Barry Michael Cooper, a writer and producer 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 confirmed by a representative for Spike Lee. The pair collaborated on the Netflix series adaptation of Lee’s debut feature “She’s Gotta Have It.” Cooper served as a producer for both seasons, and a write 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 leader and a hardened cop, dodging one another amid a crack epidemic in Harlem. The production represented a career change for Cooper, who had been working as an investigative reporter at The Village Voice beforehand — a tenure that produced the 1989 cover story “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young,” about the drug war in Detroit.
Three years later, Cooper completed what was deemed a “Harlem trilogy” with two other features: “Sugar Hill” and “Above the Rim,” both released in 1994. Though the pair didn’t draw the same critical approval or, later, the genre legacy of “New Jack City,” each saw Cooper writing for some of the biggest Black 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 directorial debut with “Blood on the Wall$,” a low budget web-series that told the story of a television producer who goes on a downward spiral. In 2008, he produced the Larry Davis Episode for Season 3 of “American Gangster.”
Cooper was born and raised in Harlem, an upbringing that significantly influenced the films he made. Before his screenwriting career, Cooper’s journalist bylines included Spin Magazine, as well as music criticism. While at The Village Voice, he wrote a piece titled “Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing: Harlem Gangsters Raise a Genius” in 1987 that coined the name of a new hybrid of R&B and rap. He moved to Baltimore following his screenwriting run in the ’90s.
Cooper is survived by his son, Matthew. Other information on survivors was not immediately available.
