Word: cohn
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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...
...Cohn's ostentatious snobbery (he slags Hollywood at every opportunity) and quirks (he eats paper, he doesn't return phone calls) have been finally more self-defeating than charming. And while talented performers and directors can ^ remain willfully removed from the West L.A. schmoozathon, in this day and age an agent really cannot...
During preproduction on Wolf, Nichols' forthcoming movie starring Jack Nicholson, a source close to the director says that when Nichols encountered serious impediments -- Nicholson wouldn't commit, Columbia wouldn't approve the budget -- Cohn did not quietly throw his weight around and fix everything, Ovitzishly. "Mike ((Nichols)) would try to reach Sam," recalls the source, "and he'd have left the office for the night. And Mike couldn't just call ((Columbia chairman)) Mark Canton and yell at him himself." That's what superagents...