The Clown Prince of Guerrilla Film-Making
I’m wearing my ‘Fanboy’ hat today; for once it’s not a case where I was unfamiliar with the subject of this biography as I have grown up watching Larry Cohen’s output. There’s a better than average chance that even if you are unfamiliar with Larry Cohen you’ll have seen, or at the very least heard of, many of his films. For the benefit of those who can’t quite place him here are a few of his ‘cult classic’ creations: It’s Alive. Maniac Cop. The Ambulance. Q (The Winged Serpent) The Stuff. A Return to Salem’s Lot. Aside from those he is the man responsible for dozens of other films and TV series spanning several genres and fifty years, amongst which is the first thing which brought him to my attention, the TV series ‘The Invaders’ with Roy Thinnes as David Vincent, an architect who sees a UFO and spends 43 episodes trying to convince everyone that aliens walk among us. It’s classic TV and expands on the small town paranoia evident in America at the time as well as being bolstered by such things as the Twilight Zone episode ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’ from 7 years earlier. His work output is something few can match, but aside from being prolific as both writer and film-maker there’s another aspect of Larry Cohen which is noteworthy in that he is a true renegade. Up until recently there have been relatively few people who have wrote/directed/produced their own projects, mostly as film studios have overbearing control of what their budgets goes into, although nowadays with modern technology making it possible to create an entire movie on a smartphone it’s more common to be an ‘indie film-maker’. Larry Cohen had one way of operating, and that was ‘his own’, he didn’t want what he was writing to be at the mercy of directors and producers who would bastardize his work and so he wore all of the hats required to get a project in the can. He also had a somewhat liberal attitude toward ‘getting permission’ for certain things such as filming street scenes and using particular buildings, and so he winged it for much of the time, setting up cameras and ‘stealing shots’. A fine example of pushing his luck would be having comedian/actor Andy Kaufman dress as a policeman and join a real NYPD Police Parade without telling anyone. The documentary is full of stuff Larry Cohen brazenly pulled off which if you were to try it today you’d probably end up doing hard time for, assuming that with today’s permit-centric society with surveillance on every street corner you were actually able to do something longer than the average ‘prank’. What Cohen did was, simply put, ‘Guerrilla Film-making’ at its finest. For the addicts such as myself there are many clips of his finest works, such as the notorious ‘Window Cleaner’ scene from ‘Q’, and a wealth of interviews with John Landis, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, Fred Williamson, Rick Baker, Yaphet Kotto, Traci Lords, Eric Roberts, David J Schow, J.J. Abrams and Mick Garris to name a few, and of course the man himself who gives plenty of screen time packed with anecdotes, (some of which are typically disputable for such a roguish storyteller) of his life and times from his early days of wannabe stand-up comic turned writer and film maker, right up to his latest endeavours. ‘King’ Larry Cohen may not be a household name, and that is something I think is awful given his contribution to entertainment, but one thing is for certain, he deserves the title ‘King’ as he is the ruler of his own talent as well as a man who recognises the capabilities in those around him and enables them to give their best, something which has been for the betterment of an industry in which the strictures placed on creativity are overwhelming. ‘King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen’ will receive a full theatrical run across the U.S beginning July 20 in L.A (with other cities in the weeks to follow), courtesy Dark Star Pictures. There’s no news as yet about distribution for the home audience, but when that happens I’m certain this will be a ‘must see’ for any genre enthusiast. Definitely one to watch. 
BOOK REVIEW: MANIAC GODS BY RICH HAWKINS
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