Cohen, Brother

David Bushman
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

Cult filmmaker extraordinaire Larry Cohen got his start in TV noir.

Image via quadcinema.com

Once described by The New Yorker as a “geyser of ideas both cheesy and profound,” Larry Cohen has been writing and/or directing television shows and movies for fifty-nine years.

His first script, for a 1958 installment of Kraft Mystery Theatre titled “Night Cry” (starring Jack Klugman and featuring a brief, show-stealing performance by a young Peter Falk), aired when he was seventeen years old.

Today Cohen is best known as the auteur behind such fabled B movies as Q: The Winged Serpent, It’s Alive, and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, as explored in Steve Mitchell’s upcoming documentary King Cohen, featuring testimony from Martin Scorsese and J.J. Abrams, among others.

Image via thequietus

But Cohen boasts writing or story credits on more than one hundred television episodes, including The Fugitive, one of the great television noirs of all time and a featured program in the Paley Center’s August screening series TV Noir: Let There Be Dark, in addition to creating some of TV best known shows from the sixties and seventies, among them The Invaders, a sci-fi paranoid thriller that influenced The X-Files, and Branded, Blue Light, and Coronet Blue — all notable for their lonely, alienated heroes. Cohen’s trademark is that he almost never stuck around for long, either because of creative differences (as with legendary producer Quinn Martin, who was handed control of The Invaders by ABC) or simply because he was more bored, and itching to move on to new ideas. He is, after all, a geyser of them.

We spoke recently Cohen about his contributions to TV noir, as you can hear here.

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