My Pilgrimage, Chapter Twenty-Three: King Cohen
By Michael Moriarty
web posted July 24, 2017
This week, my wife and I are off to Montreal to celebrate the life of Larry Cohen.
He creates horror movies. The title of the celebration is: King Cohen!
Or, as he himself describes his films, “shock shlock”. Did four and a half Shock-Shlocks with him. The “half” was an hour long television episode.
My actor’s life on earth in the eighties could be easily summed up as The Cohen/Clint Eastwood Decade.
I think, in retrospect, it was a very healthy and most beneficial ten years. Neither Mr. Cohen nor Mr. Eastwood are typically Hollywood. I never liked Hollywood from the first moment I entered it. And Hollywood really never liked me.
Despite my efforts to be what most American actors are expected to be, a Liberal?!
I failed completely.
Neither the Catholic nor the Liberal that some people wanted me to be, I found the Liberal, “Progressively” imprisoning ideology a suffocating, tyrannical straight-jacket.
My seemingly destined encounter with the Clinton Administration and their Attorney General, Janet Reno, made me an instant, political Independent.
Once Ira Glasser, then head of the A.C.L.U., informed me that as a result of my questioning a Liberal Administration about anything, I would be ostracized by the entire Eastern Seaboard and Hollywood.
As a result, I also felt obliged to leave my own country.
With one more, two-term Bush Presidency and the Obama Nation still to come?
Thank God I left.
Given the similarly insane administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, my dual citizenship, in both Canada and the United States, has become the perfect solution to the oncoming, all-threatening ambitions of what is described as The Progressive New World Order.
I’m rooting for President Donald Trump because he’s the only man in America strong enough and bold enough to question the last forty years of American Presidencies.
With the exception of President Ronald Reagan’s sterling years as Chief Executive of the most powerful nation in the world, the other Presidencies, ever since the profoundly tragic and, to this day, unsolved assassination of President John F. Kennedy, are, yes, a Larry Cohen Horror Show of terrifyingly corrupt, bipartisan clowns.
No, I don’t want The Progressive New World Order.
I want America “Great Again”!
And Canada back in the hands of men like Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Meanwhile, I ponder the prospect of Montreal and The Tribute to “King Cohen”.
I haven’t appeared in public for so long, I’m really not sure what to say. I hope, however, that I can, at some time in the three days I’ll be at the film festival, able to say:
“I’m going to keep my contributions short
because it is Larry’s celebration
and I am very grateful
to have been invited!
“It gives me the opportunity
To see one of my favorite appearances
In
Q THE WINGED SERPENT”
What I’ll have to say after that won’t be too long but it will be my tribute to Larry Cohen’s achievement as one of the few, truly renegade filmmakers of Hollywood. 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty.