Writer: Nicholas Cohen
Director: Nicholas Pitt
A true story with names changed to avoid multiple law suits, Life with Oscar takes Nicholas Cohen from the dark streets of Croydon to the bright lights of Hollywood via a horror movie in Australia.
Cohen is immediately engaging as a host welcoming the audience in and tempting them with the possibility of winning an Oscar as an introduction to the thing that drove him for most of the first 50 years of his life. His parents were on the fringes of the movie business, and in the mode of many actors who never quite made it, his dad seemed to pass all the hopes he had that never materialised onto his son. It was an ambition that was easily fuelled as Cohen was already addicted following a dinner party before he was even ten where his parents and friends talked about options for the upcoming Superman movie, and Cohen put himself forward for the role of Superboy along with other ideas that seemed good at the time.
Chance connections led him to Hollywood, house sitting for a director who also told him the secrets of how to win a best short film Oscar – clue, it has nothing to do with quality and everything with finding the right people to invite to dinner. But while winning an Oscar may be easy, he quickly discovered that the tricky bit is getting the film made in the first place.
Through a series of meetings and parties at the homes of the rich and the famous, Cohen takes the audience behind the glamour of Hollywood and into its seedy underbelly. It’s a world dominated with sex, drugs, favours and every other kind of shady unscrupulous motives you can imagine. Cohen rides with it till he reaches a breaking point.
Under Nicholas Pitt’s direction, he adopts a variety of voices and mannerisms that capture all the characters and their vices and prevents this from ever getting close to turning into a dry monologue. Like a recovering addict giving a Ted talk to people who have never had the same addiction but want to know the gory details of anyone who has, Cohen knows exactly how to pitch the script and holds the audience from the start to the redemptive finish. He turns nightmare situations into rich comedy and bad situations into waves to surf upon, leaving the audience feeling that they know more of the world they have seen on screens even if he might not have dissuaded them from trying to follow in his footsteps.
Runs until 27 August 2023 | Image: Contributed
