Harry Cohn |
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Harry Cohn Biography |
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He was crude, uneducated, foul and, even on his best behavior, abrasive. No major studio executive of the so-called Golden Age was more loathed (although at times the dictatorial Samuel Goldwyn and hard-nosed Jack L. Warner came close) than Harry Cohn. Born in the middle of 5 children to Joseph Cohn, a Jewish tailor and Bella, a Polish émigré, Harry was raised on New York`s rough lower class East 88th Street where he followed his older brother Jack Cohn into show business. Harry`s life and the origins of Columbia Pictures are closely associated with Jack, whose early career paved the way for his own ambitions, despite the fact that the two brothers fought bitterly and each harbored deep resentment over the other`s success. By 19, Jack had left a job with an advertising agency to work for Carl Laemmle`s newly formed Independent Motion Picture Company (or IMP), rapidly working his way out of an entry-level job in the processing lab and through various positions where he founded Universal Weekly, one of the first newsreel outfits, for Laemmle. Jack soon found himself in charge of IMP`s shorts as an uncredited producer. He was involved in Laemmle`s first stab at feature production, Traffic in Souls (1913) which returned a then-whopping $450,000 on a $57,000 negative cost, convincing Uncle Carl to head west and invest in his own studio, Universal City. During this period Jack had convinced Laemmle to hire Joe Brandt, an attorney he`d worked for in advertising. Brandt, who would become the head of Universal`s east coast operations, would later be a key factor in the brothers` success. Harry had been growing up in his brother`s shadow, working for much of the first decade of the 20th Century as a lowly shipping clerk for a music publishing company. In 1912 he teamed with Harry Ruby as a local nickelodeon singing duo for $28 per week, with Ruby receiving the biggest piece of the pie. The act would split up within a year and after a brief stint as a trolley fare collector, he struck on the idea of applying song plugging to motion pictures. Harry produced a handful of silent shorts where popular songs were mimed by actors, inviting the audiences to join in. His relatively modest success at this greased the skids for his brother to recommend him for a job at Universal. At age 27, Harry was working for Laemmle. By 1919, Jack was itching for a change and wanted to become an independent film producer - he produced a series of shorts called Screen Snapshots, which purported to show stars` lives off-screen. Their popularity encouraged Jack to jump ship and Harry, sensing an opportunity went with him. And with them went Joe Brandt. The three men formed CBC Film Sales, which released mostly terrible shorts - so bad, it earned the nickname, `Corned Beef and Cabbage` Productions (Cohn would explode into a rage whenever he heard this). Harry, desperate to put distance between him and his brother, headed for Hollywood to oversee CBC productions there. Harry, by design or opportunity ended working out of the old Balshofer Studio on Hollywood Boulevard and gradually created his own studio, renting out the Independent lot on Sunset and Gower. This was poverty row and Harry was at home. Harry produced two reelers cheaply and nearly everything he sent east made money for CBC. It soon dawned on him that the big money wasn`t in shorts but in features and the company scraped $20,000 together and produced More to Be Pitied Than Scorned (1922). Through the then-comple
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Quotes All I need to make pictures is an office.
I have never met a grateful performer in the movies.
[on being a studio head] It`s better than being a pimp.
I don`t have ulcers; I give them.
I kiss the feet of talent Let me give you some facts of life. Every Friday, the front door of this studio opens and I spit a movie out onto Gower Street . . . If that door opens and I spit and nothing comes out, it means a lot of people are out of work--drivers, distributors, exhibitors, projectionists, ushers, and a lot of other pricks . . . I want one good picture a year, and I won`t let an exhibitor have it unless he takes the bread-and-butter product, the Boston Blackies, the Blondies, the low-budget westerns and the rest of the junk we make.
It`s not a business, it`s a racket.
If I wasn`t the head of a studio, who would talk to me?
Gower Street [location of Columbia Studios] is paved with the bones of my executive producers.
[to actress Joan Perry, when he signed her and Rita Hayworth at the same time in 1935] Hayworth will be a star, and you`ll be my wife [he married Perry six years later].
Trivia In the mid-`30s Cohn hired a relatively unknown cowboy actor, John Wayne, for a several-picture contract at Columbia with its `B` western unit. Cohn, a married man, soon got the idea that Wayne had made a pass at a Columbia starlet with whom Cohn was having an affair. When he confronted Wayne about it Wayne denied it, but Cohn called up executives at other studios and told them that Wayne would show up for work drunk, was a womanizer and a troublemaker and requested that they not hire him. Wayne didn`t work for several months afterward, and when he discovered what Cohn had done, he burst into Cohn`s office at Columbia, grabbed him by the neck and threatened to kill him. After he cooled off he told Cohn that `You son of a bitch, as long as I live I will never work one day for you or Columbia no matter how much you offer me.` Later, after Wayne had become a major star, he received several lucrative film offers from Columbia, including the lead in The Gunfighter (1950) (which was later made by 20th Century-Fox with Gregory Peck in the role), all of which he turned down cold. Even after Cohn died in 1958, Wayne still refused all offers from Columbia Pictures, including several that would have paid him more than a million dollars.
The career of Oscar-winning screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who achieved cinematic immortality writing Citizen Kane (1941) for Orson Welles, was effectively scuttled by his alcoholism. By the end of the 1930s he had been reduced to working for Columbia Pictures, a former Poverty Row studio turned into a major because of the huge success of movies directed by Frank Capra. Despite the wealth brought into the studio by Capra, it was a stingy place and the bottom of the barrel for a self-respecting screenwriter, a last stop before actually falling off the map in Hollywood. Mankiewicz had been fired by almost every other studio in Hollywood and was, by the late 1930s, a `ruined man,` according to fellow screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cohn was known for getting talent discarded by the major studios at bargain prices, and he signed Mankiewicz for $750 a week. On his part Mankiewicz was contrite, but Columbia producer William Perlberg, knowing Mankiewicz was an alcoholic with a sharp tongue who enjoyed baiting his bosses, banned him from the executive dining room in an effort to head off trouble. However, one day Mankiewicz defied the ban and wound up sitting at a table with Cohn and other executives. Cohn started the conversation with: `Last night I saw the lousiest picture I`ve seen in years.` After mentioning the title, one producer reported that he had seen it with an audience and they had loved it. He suggested that maybe Cohn would have had a different reaction if he had seen it with an audience. Cohn replied, `That doesn`t make any difference. When I`m alone in a projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it`s bad. If my fanny doesn`t squirm, it`s good. It`s as simple as that.` There was a momentary silence, which was broken by Mankiewicz. `Imagine,` he said to the other members of the table. `The whole world wired to Harry Cohn`s ass!` Mankiewicz was once again out of a job and eventually wound up writing scripts for Welles` Mercury Theater on the radio.
It was absolutely no secret that many people loathed Harry Cohn, but Cohn actually enjoyed his reputation of being the most hated man in Hollywood. In February 1958 when he died, the classic comment (usually attributed to Red Skelton) upon seeing the large number of people showing up for Cohn`s funeral: Give the people what they want, and they`ll turn out for it! When a member of the Temple asked the Rabbi to say one good thing about the deceased, he paused and said He`s dead.
Uncle of Robert Cohn.
Brother of Jack Cohn and Nat Cohn
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