New Jack City Writer Barry Michael Cooper Dies at 66: He ‘Helped Define Pop Culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s’

Barry Michael Cooper, the screenwriter behind movies like 1991’s New Jack City, has died. He was 66.

The Maryland Chief Examiner’s Office confirmed Cooper’s death to PEOPLE on Thursday, Jan. 23, pending an autopsy. His friend Nelson George also announced Cooper’s death in a Substack post he published on Wednesday, Jan. 22, citing Cooper’s son Mathew.

“Barry helped define pop culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s with his early reporting on crack, by 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],” George — an author, journalist and filmmaker who previously worked with Cooper at the New York City-based publication The Village Voice — wrote in his Substack blog. “Though he lived much of the last decades of his life in Baltimore, he was Harlem to his core.”

According to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, Cooper began his career as a reporter and journalist withThe Village Voice in the 1980s. He transitioned to screenwriting with his debut feature, New Jack City, which starred Wesley Snipes and Ice-T. Cooper wrote two other movies that released in 1994, Sugar Hill and Above the Rim, all of which are known as his “Harlem trilogy” focusing on Black characters living in N.Y.C.’s Harlem neighborhood, where Cooper was born and raised.

Cooper is credited as a screenwriter on eight total films, television series and video games, including as a co-writer on video game NBA 2K16 and Spike Lee’s 2017 Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It, a remake of Lee’s debut 1986 feature-length film of the same name. Cooper also worked on the series as a producer.

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

Cooper posted a photo of himself on Instagram as recently as Jan. 16, when he published a selfie and wrote the following in a caption: “15 January 2025 – Dr. MLK Day – “Am I My Brother’s Keeper? – Baltimore, Md.”

When Cooper spoke with Stop Smiling in an interview published in 2007, he asserted that New Jack City made a significant impact on hip-hop culture and cinema. “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,” he said at the time. “I think it set it off.”

Cooper is survived by his son Matthew; per Variety, other information regarding his survivors was not immediately available.