Barry Michael Cooper, the screenwriter behind the influential “Harlem Trilogy” of films New Jack City, Sugar Hill and Above the Rim and the man who coined the term New Jack Swing, has died. He was 66.
Cooper died in Baltimore, Maryland, his friend the writer and filmmaker and former The Village Voice colleague Nelson George confirmed on his Substack. A cause of death was not immediately available.
After starting his career as a journalist in the 1980s, writing important pieces for The Village Voice and Spin Magazine, Cooper transitioned to penning screenplays drawing on the crime and culture of his native New York. His Harlem Trilogy of crime dramas were among the definitive Black films of the 1990s, and became hugely influential on hip hop music and culture.
Born in Harlem, New York, Cooper grew up in the Little Washington Heights neighborhood and also lived in Esplanade Gardens. In interviews, he has spoken of Harlem’s rich literary, musical, fashion and sports culture as sources of inspiration, but also the ruinous impact of crack cocaine. “Harlem is split into two periods: BC and AC, Before Crack and After Crack. There was a profound change when that drug hit Harlem,” Cooper told Stop Smiling in a 2007 interview.
After spending one year at North Carolina Central University, where he became well versed in the New Journalism movement, Cooper became a journalist in the early 1980s and wrote pieces for The Village Voice, then at the zenith of its cultural importance, working under the legendary music critic Robert Christgau. Talking to Rolling Stone in March 2024, Cooper remembered bringing to Christgau’s attention a new type of music that was becoming rapidly popular in the Bronx. “I had this conversation with Bob Christgau in January of ’80. I said, “There’s some music coming out of the Bronx called rap music. This is going to be a game changer.” He said, “I don’t believe that.” I said, “I’m telling you, there’s a group called Funky 4 + 1 — these four guys, a girl who’s a rapper, Sha-Rock. They got a record called “That’s the Joint.” This thing is phenomenal.” And two days later, he called me to come down to the Voice. “You were right. This is something.”
During his time at The Village Voice, Cooper wrote a piece about rising R&B producer and singer Teddy Riley in October 1987. The piece, titled “Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing: Harlem Gangsters Raise a Genius,” captured a star on his meteoric rise to the top but also coined the term “new jack swing” that defined the genre of music associated with Riley and his collaborators.
As well as from music journalism, Cooper also made his name with impactful investigative reporting. In 1986, Cooper was behind the feature story “Crack, a Tiffany Drug at Woolworth Prices” in Spin Magazine, one of the first national reports on the ravaging effects of the crack epidemic.
“When the story came in it was so well written and reported, and so alien from anything I had heard of, that I feared the writer made it up. The story was too good, too intact, too many colorful characters, too much dramatic, instant devastation,” Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin wrote in 2015 about Cooper’s story. “Lives, families, an entire community, were being shredded in weeks, not the years usually associated with drug addiction. People were selling their furniture, and themselves, for their next hit. It didn’t seem real.”
In December 1987, he wrote the piece “New Jack City Eats Its Young” for The Village Voice, a searing piece that chronicled the rise and rise of street drug dealers in Detroit who had reached millionaire status from the crack epidemic.
Cooper’s reporting on the crack epidemic and his intimate knowledge of the growing corporate nature of drug dealing caught the attention of film producers who wanted to make a film about drug kingpin Nicky Barnes. The script for the Nicky Barnes movie was written by Thomas Lee Wright, but Quincy Jones had seen Cooper’s Spin piece and drafted him to do a rewrite.
With Cooper’s rewrites, notably changing the drug at the center of the film from heroin to crack, the script would become New Jack City, his first screenplay. Made for a budget of $8 million and debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, the film starred Wesley Snipes as Nino Brown, the leader of ruthless Harlem street gang the Cash Money Brothers that builds a powerful empire built on crack. New Jack City was a big critical and commercial success, making nearly $50 million at the box office, and would become a cultural phenomenon that continues to this day.
“If there was no New Jack, there would be no Boyz n the Hood, there would be no Menace II Society, because it let the public know, and more importantly let the suits in the studios know, that these movies make money,” Cooper told Stop Smiling. “I think it set it off.”
Cooper next film project also involved Snipes, the 1994 crime drama Sugar Hill. Written soley by Cooper and directed by Leon Ichaso, the film focused on two drug dealer brothers from the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem. The critics were not kind to Sugar Hill, with many feeling that the film was too derivative of New Jack City though the film enjoyed respectable box office returns.
Cooper’s third film, Above the Rim, was released in theaters a few months after Sugar Hill, was met with a much more positive reception. Adapted from a story by Benny Medina, Above the Rim was directed by Jeff Pollack and notably starred rapper Tupac Shakur as well as Duane Martin, Marlon Wayans, and Leon. The film, about a rising basketball talent and his relationship with the drug gangs of Harlem, is considered the final film in Cooper’s Harlem Trilogy and was also a box office success.
After that initial burst of success, it would be some years before Cooper was able to make his next film project. Now relocated to Baltimore, in 2005, he made his directorial debut in the indie Blood On The Wall$.
Cooper’s last project was the 2017 TV series adaptation of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It for Netflix. Cooper worked as a producer on the show and also wrote three episodes.
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