Barry Michael Cooper, ‘New Jack City’ Screenwriter, Dies at 66
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.’”
His goal, he added, was to “take Harlem and the Renaissance and put it in a modern context.”
In 1986, he published an early in-depth examination of the crack boom for Spin, the music and culture magazine. “Sinewy arms folded across their chests laden with gold medallions,” he wrote in the article, “a silent roar creasing their lips in the guise of a sneer, the young lions usher their prey in and out of video parlors and misty hallways.”
A year later, he won the award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists for his Spin article “In Cold Blood: The Baltimore Teen Murders,” about the eruption of gun violence among teenagers.
His 1987 Village Voice cover article “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young” chronicled the exploding drug trade in Detroit, including the young street-level dealers who “were making like $2,000 a day,” Mr. Cooper said in a 1991 interview with Terry Gross of the NPR program “Fresh Air.”
“These were new examples of the privileged underclass, so to speak,” he said. “The ones who carried beepers and cellular phones, and drove Jeeps and went out to the malls in Michigan and spent $10,000 at a drop at Gucci’s and Fendi’s. I had never seen that before.”
The article was a showcase for a street term — “new jack” — that Mr. Cooper made his own, albeit with a twist. “My brother used the term a lot,” he told Stop Smiling. “He used to say, ‘Yeah, that kid is a new jack,’” meaning “someone who’s new to the game and frontin.’ It’s almost a derogatory term — almost like a rookie.”
He added: “Then I heard a song by Grandmaster Caz, and he used a line about this guy who was ‘a new jack clown.’ I took the phrase and wanted to flip it. It rang strong, new jack.”
Mr. Cooper again invoked the term in 1988 with “Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing,” an article in The Voice in which he gave a name to the blend of hip-hop, dance-pop and R&B pioneered by Mr. Riley, a prominent record producer and songwriter, as epitomized by artists like Keith Sweat and Bobby Brown.
By that point, “Kids Killing Kids” had already opened the door to Hollywood. Two weeks after the article was published, Mr. Cooper said in a 2007 interview with The Voice, “I was on a first-class flight to Hollywood to meet with Quincy Jones. My head was huge.”
Mr. Cooper was hired to retool a script by the screenwriter Thomas Lee Wright based on the story of Nicky Barnes, the heroin lord of Harlem in the 1960s and ’70s. He updated it for the crack era, focusing on a fictional kingpin, Nino Brown, in what became “New Jack City.”
Directed by Mario Van Peebles, the film featured breakout performances by Chris Rock and the rapper-turned-actor Ice-T. It eventually earned nearly $50 million and was released at “a pivotal time,” Sha Be Allah wrote in an appraisal for The Source magazine last year.
In 1991, he wrote, “the blaxploitation film genre had been defunct for over a decade, leaving a gaping hole in ‘Black Hollywood.’ ‘New Jack City’ was a harbinger of the resurgence of Black actors, writers and filmmakers in Hollywood, as well as the crystallization of Hip Hop’s synergistic capabilities.”
Barry Michael Cooper was born on June 12, 1958, in Harlem, the elder of two sons of Lafayette and Josephine Cooper. He spent his formative years in Esplanade Gardens, a cooperative high-rise complex. “You had all levels of society in there,” he later said, “from millionaires to people on welfare.”
He recalled spending Saturdays at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, reading Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. After high school, he spent a year at North Carolina Central University, in Durham, N.C., before transferring to Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Along the way, he fell in love with the narrative nonfiction of Gay Talese, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and others associated with the New Journalism movement.
In 1980, Mr. Cooper embarked on a journalism career of his own with a piece for The Voice, “The Gospel According to Parliament,” about the funk titan George Clinton’s celebrated ensemble. His career as a reporter thrived in the 1980s, but he largely abandoned print for Hollywood after “New Jack City” became a hit.
Success, he admitted, went to his head. “I got so high on myself that I turned down jobs,” he told The Voice in 2007.
He eventually found himself in a tangled relationship with a woman that resulted in his arrest on charges of assault in 1997, according to The Voice. The terms of his plea deal required him to leave Los Angeles for a year; when he returned, he found that opportunities had evaporated.
Mr. Cooper tried to jump-start his career in 2005 with a semiautobiographical web series, “Blood on the Wall$,” about a television producer who attempts to pull out of a tailspin by working as an investigative reporter. He was a producer of the 2017-19 Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It,” based on Spike Lee’s 1986 breakout film, and wrote three episodes.
Mr. Cooper’s son is his only immediate survivor. Another son, Timothy Michael Cooper, died in 2020; his wife, Charmaine (Lynn) Cooper, died in 2022. He lived in Baltimore.
Although his run in the film business was brief, Mr. Cooper was proud of his legacy.
“If there was no ‘New Jack,’ there would be no ‘Boyz ‘n the Hood,’” he told Stop Smiling. “There would be no ‘Menace II Society,’ because it let the public know, and more importantly let the suits in the studios know, that these movies make money.”
