, "I don't like the voice of the sniper."

He says, "You really think so?"

I said, "Yeah." He says, "Okay."

Picks up the phone, calls Kiefer Sutherland.

The next day, there's a new sniper.

Without him, that picture wouldn't be half as good.

He really made the picture.

Well, you could ask her to forgive you, Stuart.

You could confess your sins

and beg for absolution.

Come clean.

He takes these pulpy ideas

and sets them in the real world.

And he never loses that sense of reality,

no matter how bizarre that things can be.

I mean, Larry is wonderfully fertile.

He's an idea guy.

He's always coming up with stuff.

And then, okay, I've created this

and now I'll go through with it.

You know, I wish I was fertile as Larry.

He was doing lots of spec scripts

and selling them at a million dollars a pop

at an age where very few people

are selling screenplays,

and just had been doing it so consistently.

Always trying to do something every day,

like send a script out to somebody

or make a pitch to somebody

or make contact with somebody.

Try to do something that, you know,

keeps the career going,

keeps it alive.

Enter the little office.

The little orifice, as they say.

You know, every couple mornings,

I go into Larry's bathroom

and I see these little pieces of paper of ideas.

So the house is littered with all these little pieces of paper.

This is where it all happens.

Here, there, upstairs,

in the other room, in the other office,

in the living room, and in the dining room.

The whole house is my office.

Never stop.

Now I write longhand.

I just enjoy writing with a pen and pad.

I feel the dialog running down my arm on to the page.

It's astounding to me, in 27 years,

this man writes every day,

and there's never a complaint.

It's complete joy.

Well, over the years,

even though I was making my movies,

I was still selling screenplays to other people

and I was still selling pilots for TV series.

I mean, Larry can pump out a script in a week.

20, 25 pages a day.

In a week, it's done.

I fucking hate him.

I mean, that's... what a great gift.

What a gift to be able to do that on the fly.

Larry just sits his butt in a chair

and either picks up the Dictaphone,

little tape recorder,

or the pen and legal pad,

and it just flows out of him.

Well, sometimes when I write a script,

I just start with one of the most interesting scenes in the script

because I want to get myself interested in the material.

And the way to do that is to bring the characters to life.

And he's pacing

and he's playing the parts of the woman,

the man, the policeman.

He... all of the characters,

he is speaking and role-playing.

I know how a guy talks.

I know how he thinks.

I know who his girlfriend is.

And the back-story gets filled in.

And the future starts to happen.

I don't know what's gonna happen next

but I want to find out so...

then I go back and start from the beginning again.

But now I know who I'm writing about.

You know, Larry can go knocking on a kazillion doors

and have people say, "I didn't like it, I didn't like it."

But he knows he likes it and it's good and somewhere...

Larry always says, "Every script has a history and a journey.

And this will get made some day."

And just before we start the actual reading,

I'd like to introduce the real star, Larry Cohen.

We had an event at a place called Jump Cut Café.

And they read a screenplay of mine called "Movie House."

It was a terrific evening.

And everybody seemed to have a very good time.

"The artwork depicts a beautiful young woman

with a pair of gloved hands wrapped around her throat

"against the background of the New York City skyline."

"When I was younger, going to the movies,

the shows were continuous, usually a double feature.

Back then, you had to do some thinking.

It was more like life.

You're thrown in the middle of things.

It all happened before you got there."

His dialog is amazing.

And it may not read that way,

but the minute you hear it,

it's, like, oh, well, yeah.

That's how that had to go.

"And you did a fine job, proving once again

that real people can outperform actors any time."

If you asked me to define a Larry Cohen film,

It's that it earns its keep minute by minute.

Everything in it is always interesting.

I think the fact that he has faith in humanity,

that he actually puts some trust in the fact

that people will try to make themselves better

because there's always that sense

that somehow people will find a way.

They will survive and endure.

Well, the era through which

his most wonderful movies were distributed,

that has come and gone.

But his ability to tell stories,

his ability to think pictures,

is still with us, still with him.

"Murder at the Festival."

Wouldn't it be great if somebody ran amok here

with a hatchet

and started chopping people up for real?

Wouldn't that be a good movie?

It's delightful and it is surprising

that he is still as innocent as he is in some ways

and that he is as childlike.

He's got that, yes, I'll dance in the rain thing about him.

And I think that is an amazing attribute

to have as a person.

But certainly as a filmmaker and as a director.

I can't imagine having a better collaborator

and friend and teacher than he was.

Working with Larry is a freeing experience

because there are no mistakes.

It's important, I think, for any creative person

to not be afraid of mistakes.

And he's not.

All right, they don't like the picture.

So what? Pictures are rough.

I don't care. You don't like my movies?

So what? But do you like me? That's the question.

With really creative people who have a gift,

if they're not doing that gift,

there's just no life.

Like Larry's always said to me,

"If I didn't, you know, sell that first script,"

he says, "I don't know what I woulda done."

Larry is a creative artist that has to do his art.

He would be doing it if it didn't sell.

He would have to do it.

If you look back at his filmography

and you see the variety of the stuff,

much of it low budget and much of it exploitation,

but still, all really interesting and different

and trying to do something that nobody else has done.

Well, they're individualistic.

They're clearly Larry Cohen movies.

I mean, that's what... that's what's interesting

about a filmmaker where you can see...

A movie doesn't tell you anything.

But seven or eight movies tells you a lot.

You know, I miss the pictures that he made.

I miss his spirit.

And I miss this spirit of the times,

which we can say was truly the renegade spirit.

And that's it.

What do you mean, that's it?

My career's over?

The moral of it is never give up.

If you think you have a good movie,

you just can't listen to other people

and let them dissuade you

and let them get you discouraged.

You just have to keep annoying people.

The only thing that's important is your own film.

This is my epitaph.

But I'm gonna live.

So you'll be sorry you didn't do a part two.

"Part Two... Larry Cohen Lives Again."

"Cohen's Alive". How's that?

I like that.

You can't possibly get all of this into one documentary.