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Movies|Barry Michael Cooper, ‘New Jack City’ Screenwriter, Dies at 66
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/movies/barry-michael-cooper-dead.html
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After chronicling the crack boom of the 1980s as an investigative reporter, he had a high-profile but brief second career in Hollywood.
Jan. 28, 2025
Barry Michael Cooper, who was one of the first journalists to explore the crack epidemic of the 1980s before turning to Hollywood, where he made his mark with screenplays for gritty films like “New Jack City,” died on Jan. 21 in Baltimore. He was 66.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Matthew Cooper, who did not cite a cause.
As a screenwriter, Mr. Cooper, who was raised in Harlem, was perhaps best known for the three films often called his Harlem Trilogy. The first, “New Jack City” (1991), about a ruthless uptown drug lord (Wesley Snipes), presaged a wave of films from Black directors and screenwriters that touched on gang life in the 1990s.
The trilogy also included two films from 1994: “Sugar Hill,” another drug-hustling drama starring Mr. Snipes, and “Above the Rim,” a basketball drama starring Tupac Shakur as a dealer, which Mr. Cooper wrote with Benny Medina and the film’s director, Jeff Pollack.
Whatever the medium, Mr. Cooper blended a rich literary sensibility with a deep knowledge of the language and status symbols of the ghetto. “He was very aware of everything from Hemingway to Dostoyevsky,” the author, critic and filmmaker Nelson George, who worked with Mr. Cooper at The Village Voice, said in an interview. “At the same time, he was very, very connected to the slang of the streets.”
Mr. Cooper captured the glitter as well as the bloodshed of a new generation of 1980s and ’90s hustlers who flashed thick gold ropes and hockey-puck-sized rolls of cash while upending communities in pursuit of overnight fortune.
“I wanted to detail their voices — the way the hustlers talked,” Mr. Cooper said in a 2007 interview with Stop Smiling, an arts and culture magazine. “I wanted to put it in a literary context like ‘The Great Gatsby.’”
