Harry Cohn(1891-1958)
- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Production Manager
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 the 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 St., 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 Harry's 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 (IMP), rapidly working his way from 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 grown 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 at a local nickelodeon, singing
duo for $28 per week, with Ruby receiving the biggest slice of the pie.
The act would split up within a year and, after a brief stint as a
trolley-car fare collector, Harry hit on the idea of applying song
plugging to motion pictures. He produced a handful of silent shorts in
which 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. With them went Joe Brandt. The three formed
CBC Film Sales, which released shorts, mostly terrible--so terrible, in
fact, they earned the studio the nickname "Corned Beef and Cabbage
Productions" (Harry would explode into a rage whenever he heard this).
Desperate to put distance between he and his brother, Harry headed for
Hollywood to oversee CBC productions there. By design or opportunity he
ended up working out of the old Balshofer Studio on Hollywood Boulevard
and gradually created his own studio, renting out the Independent
Studios lot on Sunset and Gower. This was the heart of "Poverty
Row"--so-called because it was an area filled with the offices of
low-budget production companies and fly-by-night producers, who ground
out ultra-cheap programmers (mostly westerns) hoping to make a few
bucks. Harry was home.
He began producing 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 features, and the company scraped $20,000 together
and produced
More to Be Pitied Than Scorned (1922).
Through the then-complex system of exchange releasing and so-called
states rights sales, CBC netted $130,000 on the picture and, even more
importantly, scored a deal for five additional features. By the end of
1923 CBC had released ten features, none of which lost money--a
remarkable event along Gower Gulch. Harry was extremely conscious of
his place in Hollywood and took offense at the derision CBC films
received. He finally had enough, and on January 10, 1924, the company's
name became Columbia Pictures Corporation. The next year the company
paid $150,000 for a property at 6070 Sunset Boulevard. The partners
made a fateful decision about the same time: unlike most of the other
major studios (and this definition certainly didn't include Columbia at
the time), they opted to forego theater ownership. This decision would
prove extremely wise over the next 3three decades. Under Harry,
Columbia rose from the Gower Gulch ash heap. His releases rarely
featured A-list stars but consistently made money. Columbia took its
first tentative stab at A-list feature production with
The Blood Ship (1927) (its first
featuring the now-familiar torch lady logo), and even that was made
using a faded star, Hobart Bosworth, who
agreed to appear in the melodrama for free.
Fate smiled on Harry when former
Mack Sennett writer/director
Frank Capra became available, and he was
able to initially secure Capra's services for $1000 per picture.
Capra's importance to the fortunes of Columbia Pictures cannot be
overstated and, to be fair to Cohn, he recognized it. With rare
exceptions the studio utilized competent journeymen directors like
Erle C. Kenton,
Malcolm St. Clair or
Edward LeSaint, usually assigned to
projects starring capable B-level actors hired on a one-shot basis
(every so often Columbia would splurge and hire an "A"-list director
like Howard Hawks. With each of his
features, Capra's significance to Columbia grew, and with each hit
Capra was given increasing carte blanche; the congenitally tightfisted
Cohn would still fight bitterly with his star director over budgets,
but would usually relent to the demands of his productions. Strangely,
Columbia's status as a Poverty Row outfit actually helped. The major
studios loaned them temperamental stars who demanded pay raises or
script approval--since working for a "low-rent" studio like Columbia
was considered punishment in the class-conscious world of
Hollywood--and Harry enthusiastically assigned them to Capra's
pictures, a tactic that usually paid off big. A top actor from MGM or
Warners was expected to suffer in the low-budget purgatory of Gower
Gulch but usually left eagerly wanting to work for Capra again. One
such production,
It Happened One Night (1934),
single-handedly propelled the studio into the ranks of the majors and
garnered Columbia its first Oscars (although the studio had been
nominated for productions infrequently since 1931). Cohn never looked
back; signing directors to contracts was one thing, but hordes of
potentially unruly actors was another thing entirely--he held firm to
his long-standing belief that contract stars were nothing but trouble,
after paying keen interest to
Jack L. Warner's battles with
James Cagney,
Bette Davis and
Olivia de Havilland. In 1934 he
signed The Three Stooges (who would
enjoy a 22-year run at Columbia) and recent German émigré
Peter Lorre (Cohn was at a loss on
how to utilize him and Lorre would spent most of his time at Columbia
being loaned out to other studios) to long-term contracts, but wouldn't
begin to build a roster of contract stars in earnest until the late
1930s, beginning with Rosalind Russell,
and always he kept their numbers comparatively small
(William Holden,
Glenn Ford and
Rita Hayworth were among the select few in
the late 1930s and early 1940s).
