Larry Cohen Page 5

  What was it like being involved in live television and mounting dramatic works?

  Oh, it was great. When I first started out doing live television back in New York, the writer was always included in every step of the process. You had to be present because changes were constantly being made to the shows. The writer came to the first reading of the play with the cast and then attended the rehearsals. The writer was also always there on the day of production, because the show had a couple of run-throughs, and then after each run-through the show would either be too short or too long. This meant that you would either have to write an additional scene, or extend an existing one, or you would have to cut something from the script. After the run-throughs, there would be the dress rehearsal and further changes would be made after that. Finally, the show would go out live on the air and the writer would be sitting in the control room throughout the whole of this procedure. So, the writer was always around and you really felt like you were a vital and active part of the production as it moved along. Live TV was great for that reason. It was an incredibly dynamic and creative environment to be immersed in, particularly for me as I was so young.

  As your early career in television progressed, and the medium itself began to evolve, was the writer always as valued and involved?

  No. As soon as they went to film television, or “tape” as it’s often called, that was the end of the writer’s participation. It all changed so quickly. Soon, everything was being done at the exclusion of the writer, and we were no longer welcomed in anymore as an integral part of the process. That was a shame because I enjoyed being deeply involved in live television. It’s actually enormously beneficial for the whole production if the writer is constantly available, but in many cases a lot of writers don’t want to be there for various reasons. Today, making television is a lot like making movies. A movie shoots for thirty or forty days, and the writer doesn’t want to be up at seven o’clock in the morning everyday and be at the command of the director or producer. They don’t want to be standing around watching everybody do their jobs, whilst they are rarely being called upon to make changes. Very often, there is nothing for the writer to do, and the weather may be poor on location, and the hours very difficult. I think if you asked most writers to come out on the set everyday, they would probably want extra money for taking the trouble. That’s the way a lot of writers are. I wouldn’t be that way, but I do understand that view. I think, for the most part, writers feel that being on a set is a waste of time. Not every writer, but many of them. Also, if their work is being tampered with, it can be a very painful place to be. But in the days of live television, there was more of a sense that you were directly connected with the whole operation of creating something. You were firmly on the inside looking out and you were all working together. That was wonderful.

  What prompted you to move to Hollywood in late 1959?

  I decided to try my luck on the West Coast because, after my first couple of shows were on the air, nothing was really happening for me. I just had no luck at all. I was rejected everywhere and it was rather a depressing time. I was actually collecting unemployment insurance and was living on something like $52 a week. I was repeatedly being turned down, and people kept asking me, “When is your next show coming on? When can we see it?” The truth was I had absolutely no idea. I then had this troubling thought that I would have to go back to being a pageboy again. I was determined that was never going to happen. It would have just been too embarrassing for me, particularly after tasting a little success. So, I went to California and got into doing live television remakes of old movies. One of the things we did was a version of Meet Me in St. Louis, which had Walter Pidgeon, Jane Powell, Tab Hunter, Ed Wynn, and Patty Duke in the cast. I don’t mind telling you that it was a poor imitation of the Vincente Minnelli original with Judy Garland, but I was happy to be working.

  How did you find Hollywood at this early stage of your career?

  Exciting, intoxicating, but also a little difficult. I had never been there before, so it was a new experience for me. Hollywood was full of beautiful girls and sunshine. It was like this wonderland, but it was also a tough place to find work. I was staying at the Montecito Hotel, which was frequented by a lot of writers and actors from New York. It had a private swimming pool, and you’d meet a lot of interesting people there. The actor Martin Balsam was staying while he was shooting Psycho with Hitchcock. He seemed to take great pleasure in telling me the ending one day when we were sitting out by the pool. Naturally, that ruined the picture for me. Brendan Behan [3] was also staying at the Montecito and we became pals for a time. Brendan was a great guy, drunk most of the time, but always jovial. He was quite a character. I do remember that one day he was driving up from Hollywood Boulevard in a car with his wife when he turned to wave at me and crashed into a tree! Another time Brendan approached me and said, “They want to throw me out of the hotel. They claim that every time I come out of the swimming pool, I take my bathing trunks off and my robe is hanging open and everyone can see my genitals. I don’t know what the matter is with these people. Over in Ireland, even the priests go swimming naked!” [Laughs]

  Was the Montecito Hotel affordable?

