INTERVIEW: After decades of delays, ‘Chief Zabu’ is released in the age of Trump
Photo: From left, Zack Norman and Allen Garfield star in Chief Zabu. Photo courtesy of artist / Provided by press agent with permission.
The delays that surrounded Chief Zabu, the indie comedy from the 1980s that almost never saw the light of day, are legendary in Hollywood. Zack Norman and Neil Cohen came together and wrote a screenplay about a New York real estate developer who dreams of having political influence one day. They finished the movie in record time, with both co-writers also directing, and Norman starring in the feature (he was billed as Howard Zuker for the production, and Nancy Zuker was a co-writer). They kept costs down, utilized a local college campus for principal photography, and acted with friends and friends of friends.
Then the problems started. Their distributor at the time went belly up in bankruptcy, and Chief Zabu went into a legal limbo for the longest time. Only in recent years has there been a concerted effort to re-edit the film and release it for the public — with Norman and Cohen overseeing the new edition. Of course, in the interim, an actual New York real estate developer ascended to the U.S. presidency, and Chief Zabu now feels like a piece of cinematic soothsaying.
“It’s so exciting,” a clearly delighted Cohen said in a recent phone interview. “It’s so much fun.”
The movie was released this summer on several streaming platforms, including Vudu, Amazon, Google and Apple. A whole new generation are now the beneficiaries of Norman and Cohen’s can-do energy from the 1980s.
“I use it as a punchline, but it’s true,” Cohen said. “We didn’t know that when you make your first movie it’s not supposed to have 43 speaking roles and 22 locations purportedly in three cities and on two continents, so when we finished the movie, it was a little shaggy.”
Cohen remembers the difficult time of trying to get the movie into theaters. He can laugh about it now, but it was a trying time in the late 1980s. The distributor went bankrupt two weeks before the intended release, Cohen said, and Zabu found itself in the middle of a legal proceeding. In the meantime, Cohen moved on with his life, relocating to Los Angeles and writing scripts for various people and studios. Norman booked many acting jobs, building on his success in Romancing the Stone and Ragtime.
“We figured maybe one day we can get the movie back, which Zack did over the course of years,” Cohen said. “We wanted to cut it the way we wanted to cut it. In those days to hire an editor and a Moviola in a room somewhere was anywhere between $200 a day to $200 an hour, which we certainly didn’t have. Cut to 2016, this maniac named Donald Trump comes down an elevator and says he wants to run for president. He was the guy we had in mind when we made the picture. … And to our delight nowadays you can re-cut a movie on an actor’s laptop in North Hollywood for $200 a week.”
The duo had to search for months for the original print, but they found the 35mm negatives eventually. They brought it to a shop in Los Angeles, and the transfer began. “We did a test screening,” Cohen remembers. “Peter Bogdanovich was there. From that, they saw it at The Hollywood Reporter and gave it a great review. A couple of academics gave it a great review. We were interviewed on an NPR critics podcast, and the next thing you know, we’re bringing it out on VOD. We were going to do a tour of it in comedy clubs where Zack and I would do a little comedy intro, you’d see the movie, and then we’d do a comedy Q&A. But the COVID thing shut that down. We were plotting that out. So we said, you know what, it’s time for the public to see it. That’s why people can see it now and have some fun with it.”
Cohen said the dynamic of working with Norman was easy-going. They each wore several hats, but they became good friends and respected each other’s work.
“I had known Zach’s work because I was a freak for that sort of ‘80s independent filmmaking,” Cohen said. “He had financed the release of the great anti-war documentary Hearts and Minds in the 1970s, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, so I knew who this guy was. And he had read a script of mine, liked it, said let’s write together, hired me. I was doing all kinds of odd jobs that writers do, and we were writing scripts together. And then one day he told me this true story.”
That true story: Norman went to a suite at a swanky New York City hotel and saw a potential deal going down with an African leader petitioning the United Nations for statehood.
“Zack walked into this suite, and he saw every hustler, every con man, every crook in New York is in this suite surrounding this guy,” Cohen relayed. “And Zack said, ‘I knew this guy was screwed. He seemed like a very nice guy. I knew he was screwed. I made a u-turn and left.’ He told me that story. I said, ‘Let’s put aside everything we’re writing. That’s the movie we’ve got to write, and that’s a movie we can make.’ So writing it together was great fun because Zack and I have similar comic timing and tempo and also — for lack of a better term — maybe a little disdain for the conventional.”
They filled out the cast with friends. Cohen knew Allen Garfield, who plays the protagonist Ben in the film, and Garfield brought along friends from the Actors Studio. Ed Lauter, the late great character actor, wanted in because he usually was cast as the heavy. This time he wanted to show off his comedic chops.
“The guy who produced the movie was a friend of Zack’s,” Cohen said. “He was a line producer and asked to produce the movie. He had a friend who ran maintenance at Bard College, and so they slipped us in there for 15 days between the spring and summer sessions under the guise that it was a learning experience. We were happy to use 22 student interns on the film, but in terms of making the movie, it was kind of on the fly.”
It was a wild ride, and Cohen can finally say after 34 years: “What you see now is the movie we like.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Chief Zabu is (finally) available to be streamed on Vudu, Amazon, Google and Apple. Click here for more information.
