Cult B-movie director who found late success with Phone Booth

Born: July 15, 1936;

Died: March 23, 2019

LARRY Cohen, who has died aged 82, was a director and screenwriter for whom the term “Hollywood maverick” might have been specifically coined. Another fitting adjective was “guerrilla filmmaker”. When making God Told Me To (1976), he filmed a shoot-out in the middle of the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York, without the relevant authorisation, and included onlookers’ genuine reactions in the finished film. He eschewed storyboards, shot lists, and filming in studios – “When chaos reigns, I shine.”

Constantly fizzing with ideas, his wilder flights of fantasy as a B-movie director were complemented by a supply of scripts for television, where he devised scenarios for principled lawyers, lone heroes on the run, and the dishevelled detective Columbo. He had a late success with Phone Booth (2002), directed by Joel Schumacher from Cohen’s script, based on the irresistible ‘high-concept’ premise of a caller rooted to the spot by an unseen sniper on the line. It starred Colin Farrell; Cohen had written it, years earlier, for Tony Curtis.

Cohen was born into a Jewish family in Manhattan, where “We didn’t have a lot of money but I always had enough to go to the movies.” He maintained he made his first film, a short, silent spy caper with his apartment manager father’s 8mm camera, aged ten. While studying at the City College of New York, he got a job as a pageboy at NBC, and was swiftly selling scripts to live TV, commencing with The 87th Precinct (1958).

Cohen’s first TV series as creator was Branded (1965), a Western about a dishonoured cowboy, carrying a symbolic broken sword. He intended it as a comment on the McCarthy-inspired blacklist, displeasing its highly conservative star Chuck Connors. Cohen claimed that subsequently, Connors attempted to trample him while riding his horse.

After writing two episodes of The Fugitive for producer Quinn Martin, Cohen sold Martin the similar, albeit science-fiction tinged, The Invaders (1967-68). Despite his belief that the series was “a way to explore the political climate and deal with the idea of an unseen enemy in our midst”, arguably its best remembered aspect was the aliens’ identification being a distended little finger. Coronet Blue, a series he created in 1965 about an amnesiac, was shown two years later, and cancelled before its conclusion. Cohen later claimed its protagonist was a Russian sleeper agent, not unlike the recent series The Americans.

Directing and writing blaxploitation entries Black Caesar (1972) and Hell Up In Harlem (1973), he observed, “this was my chance to do my own Warner Brothers gangster movie in what was, at that time, modern dress.”

When supplying storylines for Columbo, his specialities were the final clues by which the murderers incriminated themselves. One was that the victim’s shoelaces had been tied by someone else. Cohen insisted he had written the series’ first episode, credited to story editor Steven Bochco, and directed by the then unknown Steven Spielberg.

It’s Alive (1974), the tale of a murderous, mutant baby, was Cohen’s biggest success financially. During a year living in London, he wrote a three-handed stage thriller, Motive (Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, 1976), with Honor Blackman, Ian Hendry and George Cole. Bette Davis's last film, the title role of Wicked Stepmother (1989), was fashioned by Cohen for her, but she walked out during filming.

Always an entertaining interviewee, it was Cohen’s lasting regret that his The Man Who Loved Hitchcock, a pastiche involving ‘Hitch’ as a character, was never filmed. He was the subject of a documentary, King Cohen (2017).

His second wife survives him, along with two daughters, two stepsons and one stepdaughter.

GAVIN GAUGHAN