The vast majority of Columbia's output remained at the B-level well
into the 1950s, but most of its films were profitable. It took Columbia
until 1946 to experience its first bona fide blockbuster with
The Jolson Story (1946), which
netted $8 million on a $2-million investment and resulted in a
profitable sequel in 1949. Among the major studios only Paramount and
Columbia eagerly welcomed the intrusion of television, and Columbia
responded by creating a subsidiary, Screen Gems (created by Harry's
nephew Ralph Cohn) in the early 1950s. The
division would pay off handsomely over the next 20 years.
Harry and his brother Jack continued to fight fiercely over business
matters until Jack's death in 1956. Harry himself died of a heart
attack in 1958. Despite his undeniable crudeness--the boorish,
thuggish, crooked, loudmouthed "Harry Brock" character in
Garson Kanin's classic
Born Yesterday (1950), memorably
played by Broderick Crawford,
was largely based on Cohn), Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures never had a
negative year during his 30-year-plus reign--a record only approached
by Louis B. Mayer, who ruled MGM from
1924 through mid-1951. Columbia began from a far more disadvantaged
position than MGM did, though, and it thrived due to Cohn's keen judge
of talent and his near-fanatical adherence to early business policies
that were originally ridiculed.
abrasive. No major studio executive of the so-called "Golden Age" was
more loathed (although at times the dictatorial
Samuel Goldwyn and the 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 St., 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 Harry's 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 (IMP), rapidly working his way from 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 grown 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 at a local nickelodeon, singing
duo for $28 per week, with Ruby receiving the biggest slice of the pie.
The act would split up within a year and, after a brief stint as a
trolley-car fare collector, Harry hit on the idea of applying song
plugging to motion pictures. He produced a handful of silent shorts in
which 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. With them went Joe Brandt. The three formed
CBC Film Sales, which released shorts, mostly terrible--so terrible, in
fact, they earned the studio the nickname "Corned Beef and Cabbage
Productions" (Harry would explode into a rage whenever he heard this).
Desperate to put distance between he and his brother, Harry headed for
Hollywood to oversee CBC productions there. By design or opportunity he
ended up working out of the old Balshofer Studio on Hollywood Boulevard
and gradually created his own studio, renting out the Independent
Studios lot on Sunset and Gower. This was the heart of "Poverty
Row"--so-called because it was an area filled with the offices of
low-budget production companies and fly-by-night producers, who ground
out ultra-cheap programmers (mostly westerns) hoping to make a few
bucks. Harry was home.
He began producing 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 features, and the company scraped $20,000 together
and produced
More to Be Pitied Than Scorned (1922).
Through the then-complex system of exchange releasing and so-called
states rights sales, CBC netted $130,000 on the picture and, even more
importantly, scored a deal for five additional features. By the end of
1923 CBC had released ten features, none of which lost money--a
remarkable event along Gower Gulch. Harry was extremely conscious of
his place in Hollywood and took offense at the derision CBC films
received. He finally had enough, and on January 10, 1924, the company's
name became Columbia Pictures Corporation. The next year the company
paid $150,000 for a property at 6070 Sunset Boulevard. The partners
made a fateful decision about the same time: unlike most of the other
major studios (and this definition certainly didn't include Columbia at
the time), they opted to forego theater ownership. This decision would
prove extremely wise over the next 3three decades. Under Harry,
Columbia rose from the Gower Gulch ash heap. His releases rarely
featured A-list stars but consistently made money. Columbia took its
first tentative stab at A-list feature production with
The Blood Ship (1927) (its first
featuring the now-familiar torch lady logo), and even that was made
using a faded star, Hobart Bosworth, who
agreed to appear in the melodrama for free.
