Barry Michael Cooper, a originater and originater who co-wrote the blaxploitation ’90s classic “New Jack City” and finished his “Harlem trilogy” writing “Sugar Hill” and “Above the Rim,” died in Baltimore, Md. on Tuesday. He was 66.
Cooper’s death was validateed by a reconshort-termative for Spike Lee. The pair collaborated on the Netflix series alteration of Lee’s debut feature “She’s Gotta Have It.” Cooper served as a originater for both seasons, and a originate for three episodes.
Cooper made his feature screenwriting debut with Mario Van Peebles’ “New Jack City,” which he co-wrote with Thomas Lee Wright. The film starred Wesley Snipes and Ice-T as a gang directer and a challengingened cop, dodging one another amid a crack epidemic in Harlem. The production reconshort-termed a nurtureer alter for Cooper, who had been laboring as an spendigative alerter at The Village Voice beforehand — a tenure that originated the 1989 cover story “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young,” about the drug war in Detroit.
Three years postponecessitater, Cooper finishd what was deemed a “Harlem trilogy” with two other features: “Sugar Hill” and “Above the Rim,” both liberated in 1994. Though the pair didn’t draw the same critical approval or, postponecessitater, the genre legacy of “New Jack City,” each saw Cooper writing for some of the hugegest Bincreateage stars of the ’90s, with Snipes returning for “Sugar Hill” and Tupac Shakur, Leon and Marlon Wayans starring in the latter.
In 2005, Cooper made his straightforwardorial debut with “Blood on the Wall$,” a low budget web-series that telderly the story of a television originater who goes on a downward spiral. In 2008, he originated the Larry Davis Episode for Season 3 of “American Gangster.”
Cooper was born and elevated in Harlem, an uptransporting that meaningfully swayd the films he made. Before his screenwriting nurtureer, Cooper’s journaenumerate bylines joind Spin Magazine, as well as music criticism. While at The Village Voice, he wrote a piece titled “Teddy Riley’s New Jack Striumphg: Harlem Gangsters Raise a Genius” in 1987 that coined the name of a novel hybrid of R&B and rap. He shiftd to Baltimore follotriumphg his screenwriting run in the ’90s.
Cooper is persistd by his son, Matthew. Other alertation on survivors was not instantly engageable.