Barry Michael Cooper is one of the first journalists who explored the trend of cracks in the 1980s before looking at Hollywood, and on January 21, with a rough movie script like “New Jack City”. I died in Baltimore. He was 66 years old.
His death at the hospital was confirmed by his son Matthew Cooper who did not quote the cause.
As a writer, Cooper, who grew up in Harlem, was probably the best in three films called his Harlem trilogy. The first “New Jack City” (1991) has reserved a movie wave from a black director and a scriptwriter for the ruthless Uptown Drug Road (Wesley Snipse) in the 1990s.
This trilogy also included two movies in 1994. “Sugar Hill” is another drug dense drama starring Snipes and a basketball drama starring Tupak Shacour as a dealer, a basketball drama and a movie director, Jeff Polak, written by Cooper as a Benny Medina.
Whatever the medium, Cooper fused the rich literary sensitivity and the deep knowledge of the Ghetto language and status symbol. “I knew everything, from Hemingway to Dostoevsky,” said the author, critic and film director Nerson Joji, who cooperated with Cooper in Village Voice. “At the same time, he was very connected to the streets slang.”
Mr. Cooper, as with the blood -covered hustle of the 1980s and 1990s, flashing the thick gold rope and the cash roll of hockey pack size, in pursuit of overnight wealth and overturning the community I did it.
“I wanted to detail their voice. This is how Hustler spoke,” said Cooper in 2007 interview with STOP SMILING, a magazine of art and culture. “I wanted to put it in a literary context like” Great Gatsby. ” “
He added that his goal was to “take Harem and Renaissance and put it in the context of modern times.”
In 1986, he published a detailed investigation of Spin's Crack Boom and The Music and Culture Magazine. “Sign Wai's arm folded on a chest with a gold medallion,” he wrote in the article.
One year later, he won the US Black Journalist Association in the spin article “IN COLD BLOOD: The Baltimore Teen Murders” about the eruption of violence by a teenager gun.
His 1987 village's audio cover article “Kids Kill Kids Kids: New Jack City Eat Young” is “Detroit with a young street -level dealer who earned $ 2,000 per day. We recorded explosive drug trading, “said Cooper in 1991. Interview with Terry Gross of the NPR program “Fresh Air”.
“These were new cases of lower privileged lower class,” he said. “I carried a beeper and a mobile phone, drove a jeep, went to a mall in Michigan, spent $ 10,000 on Gucci and Fendi's drop. I have never seen it.”
This article was a street term showcase that Cooper added, despite the twist. “My brothers used this term well,” he said. “He said,” Yes, that child is a new jack. ” It's almost a clear term, almost a newcomer. “
He added as follows: “Then I heard the song of Grandmaster Caz and used the line about this man,” New Jackpiero. ” I wanted to take a phrase and turn it over. It's a new jack that sounded strongly. “
Cooper called this semester in 1988 with the New Jack Swing of Teddy Lilly. In this voice, a voice is named by the famous Hip Hop, Dance Pop, and R & B blends by the prominent Riley. Record producer and songwriter as typical by artists like Keith Sweats and Bobby Brown.
By that time, “Children who kill children” had already opened the door to Hollywood. Two weeks after the article was released, Cooper said in an interview with The Voice in 2007: My head was huge. “
Mr. Cooper was hired to retur the script by the writer Thomper Light, based on the story of Nickyburns, a heroin road in the 1960s and 70s. He updated it in the crack era and focused on the fictitious Kingpin, Nino Brown, which became a “new jack city.”
The film by Mario Van Piebles featured a breakout performance by Chris Rock and the rapper actor ice T. Eventually, it gained nearly $ 50 million and was released at an extremely important time.
In 1991, he said, “The genre of the Black Professional Film was abolished for over 10 years, and a big hole in Black Hollywood remained. “New Jack City” was a sign of the revival of Hollywood's black actors, writers, and filmmakers, and the crystallization of hip -hops. “
Barry Michael Cooper was born on June 12, 1958 in Harlem, the elders of the two sons of Rafayet and Josephin Cooper. He spent the formation period at Esplanade Gardens, a cooperating high -rise complex. “There was a society of all levels,” he later said, “From billionaire to welfare people.”
He read a Harlem Renaissance writer, such as Langston Hughes and Wallace Therman, and remembered his Saturday to study black culture. After graduating from high school, he spent a year at North Carolina Central University in Dalam, North Carolina, and then transferred to Medger Evers College in Brooklyn. On the way, he fell in love with the story non -fiction, such as Gay Tales, Joan Dion, and Tom Wolf.
In 1980, Cooper embarked on his own journalism career, “The Gospel according to Congress,” a famous ensemble of Funk Titanjo Joji Clinton. His career as a reporter prospered in the 1980s, but after the hitting of New Jack City, he mostly abandoned Hollywood prints.
He acknowledged that he had gone to his head. “I refused my job because I was so expensive,” he told The Voice in 2007.
He finally realized that he was in a relationship with a woman arrested in 1997 for an attack. The condition of his judicial trading demanded that he would leave Los Angeles for one year. When he returned, he discovered that the opportunity had evaporated.
In 2005, Cooper tried to jump a career in the semi -otoviolafi web series “Blood on the Wall $” for a television producer who worked as a research reporter to pull out of tail spin. He wrote three episodes of the SPIKE Lee 1986 Breakout movie in the 2017-19 Netflix series “She's Hotta it”.
Cooper's son is his only immediate survivor. Another son, Timothy Michael Cooper, died in 2020. His wife, Shal Maine (Rin) Cooper, died in 2022. He lived in Baltimore.
His running in the movie business was short, but Cooper was proud of his heritage.
“Without a new jack, there is no boys' N food,” he said. “There is no” Menace II Society “. The reason is that the general public knows that the studio suits are making money for these films. “