Fate smiled on Harry when former
Mack Sennett writer/director
Frank Capra became available, and he was
able to initially secure Capra's services for $1000 per picture.
Capra's importance to the fortunes of Columbia Pictures cannot be
overstated and, to be fair to Cohn, he recognized it. With rare
exceptions the studio utilized competent journeymen directors like
Erle C. Kenton,
Malcolm St. Clair or
Edward LeSaint, usually assigned to
projects starring capable B-level actors hired on a one-shot basis
(every so often Columbia would splurge and hire an "A"-list director
like Howard Hawks. With each of his
features, Capra's significance to Columbia grew, and with each hit
Capra was given increasing carte blanche; the congenitally tightfisted
Cohn would still fight bitterly with his star director over budgets,
but would usually relent to the demands of his productions. Strangely,
Columbia's status as a Poverty Row outfit actually helped. The major
studios loaned them temperamental stars who demanded pay raises or
script approval--since working for a "low-rent" studio like Columbia
was considered punishment in the class-conscious world of
Hollywood--and Harry enthusiastically assigned them to Capra's
pictures, a tactic that usually paid off big. A top actor from MGM or
Warners was expected to suffer in the low-budget purgatory of Gower
Gulch but usually left eagerly wanting to work for Capra again. One
such production,
It Happened One Night (1934),
single-handedly propelled the studio into the ranks of the majors and
garnered Columbia its first Oscars (although the studio had been
nominated for productions infrequently since 1931). Cohn never looked
back; signing directors to contracts was one thing, but hordes of
potentially unruly actors was another thing entirely--he held firm to
his long-standing belief that contract stars were nothing but trouble,
after paying keen interest to
Jack L. Warner's battles with
James Cagney,
Bette Davis and
Olivia de Havilland. In 1934 he
signed The Three Stooges (who would
enjoy a 22-year run at Columbia) and recent German émigré
Peter Lorre (Cohn was at a loss on
how to utilize him and Lorre would spent most of his time at Columbia
being loaned out to other studios) to long-term contracts, but wouldn't
begin to build a roster of contract stars in earnest until the late
1930s, beginning with Rosalind Russell,
and always he kept their numbers comparatively small
(William Holden,
Glenn Ford and
Rita Hayworth were among the select few in
the late 1930s and early 1940s).
The vast majority of Columbia's output remained at the B-level well
into the 1950s, but most of its films were profitable. It took Columbia
until 1946 to experience its first bona fide blockbuster with
The Jolson Story (1946), which
netted $8 million on a $2-million investment and resulted in a
profitable sequel in 1949. Among the major studios only Paramount and
Columbia eagerly welcomed the intrusion of television, and Columbia
responded by creating a subsidiary, Screen Gems (created by Harry's
nephew Ralph Cohn) in the early 1950s. The
division would pay off handsomely over the next 20 years.
Harry and his brother Jack continued to fight fiercely over business
matters until Jack's death in 1956. Harry himself died of a heart
attack in 1958. Despite his undeniable crudeness--the boorish,
thuggish, crooked, loudmouthed "Harry Brock" character in
Garson Kanin's classic
Born Yesterday (1950), memorably
played by Broderick Crawford,
was largely based on Cohn), Harry Cohn's Columbia Pictures never had a
negative year during his 30-year-plus reign--a record only approached
by Louis B. Mayer, who ruled MGM from
1924 through mid-1951. Columbia began from a far more disadvantaged
position than MGM did, though, and it thrived due to Cohn's keen judge
of talent and his near-fanatical adherence to early business policies
that were originally ridiculed.