  The rent was only $150 a month, which was pretty good, and it was a great place to be. I was comfortable, hobnobbing with all these fascinating people. Sidney Pollack [4] was living at the Montecito as he was working as an assistant director to John Frankenheimer at the time; Mel Brooks was also there, as was Percy Kilbride, a famous character actor who played Pa Kettle in the popular Ma and Pa Kettle films. Percy really was a remarkable old guy. He must have been in his late seventies back then, but he’d be in the pool most days in his bathing cap and would effortlessly swim fifty laps as we all looked on in amazement. All the time I was out in Hollywood, I was having a good time, but I still wasn’t selling anything. But I was determined to experience Hollywood moviemaking and learn as much as I could about the business. Like I had done at NBC, I decided to gatecrash the studios and hang out with the stars. One day, I wandered onto the set of The Sins of Rachel Cade, which was shooting at Warner Bros. with Angie Dickinson, Peter Finch, and Roger Moore. The director was Gordon Douglas [5] and I was just watching him work. I couldn’t quite believe that I was on a real Hollywood soundstage, but there I was drifting around, soaking it all in. Nobody had any idea who I was, but the crew all assumed that I was employed by the studio in some capacity. The cameraman on The Sins of Rachel Cade was Peverell Marley. [6] At one point, Marley was conferring with Douglas about how they were going to block the next scene. I quietly strolled up beside them to listen and when they’d finally finished talking, Douglas suddenly turned to me and said, “Is that okay with you?” [Laughs] He knew very well that I had infiltrated the studio and had no reason for being there, but he let me be. I don’t know. I couldn’t help myself.

  In 1960, whilst in L.A., you wrote for the Western anthology series, Zane Grey Theater, delivering a script called “Killer Instinct.”

  Well, after not being able to get a lot of work in Hollywood, I returned to New York. As soon as I got back there, I immediately got a phone call from my agent, who was a terrible agent by the way, telling me that the Zane Grey Theater wanted to buy a story I’d submitted for $350. Unfortunately, they did not want me to write the teleplay and were looking to put another writer on it. The story was called “Member of the Posse” and was about a marshal who swears in a bunch of deputies in order to hunt down some bad guys. After a while, these deputies all want to go home but the marshal refuses to let them. He keeps the posse as virtual prisoners and makes them face death when they don’t want to. It was intended to be a parable of the Vietnam War, where President Johnson had sent all these American guys over to a dangerous, foreign land and wouldn’t let them come home. So, anyway, I didn’t get to write “Member of the Posse” and it ended up being re-titled as “Killer Instinct.” It was a pretty lousy show, which starred Wendell Corey as the marshal. I don’t remember who w
rote it, but whoever it was, he didn’t do much of a job. [7] It kind of broke my heart that I had been in Hollywood all that time and didn’t really sell anything. But when I came back to New York, things quickly picked up and I started selling some things.

  One of the scripts you sold whilst in New York was “False Face,” a disturbing episode of the anthology show Way Out, hosted by the celebrated Welsh author Roald Dahl. Since “False Face” was first broadcast on May 26, 1961, it seems to have attained legendary status, hasn’t it?

