Harry Cohn Pics

Harry

Cohn

New York

Cancer

27 February 1958

Male

Phoenix, Arizona

heart attack

They Do It On $8 Per (1919) (producer)

American

23/07/1891

Average

White

Jewish

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-complex system of exchange releasing and so-called state`s rights sales, CBC netted $130,000 on the deal and, even more importantly, scored a deal for five additional features. By the end of 1923, CBC had released ten features and none 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. On January 10, 1924 the company`s name became Columbia Pictures Corporation. In 1925 the company paid $150,000 for the 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 surely didn`t include them at the time), they opted to forego theater ownership. This decision would prove extremely wise over the next 3 decades. Under Harry, Columbia rose from the Gower Gulch ash pile. His releases rarely featured A-list stars but they consistently made money. It 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 him when ex-Sennett director Frank Capra became available and he was able to initially secure his 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 the rare exception of occasionally e

Harry Cohn

Jack Cohn, Maxwell Cohn

Charles Feldman, Joe Brandt, Frank Capra, Archie Mayo, Frank Borzage, Clifford Odets, Joseph Schenck

Frank Costello

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