In January 2008, I was hired to turn my first book into a feature-length documentary. The second half of the book (Nightmares in Red, White and Blue) was a survey of major horror film directors, so my goal for the doc was to interview some of the filmmakers I had profiled. One of the first calls I made was to Larry Cohen’s production company—and I was dumbstruck when Larry himself answered the phone. I had expected to make my pitch to an assistant or an answering machine. Suddenly I was talking to one of my filmmaking heroes.
I must not have fumbled too badly, because at the end of the call Larry said, “How about Monday?” Just a few days after the call, my cameraman Mike Bratkowski and I drove to Larry’s house off of Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hill—an old William Randolph Hearst mansion straight out of Old Hollywood, with 50-foot-high ceilings, a foyer filled with tapestry-sized posters from the silent film era, and a general aura of burnished gold. And then there was Larry, who greeted us with a warm, wry smile.
When I was growing up, Larry Cohen’s films were a cinematic blind spot for me. He wasn’t as widely celebrated as directors like George Romero, Wes Craven, or John Carpenter, so I barely knew his name. The first LarCo film I saw was A Return to Salem’s Lot, and that was because of the Stephen King connection. Then in high school, while I was working at a small-town video store, I discovered the It’s Alive trilogy. Those were fun, but what really drew me into Cohen’s world was a pair of books I found in my college library. Dennis Fischer’s Horror Film Directors and Tony Williams’s Larry Cohen: Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker informed me that I should be paying more attention to Larry Cohen. Thankfully, Anchor Bay followed close behind with new VHS releases of God Told Me To and Q: The Winged Serpent. I love those two films to no end.
After that, I started tracking down every film with Larry Cohen’s name on it. Not all of them were great, but all were high concept (and he made them well before Hollywood producers were recklessly throwing around that phrase). When I wrote my first book, I found it easy to make the case for Larry as an auteur because he was a writer/producer/director whose larger-than-life personality was clearly embodied in his films. The worldview behind his stories is that of a perpetual outsider, striving for purpose. Larry’s visions became increasingly tongue-in-cheek over the course of the 1980s, and diluted in the 1990s by alliances with other writers, producers, and directors—but there’s no denying the audacity of the core ideas. Larry was a brilliant and sometimes blasphemous storyteller who knew how to preach without pontificating. And he wrote great characters because he was a great character.
When I sat down to interview Larry in 2008, I felt a twinge of panic as he said that “monsters movies” were not really his “favorite thing.” I needed soundbites about horror movies for my document, but he seemed to be more interested in talking about classic Warner Bros. adventure movies, especially those directed by Michael Curtiz. Once I realized that his favorite films were those with strong characters and strong performances, I tried to shift gears and talk about horror movies that fit the bill. That drove our conversation forward from the 1930s to the 2000s.
In the early 2000s, Larry’s career was revitalized by a trio of original scripts that got produced with A-list casts and budgets for theatrical release. Phone Booth (2002) had originated as a collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock decades earlier but eventually became a box office hit and a star-making vehicle for Colin Farrell. The star-studded Cellular (2004) was a more modest success. Captivity (2007) was a bomb, and Larry was eager to distance himself from it in our interview. He also railed against the forthcoming remake of It’s Alive—which was as bad as he predicted. Sadly, his career never rebounded.
A few years after I met him, Larry posted 10 original screenplays on his website, trying to stir up discussion. One of the scripts (“Movie House”) became the basis for a live table read at a Los Angeles coffee house, with Larry in attendance. I loved seeing him there, basking in the glow of an energized performance with a receptive audience. A few years after that, I saw him again at a North Hollywood screening of Steve Mitchell’s excellent documentary King Cohen. I even had a chance to talk to him, and to thank him for being the first interviewee to say “yes” to my little documentary. At the time, I was quietly thinking about interviewing him again for a documentary on the history of western films. But, just a few months after that, Larry was gone.
The horror community didn’t mourn Larry Cohen’s death the way they mourned the loss of Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, or George Romero. I don’t remember a lot of tributes, which made his passing seem even sadder to me. Thankfully, Tony Williams’s book and Steve Mitchell’s documentary had already done a thorough and heartfelt job of summing up the man and his work. Those tributes remain available…. But, like the helpless addicts in The Stuff, I always want more. A few weeks ago, Sticking Place Books fed my Larry Cohen obsession with a truly excellent Christmas present.
I Killed Bette Davis is a memoir by Larry Cohen and an appropriately haphazard chronicle of his charmed life in cinema. Cohen focuses on infamous stolen movie moments (“I’ve got nothing against unions. I just couldn’t afford their fee.”) and heartfelt interactions with fellow celebrities (including friendships with Samuel Fuller, Bernard Herrmann, Red Buttons… and Bette Davis, sort of). I love the chapter on his unrealized projects, which include a western film starring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and an aborted spy movie that was partly shot in the shadow of the Kremlin. Above all, I love Larry’s voice—wry and candid, with a childlike enthusiasm that is inspiring from a filmmaker with 36 feature films and countless TV shows to his name. There’s not a curmudgeonly note in the book. Even though he never quite made the A-list, Larry was always having fun, and that makes him the perfect tour guide through the crazy world of indie filmmaking in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
I would have loved a more serious analysis of his films—and more insight into Larry’s writing process—but the filmmaker excuses those omissions by confessing that he never wanted to become “self-conscious” and jinx his creative instincts. Anyway, as I said, the story is wonderfully augmented by Tony Williams’s Radical Allegories book and Steve Mitchell’s King Cohen doc. Now we have a triumvirate of constant Cohen companions.
In I Killed Bette Davis, Larry says he told filmmaker Elia Kazan that he had read Kazan’s biography twice. When the elder statesman wondered why, Larry explained, “I felt like I was hanging out with you, and I just didn’t want it to end.” I felt the same way reading Larry’s memoir. When I was done, I promptly queued up Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff, and watched them with my daughter—a new member of the Larry Cohen fan club. Thanks to Sticking Place Books for setting the stage. And thanks again, Larry, for being you!
Buy the book here: https://stickingplacebooks.com/books/i-killed-bette-davis