  Yeah, it really has. “False Face” has been described as the most memorable segment of Way Out, although the series was only on the air for seventeen weeks. Of course Roald Dahl was a famous writer, responsible for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and many other books. His job as the host was kind of a take-off on Hitchcock’s role in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where he would introduce these strange and scary stories each week. [8] “False Face” was about a horror actor who is playing the part of Quasimodo in a play of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He copies his stage makeup on the deformed face of an unfortunate derelict he has picked up. The play has a successful opening night, but afterwards the actor discovers to his horror that he can’t remove the makeup and it’s stuck on his face permanently. He then tracks down the derelict to a nearby flophouse, but finds that the homeless man is dead and now has the actor’s face. It was a very good episode with a nice, macabre twist. Dick Smith did the makeup on “False Face” and it proved to be very influential for a generation of young makeup artists who watched that show. Again, everybody who saw “False Face” said it was the best segment of Way Out that was ever done. Personally, I agree with them! [Chuckles] But it is a classic bit of television. You know, I never met Roald Dahl when we were working on the show, but he did visit my house once when I held a party. Several years after Way Out was cancelled, somebody brought him over to my place one evening and we talked. Dahl had no idea that I had written anything for Way Out, but that was the one and only time I ever met him. I do remember feeling thrilled when I caught the telecast of “False Face” and heard Dahl’s British accent say in his introduction, “And tonight’s show is by Larry Cohen.” After everything that had happened in Hollywood, that really made me feel good.

  How did your career move forward after Way Out?

  I then went back to Hollywood again and picked up a very good agent by the name of Peter Sabiston. Peter was with me for about twenty-five or thirty years and got me a lot of jobs. I started picking up work on TV shows in California and, subsequently, got jobs in New York on things like The Defenders, which was basically a courtroom drama which concerned a father and son team of lawyers who were involved in a variety of difficult legal cases, and The Nurses and Espionage. All of a sudden I was making a lot of money and was constantly working on various things. It’s hard to remember the exact chronology of these shows, but around this time I wrote an episode of Checkmate, which was a show about a detective agency on CBS, and an episode of Sam Benedict, which was a legal drama on NBC starring Edmund O’Brien as an attorney. I also wrote an episode of Arrest and Trial, which was a ninety-minute crime show on ABC that starred Ben Gazzara as a cop in Los Angeles. The Nurses was a film show that was produced by Herbert Brodkin, who was also producing The Defenders at the same time. I actually started off writing for The Defenders and wrote seven or eight episodes of that show. Since they were also doing The Nurses, I wrote three episodes of that show, as well, and those episodes are very good ones, too. I thought The Nurses had some social relevance and addressed some fairly sensitive issues of the time, but there were certain limits we adhered to. Sometimes, in my eagerness to do something I felt was important and potentially very good, I was pushing at what was acceptable and what was not. One episode I wrote, “Party Girl”, originally had a woman character in it that had recently had her breast removed. This was deemed to be too much and so I changed it to her having a leg amputated. That was still fairly strong stuff for the age in which it was made, but not as powerful as my first idea. I also wrote an episode called “Night Sounds” which dealt with one of the nurses being harassed and molested by a patient. That was changed a little, too, but it was still a very good episode. So, I was now being kept quite busy around this time and producing work that I felt was good and was even breaking some new ground.

  I know that around this time you joined the Army. By my reckoning this would be sometime around 1962, correct?

  It might be, yeah. I was in a reserve unit and I was called up on active duty and shipped down to a small Army base in Virginia, near Williamsburg. As fate would have it, I arrived there around Christmas, just as the Army were preparing to do their annual Christmas pageant. The chaplain, who was a Protestant chaplain, got me to write the Christmas show, which I was happy to do. When the chaplain discovered I could write a little, he decided to keep me on to write the radio program. David Carradine was also stationed at Fort Eustis, Virginia, at the same time I was, and we became very close friends. I was writing the radio program and David was painting the murals. We were both supposed to be stevedores, but we were working for the chaplain. We didn’t mind because it was a lot better than some of the other tasks we could have been doing there. I was happy to end up with the chaplain because I had access to a typewriter and the freedom to write stuff. It was great. Officially, I may have been a stevedore but there was really nothing for the recruits to do when they were called to service. It could all get pretty mind-numbing because each and every day we would be expected to load and unload the very same ship. It was incredibly boring, very monotonous work, and I don’t like to do monotonous work. No, I was fine writing the little radio show in the chaplain’s office. I could just sit in there and write my scripts. I thought my time in the Army was very enjoyable and I was still able to be creative. David and I did a play together called Once Upon a Mattress, which had been a famous Broadway musical based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Princess and the Pea. We did a tour of it around some of the Army bases and had several military personnel playing the various parts. It was fun.

