Profile/Obiturary: Sam Cohn

Sounds like an interesting person. He called our office once.

Some highlights:

Cohn was not in the biz for the fame or fortune: he considered himself a facilitator of the arts rather than an agent salesman. He loved to discuss art with his clients, spending hours hashing out parts and dissecting scripts, while the phone messages from crazed colleagues out in Los Angeles piled higher and higher on his desk. Sue Mengers once described him as an “agent auteur,” only half jokingly. Not many agents could claim they saw a client's film 24 times, but that's what Sam did for Robert Altman or Bob Fosse. “He would basically become a collaborative partner to these artists, and fight the studios when they said they wanted change,” notes Marty Bauer, the UTA co-founder who was Cohn's Business Affairs attorney in the old days. “That’s why he flirted many times with being a producer. He wanted to be involved creatively. But Sam always knew that all these clients, who were his close friends, might not be there for him as a producer.”

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But Cohn’s eccentricities and attitudes became a serious internal problem. The agent made no secret of his contempt for Hollywood and its business and rarely flew out to the West Coast. “I wouldn’t want to live in L.A. any more than I would want to live in Los Alamos,” Cohn quipped. When forced to travel to L.A., he would routinely spend as little time as possible: take the 4 PM flight from Kennedy and arrive at 10 PM, then catch the plane out the following afternoon. Infamous for his paper eating, he once couldn’t get out of the LAX baggage area because he had eaten his claim check on the walk down from the plane. Once he arrived at the ICM headquarters, Cohn spent the majority of the day fuming about colleagues who acted more like "parking lot attendants to the stars” than agents, or the lavishly decorated offices which rated a “Hmmm, pretty tacky” response from him.

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Another problem was that Cohn, a lawyer himself, refused to work with the rising tide of entertainment attorneys, cutting them out of the dealmaking process whenever he could, and gathering a great store of personal enmity not only for himself but for ICM. Cohn in particular butted heads repeatedly with Barry Hirsch. The running feud became so bad that. at one point, Hirsch, Cohn and various lieutenants finally met to broker a peace conference, which was ended before it even began when Cohn imperiously informed Hirsch that “deals are the province of the agent and not of the lawyer.”