My Way Or The Highway

Larry Cohen is one of Hollywood's great multitaskers. A successful television writer in the 1960s, he truly took ownership of his showbiz career in the '70s when he decided that none of the movie screenplays he'd written had been successfully turned into films. “All of the movies I wrote failed to realise what I intended in the screenplay,” he says. “None of them were as good as the scripts, and I wanted to be able to look back when my career was over and say that I made movies the way I wanted them to be.”

And so he has. While Cohen's résumé as a screenwriter for hire is studded with B-movie gems, from the awesomely horrific Maniac Cop films (only the first two, mind you; “the third one is terrible”) to the smart, gritty thriller Best Seller (which he admits falls apart in the final five minutes due to a poor decision by the director – “We almost made it to the finish line but they blew it”), his career as a writer-director-producer-editor has resulted in brilliant blaxploitation pictures like the gangster movie Black Caesar – originally developed for legendary entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr, would you believe – and trippy, offbeat and utterly original chillers like God Told Me To and Q: The Winged Serpent.

He'll be talking about all these movies and many more when he appears as a keynote speaker at SPAA Fringe, a two-day conference organised by the Screen Producers Association of Australia and taking place during the inaugural Cockatoo Island Film Festival.

“I usually just answer the questions people ask me and find out what they're interested in knowing about,” smiles Cohen when asked what he usually discusses at such events. “There are so many aspects to making motion pictures, and I write and direct and produce and edit... I do everything on my films, so there's an awful lot to talk about.”

The independent nature of Cohen's filmmaking is a topic that comes up frequently, though. “I wanted to make pictures that were all mine,” is how he describes it. “Most people can't do that; it's hard to get people to give complete control over a movie unless you're at the pinnacle of the industry like Spielberg or someone like that, someone who has had enormous hits. Otherwise you get it at the other end of the spectrum – low-budget films the studios aren't going to spend much time supervising because they're too busy with bigger product. They'll leave you alone in that case, and that's something I like: being left alone to make my movies.”

The best way to do that? Keep the budgets low, sure, but give your backers something bigger and better than they could have anticipated. It's an ethos that sort of sums up the filmmaker's relationship with B-movie studio American International Pictures, which released the likes of Cohen's Hell Up In Harlem and The Private Files Of J Edgar Hoover.

“I always tried to give them more than was in the script – more action, more production value, things they hadn't counted on,” he says. “They didn't see the film until I was completely finished – they didn't see dailies, they didn't see anything, they just waited until I brought it in. And after my first film for AIP, they were so pleased with it they never bothered me again.”

So how does Cohen feel he would have fared if he were starting out today? “I would have made some movies, I'm sure, and maybe one or more would have caught on, leading a studio to give me some money,” he says. “But in all honesty I couldn't have made the movies I made if I'd worked in the studio system. With a studio film, if you want to change anything you have to inform the front office. There's budgeting and scheduling issues and by the time everything is approved it's too late – the moment has passed. Sometimes you need to do it right there and then. But on my movies the shooting schedule was in my back pocket and I had the power to do anything I wanted to do.”