Cult director Larry Cohen on how he became an A-list screenwriter.

By Scott Macaulay.

Colin Farrell in Phone Booth.

There’s only one thing wrong with the Davies baby..." said the poster for writer/director Larry Cohen’s ’70s horror classic. "It’s Alive!"

A master of lacing subversive social commentary within mainstream horror and thriller films, New York—born Larry Cohen was a pivotal figure from an earlier era of independent moviemaking. What his films lacked in production funding they more than made up for in concept, attitude and marketing panache. In fact, one suspects that if the director of God Told Me To, Q, The Stuff and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover had larger budgets he wouldn’t have been able to sneak as much anti-establishment criticism into his work.

Although Cohen’s filmmaking is often associated with a kind of grungy, proto-Abel Ferrara vision of New York, the writer/director is actually a politely loquacious Los Angeles resident. And this week, Cohen, who lives in a Coldwater Canyon home once owned by Sam Fuller, is anxiously awaiting the April Fox release of his latest project, Phone Booth, the Colin Farrell—starring tale of a New York publicist trapped in a phone booth by a sociopathic sniper. Although Cohen once thought of directing his script himself, he was convinced by CAA to allow the spec to be packaged with name stars and director – in the latter case, Joel Schumacher.

Cohen, 64, seems more than happy with his decades-long move from cult director to seven-figure screenwriter. As for Schumacher, Cohen says, "You have to like a director who goes out and shoots your script!"

Although Cohen’s best remembered genre films date from the ’70s and ’80s, the writer/director has more recently carved out a successful career as a Hollywood spec seller. "I wrote Phone Booth on spec, like I usually do," Cohen says. "I don’t like to be ‘in development’ because I don’t like suggestions when I am working. And when you develop a script for a studio, you have to tell them the whole story. I like to discover the story as I write."

"There’s no more suspense in movies today," Cohen continues. "It’s all bombs, planes, cars going off cliffs. In today’s movies the hero is always invulnerable. Movies are so overblown that I had the idea of making the world’s smallest movie – a movie that all takes place in a phone booth."

Larry Cohen (center) on the set of Black Caesar.

Cohen says he first had the basic idea for Phone Booth in the ’70s. "I wanted to bring the suspense genre back to where something was at stake. I talked many years ago with Alfred Hitchcock about doing this movie. He was very taken with the idea – I’d run into him and he’d say, ‘Where’s my phone booth movie?’ After he died I saw his daughter, Pat Hitchcock, at a DGA event – Hitchcock was getting a commemorative postage stamp. When she said he had many projects he wanted to do – including one set in a phone booth – that knocked me out of my seat!"

After Cohen finished the script, he thought about directing it himself. "I thought, I can put a phone booth in a corner of downtown Manhattan, use a hidden camera, and steal a lot of this movie," he remembers. "The movie’s principal character is a small-time publicist, a hustler. It reminded me of the old Tony Curtis movie, Sweet Smell of Success. And I thought, What would Sidney Falco be like today? Then I ran into Tony Curtis – he was pretty old, and his manager said [he’d do the movie] if he could have cue cards. At the same time, I was getting calls from CAA saying, ‘Please, let us package the movie. We’ll get big stars and a big director and make it into a movie that will revitalize your career.’ I thought, I’ve got six or seven scripts I can direct…"

"We started out with Nick Cage and Joel Schumacher," Cohen recounts. "And then they decided that they could get Mel Gibson, but we couldn’t make a deal. Then Will Smith jumped in with the Hughes brothers, but then Will backed out. Next, Jim Carrey would do it with Schumacher again. Then Carrey dropped out and the studios started getting nervous. I thought, here we go – a ‘go’ picture turning into a development deal. Then I had the call that Colin Farrell would do it. He’s a good actor and a great screen presence, and in the intervening period [between the movie’s production and its release] he’s become a big star. And the gimmick of the movie was always ‘a big star trapped in a telephone booth.’" For future projects, Cohen’s riffing off the gimmick that put him back on the A-list: "I sold another script called Man Alive, and it all takes place in an afternoon. I’ve got one called Moviehouse that all takes place in a movie theater during a screening. And then there’s Cellular, which New Line is doing. That’s about a guy running around the city trying to save a woman who’s talking to him on his cell phone the whole time."

Although Cohen hopes that Phone Booth will be a hit and that he can slip back into the directing chair, he says that changes in the indie scene make him just as happy to be pounding out scripts in his Beverly Hills home. "Independent film used to be me and maybe six other guys making movies. Now it’s 567 guys, and most of their films don’t get distributed, and if they do, it’s one week at the Sunset Five. When I used to make independent movies, we made money. It’s Alive cost $425,000 and made $39 million. I bought a brownstone in New York with my profits from that picture. Now, studios are picking up these movies for nothing. You can get a better deal on a script than a finished picture. There’s a lot to be said about handing in 106 pieces of paper instead of a 90-minute movie and getting the same money. Do I really want to kill myself or should I just take their million dollars? In some ways, when I finish the script, I’ve seen the whole picture in my head. It’s done."