Hello, my name's Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan, and you're listening

to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we're talking about a personal favorite of me and

Will. None of those stodgy directors we force ourselves to talk about. Oh, come on. We're talking about Larry Cohen. Now, when we started this podcast, I think the first thing you said is like, we should do a Larry Cohen episode. And I think you were probably like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to space out these these slam dunk directors, these people that we know about. Now, if you haven't heard of Larry Cohen before, and you should have, get out there and watch his movies. Yeah, how dare you? You probably know him from films like Q the Wing Serpent and the stuff, and God Told Me Too. That's like his trilogy of popular films, I would say. And he's kind of the king of the high concept. If you don't know him from those movies, you may know him from some of the screenplays that he's sold over the years, most notably phone booth, the Joel Schumacher film. Cellular.

Cellular. A message is deleted. He did three phone or cell phone related thrillers in a row in the

2000s. I read that he actually doesn't type up his screenplays. He dictates them into a tape recorder. He did it all in one day.

Oh, that's funny. Yeah. But he's not a ton of other things. And also, like, he's known for, like,

he sold just dozens of scripts to studios. He's known for all these high concepts. In the 2000s,

he sued 20th Century Fox over the movie League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

because he insisted that it was a rip-off of a script that he sold them called cast of characters

or a script that he pitched them. And he said that the Allen Moore novel, that's just a smokescreen,

basically. I had actually never heard that story. Yeah, I think it's in the New Yorker profile of him from 10 years ago.

And when I think of Larry Cohen, I also think of someone that usually works completely independent.

That's something that he really prides himself on, is that all of his films, according to him, never really had real producers and that he produced all of them himself.

He comes across when he's interviewed as a bit of a control freak, maybe a bit of an egomaniac, but like, I like him. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Oftentimes he'll tell stories and interviews like, you know, oftentimes they assign you a production assistant, but that guy's usually just a spy of the studio. So I give him 20 bucks and I say, hey, go get yourself a cup of coffee.

Well, it's funny that we talk about how independent he is when he actually started kind

of working in the system, writing TV shows and stuff like that, creating TV shows.

Yeah, he wrote scripts for many of the, you know, popular shows of the 50s and 60s. The Defenders,

the Invaders was, I think, one that he created. Also, the fugitive later, he wrote for Colombo.

And branded, the Western that is referenced in the Big Lobowski, where the Jeff Bridges

and John Goodman characters actually go

to the creator of Brandon

and he's living in an iron lung and he dies.

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