Word: cohn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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However, when the powerful director Mike Nichols (who, at 61, epitomizes a certain Manhattan strain of cool, cerebral show-business class) dumps his long-time agent, the legendary Sam Cohn (who, at 64, epitomizes a certain Manhattan strain of cerebral, relentlessly colorful show-business class) in favor of the powerful Creative Artists Agency wunderkind Jay Maloney (who, at 28 -- 28! -- epitomizes a certain L.A. strain of clear-headed, buttoned-down, reassuringly colorless show-business class), the switch seems emblematic of larger, longer-running shifts in the way movies and plays get produced...
...Cohn. It is astonishing how recently (that is, during Jay Maloney's teenage years) Cohn was singularly powerful. Indeed, he was the first superagent of the modern age, a forerunner of Maloney's boss Mike Ovitz as a finger-in-every-pie packager who represented the writer and the director and the stars of a given production. Deep into the 1980s, Cohn had an impressive plurality of the stars and filmmakers with claims to blue-chip seriousness: Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Robert Altman, Bob Fosse, Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Nichols and so many more...
...nearly his entire decade-ago pantheon of movie clients have, one by one, left him. Lumet and Allen remain, but neither director is any longer someone whose films the smart set feels obliged to see, and neither has had a hit since -- well, since before Sam Cohn's influence ebbed. In 1991 a New York- based movie star signed with Cohn's agency -- but with the understanding she would not work with Cohn. And Broadway, the classier-than-thou underpinning of his Hollywood power in his heyday, is no longer much of a creative epicenter; only two straight plays...
...three households are visited by supernatural visions. To the afflicted lover, a Wasp whose family name can be traced to the Middle Ages, ancestors appear; so does an angel. The Mormon wife is transported to distant spheres by a mystical street black who materializes and vanishes. Cohn is spooked by Ethel Rosenberg, the accused Soviet spy whose judicial execution he maneuvered for his patron, Red-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...Cohn is at once the play's villain and hero. Ron Leibman, in the role of his career, makes the ruthless lawyer a delinquent child, waggling his tongue, mocking his superiors, cackling as he spews abuse, playing the telephone like an organ as he hypocritically curries or grandiosely dispenses favor. Stephen Spinella as the sick, saintly queen and Joe Mantello as his unhinged lover are endlessly watchable, nakedly real. Alas, David Marshall Grant and Marcia Gay Harden are ciphers as the Mormons, he as stolid as wood and she vibrating like Jell-O; neither offers insight into the pain that...