  How did your Army service affect your television writing career?

  Well, I actually wrote my first episode of The Defenders whilst I was in the Army and mailed the treatment in to the producers. It was called “Kill or Be Killed” which was about a man who commits a crime as he is being transported to Sing Sing prison. My mother called me and said that the makers of The Defenders were trying to reach me. Apparently, they took a liking to what I’d done and allowed me to write the show. Of course, now certain people wanted to meet with me which was a potential problem because here I was in the Army. This inevitably meant that I would have to go AWOL if I was going to convene with these people. I had to go AWOL on Fridays, so I could get into New York City and meet with the producers. They were well aware of the situation and would always schedule my meetings for Friday afternoons. I remember I would get on a plane in the morning and fly into Manhattan from Virginia. I then had my meetings, spent the weekend in New York, before flying back to Virginia on the Sunday night. It was too close for comfort at times, but I never got caught. Not once.

  You also wrote “The Golden Thirty” for The United States Steel Hour, which I understand had some autobiographical content.

  That’s correct. “The Golden Thirty” was an autobiographical play about a boy who wants to become a comedian. I was played in it by — of all people — Keir Dullea of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame. I thought that was pretty unlikely casting to be honest with you, but Keir was a nice fellow. Nancy Kovack was the leading lady and she ended up marrying Zubin Mehta, the famous conductor, and quit acting altogether. The comedian Henry Youngman was also in it, playing the ageing comedian who steals the boy’s jokes. I was originally hoping that we’d get Jack Carson for the role, because Carson had the comedic qualities that I felt were necessary for that character, but he could act, as well. But Youngman did a very good job and really captured that sense of desperation and sadness that s
ome comedians have, particularly when they get older. You used to see some old comics who’d been churning out the same tired routine for decades, night after night, year after year, always the same material. That was the life and that sadness was pretty endemic and very depressing. So, “The Golden Thirty” has a lot of truth in it, and I think it was Youngman’s only dramatic role on television. I really enjoyed doing that show because it had a lot of familiar, personal elements in it about my life. That one was also done live.

  You contributed two episodes of The Fugitive, “Escape into Black” in 1964 and “Scapegoat” in 1965. What was it like working on that show for producer Quinn Martin’s company?

  I didn’t much like working for them, but I thought “Escape into Black” was one of The Fugitive’s very best shows. It was a very clever story in which Richard Kimble, who, of course, is wrongfully wanted for the murder of his wife, has temporary amnesia. He starts to believe that he really did kill his wife and now thinks that the police are entirely justified in their pursuit of him. Kimble decides to surrender himself to the authorities and take his punishment. He calls up Lieutenant Gerard, the cop who has been relentlessly chasing him, and agrees to meet with him. Then, as Kimble travels on the train to meet with Gerard, he remembers the train wreck which allowed him to escape from custody on his way to the death-house. He suddenly realizes that he is indeed innocent and he has to get away. I thought “Escape into Black” was an excellent show. It was different from a lot of the other episodes in what it did with Kimble’s character and his situation. It also gave Gerard a little something extra. I mean, after Kimble confesses on the phone that he is guilty of murdering his own wife, Gerard believes all the more intensely that this guy should be brought to justice. So, it gave the lieutenant an added conviction to get his man as the series continued. I don’t remember anything about “Scapegoat.” I have no recollection of having written that episode. That might even be a mistake on somebody’s part.