Barry Michael Cooper, New Jack City writer, dies at 66

Barry Michael Cooper, the screenwriter for films such as 1991’s New Jack City, has died. He was 66.

On Thursday, January 23, the Maryland Chief Examiner’s Office confirmed Cooper’s death to PEOPLE, pending an autopsy. Nelson George, Cooper’s acquaintance, also revealed his death in a Substack post on Wednesday, Jan. 22, claiming his son Mathew as the source.

George, an author, journalist, and filmmaker who previously collaborated with Cooper at the New York City-based publication The Village Voice, wrote on his Substack blog, “Barry helped define pop culture in the ’80s and ’90s with his early reporting on crack, naming Teddy Riley’s sound ‘new jack swing,’ and writing star vehicles for Wesley Snipes (New Jack City, Sugar Hill) and Tupac (Above the Rim).” Harlem deeply rooted his essence, despite spending a significant portion of his final years in Baltimore.”

According to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, Cooper started his career as a reporter and journalist for The Village Voice in the 1980s. He switched to writing screenplays with his breakthrough film, New Jack City, which featured Wesley Snipes and Ice-T. Cooper scripted two further films, Sugar Hill and Above the Rim, which were released in 1994 as part of his “Harlem trilogy,” concentrating on Black individuals living in New York City’s Harlem district, where Cooper was born and raised.

Cooper is listed as a screenwriter on eight films, television shows, and video games, including co-writing NBA 2K16 and Spike Lee’s 2017 Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It, a remake of Lee’s initial 1986 feature-length film of the same title. Cooper also served as the series’ producer.

He made his directorial debut in 2005 with Blood on the Wall, and he returned to the director’s chair in 2019 to make a short film called Guilt… In the 1990s, he directed music videos for musicians including Tevin Campbell and Grand Daddy I.U.

Cooper last shared a selfie on Instagram on January 16, with the caption: “15 January 2025 – Dr. MLK Day – Am I My Brother’s Keeper? – Baltimore, Maryland.

Cooper asserted in a 2007 interview with Stop Smiling that New Jack City significantly influenced hip-hop culture and cinema. “If there was no New Jack, there would be no Boyz n’ Hood, and 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,” he recalls at the time. “I think it set it off.”

Matthew, Cooper’s son, survives him; Variety reported that additional information about his survivors was not immediately available.