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July 5, 2002/Tamuz 25 5762, Vol. 54, No. 42
Former nurse writes science-fiction flick
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
Jon Cohen, the co-screenwriter of "Minority Report," has the perfect headline for recent events in his life. "Ordinary guy sits in room and writes Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise flick by accident," he says with a laugh.
It's an apt way to describe the ascent of a former registered nurse who taught himself to write movies strictly from books. In fact, Cohen, now 47, never had a screenplay produced until Cruise read his "Report" and sent it off to Spielberg in the late 1990s. Suddenly, the Swarthmore, Pa., resident was meeting with the legendary director.
The meeting was as surreal as something out of Philip K. Dick, whose noirish sci-fi story inspired "Report." But Cohen took it in stride. "I didn't freak out," he says, "because I was a nurse for many years and I had people die and blood and weirdness and big situations so I know what matters in life."
Cohen's life changed in 1997, when director Jan de Bont asked him to rewrite a screenplay based on Dick's 1956 story (he now shares screenplay credit with "Out of Sight's" Scott Frank). The plot revolves around a futuristic police squad that uses seers to predict murders and bust potential killers before they act. Everything goes haywire when "Precrime" chief John Anderton (played by Cruise in the movie) gets fingered and goes on the lam.
Dick's bare-bones story had already boggled several screenwriters, but Cohen discovered an affinity with the late author. Not that he had popped pills, guzzled scotch and burned through five marriages like the notoriously paranoid Dick - who claimed to be channeling a medieval rabbi before he died in 1982 at 54. "But Dick had, among other weirdnesses, a vertigo problem, which gives you a kind of dizziness, a skewed reality," Cohen says. "And I have double vision, multiple vision, a slight genetic abnormality that makes things look a little weird to me. So I identified with Dick's sense of feeling uncomfortable, that something's not quite right with the world."
Cohen, who wears thick glasses, invented optic imagery to complement Dick's concept of visionary seers - resulting in some of the film's coolest eye-candy. The fictional Anderton hides out in a city where retina scanners track your every move. To fool the scanners, he has eyeball surgery and dodges spidery robots bent on prying his eyelids open. Meanwhile, the seers, known as "Pre-Cogs," view future murders as prismatic visions.
The screenwriter's childhood was more about Moby Dick than Philip K. Dick. His father, an English professor, was a Herman Melville scholar. He was also a Southern-born Jew whose German grandfather immigrated to South Carolina around 1890.
A relative put together an exhibit on Southern Jewry - including a cousin's college basketball jersey that read, "Jew Boy" - but the Cohens experienced more anti-Semitism up North than down South. When the professor relocated to Swarthmore, Pa., in 1960, the real estate agent refused to show him around the restricted gentile neighborhood.
Cohen, whose mother is Presbyterian, grew up celebrating Passover and Easter. Eventually, he earned an English degree but - in a move he describes as "both cowardly and practical" - he became a nurse and toiled for a decade in Philadelphia hospitals.
One evening in the 1980s, the creatively frustrated nurse came home and began typing a short story out of the blue. After years of hard work, he wrote a couple novels that were optioned by Hollywood producers.
His big break came the day he turned in his "Minority Report" draft; while Frank overhauled the script, he reportedly kept Cohen's structure and eyeball imagery.
Though Cohen's career has since skyrocketed, he still shops in thrift stores and lives in Swarthmore. Then he has a surreal, Dickian moment: "I've made a movie with Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg," he marvels. "How impossible is that?''
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