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What a great idea for any gift giving occasion. Call to give a gift subscription today! 248.357.5558 a on Cohen, the co-screen- writer of Minority Report, has the perfect headline for recent events in his life. "Ordinary guy sits in room and writes Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise flick by accident," he says with a laugh. It's an apt way to describe the ascent of a for- mer registered nurse who taught him- self to write movies strictly from books. In fact, Cohen, now 47, never had a screenplay produced until Cruise read his Report and sent it off to Spielberg in the late 1990s. Suddenly, the Swarthmore, Pa., resident was meeting with the legendary director: "It was trippy," he recalls. The meeting was as surreal as some- thing out of Philip K. Dick, whose noirish sci-fi story inspired Report. But Cohen took it in stride. "I didn't freak out," he says, "because I was a nurse for many years and I had people die and blood and weirdness and big situations, so I know what matters in life." Cohen's life changed in 1997, when director Jan de Bont asked him to rewrite a screenplay based on Dick's 1956 story (he now shares screenplay credit with Out of Sights Scott Frank). The plot revolves around a futuristic police squad that uses seers to predict murders and bust potential killers before they act. Everything goes hay- wire when "Precrime" chief John Anderton (played by Cruise in the movie) gets fingered and goes on the lam. Dick's bare-bones story had already boggled several screenwriters, but Cohen discovered an affinity with the late author. Not that he had popped pills, guzzled scotch and burned through five marriages like the notori- ously paranoid Dick — who claimed to be channeling a medieval rabbi before he died in 1982 at 54. "But Dick had, among other weird- nesses, a vertigo problem, which gives you a kind of dizziness, a skewed reali- ty," Cohen says. "And I have double vision, multiple vision, a slight genetic abnormality that makes things look a little weird to me. So I identified with ) Dick's sense of feeling uncomfortable, that something's not quite right with the world." Cohen, who wears thick glasses, invented optic imagery to complement Dick's concept of visionary seers — resulting in some of the film's coolest eye-candy. "Minority Report is the per- fect story for a guy who's obsessed with eyes," Cohen says. The screenwriter's childhood was more about Moby Dick than Philip K. Dick. His father, an English professor, was a Herman Melville scholar. A Southern-born Jew whose German grandfather immigrated to South Carolina around 1890, he relocated to Swarthmore in 1960. Cohen, whose mother is Presbyterian, grew up celebrating Passover and Easter. Eventually, he earned a degree in English, but — in a move he describes as "both cowardly Inffinority Report is a film that strives to show that seeing is not necessarily believing — and how open eyes can be a curse as much as - a blessing. Rarely pausing for a breather from the chase plot that sees John Anderton (Tom Cruise) running for his freedom after being tagged for a murder he will commit two days hence, the film manages to main- tain its adrenaline level for a full 2 1/2 hours. That's not an easy trick in today's marketplace, and is just one of a dozen reasons Minority Report rep- resents a perfect marriage of Cruise's megastar power and Spielberg's bottomless well of corn- passion. In the year 2054, the highways of our cities have been reconfigured to operate up, down and sideways; slideshows are so three-dimensional it looks like you could actually touch a memory; and Washington, D.C., hasn't had a murder in six years — thanks to Precrime. The pilot police program uses the special gifts of three "precogs" — humans who exist in a sort of amphibious, semi-comatose state in ,.. ..„.,:., , ..,,,,,„ .