Harry Cohn

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 five 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 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 an entry‑level job in the processing lab 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 would become the head of Universal’s East Coast operations and later a key factor in the brothers’ success. Harry grew 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 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 audiences to join in. His relatively modest success 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 him 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 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 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, 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 proved extremely wise over the next three decades. Under Harry, Columbia rose from the Gower Gulch ash heap. Its 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 $1,000 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