Who is Rob Cohen?
Detailed Rob Cohen Biography
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Rob Cohen Biography
Rob Cohen also Rob L. Cohen is an American director, producer and screenwriter of film and television. He began his career as executive producer at 20th Century Fox, Cohen produced and developed numerous high-profile film and television programs, including The Wiz, The Witches of Eastwick, and Light of Day, before concentrating full-time on directing in the 1990s. He was born on 12th March 1949 in Cornwall, New York.
Rob Cohen Age
Cohen was born on March 12th, 1949 ( 70 years old as of 2018)
Rob Cohen Wife/Kids
Cohen got married on Diana Mitzner his first wife in 1986 and they later got divorced in 1987. He then came to marry his current wife Barbara Cohen in 2006. Cohen is the father of four children.
Rob Cohen Early Life
Cohen attended Harvard University and graduated in 1971 after transferring from Amherst College after two years. His first endeavor in filmmaking was a commissioned recruiting film for Harvard’s Admissions Office in 1970, which became his senior thesis.\After graduation, Cohen went to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter for Martin Jurow but soon found himself unemployed when the producer moved out of state.
After a six-month stint as a kennel boy at the Harvey Animal Hospital in West Hollywood to make ends meet, Cohen landed a job as a reader for then-agent Mike Medavoy. Six weeks into his tenure at International Famous Agency (now part of ICM), he distinguished himself by discovering an unheralded script he found in a slush pile of neglected screenplays. Recognizing its quality, commerciality and uniqueness, Cohen wrote in his coverage that it was “the great American screenplay and this will make an award-winning, major-cast, major-director film.
Rob Cohen Photos
Rob Cohen
Rob Cohen Career
Cohen has distinguished himself as a celebrated screenwriter, producer and director. With a career in film and television spanning more than 40 years. In 1973, 20th Century Fox Television hired Cohen as ‘Head of Current Programming’ to help out with, among other shows, the first year of the epic hit, M*A*S*H. Eager to push Fox into ‘long form’, Cohen cold-called the head of ABC and introduced himself as ‘the head of television movies at Fox’.
Barry Diller gave him a meeting where he sold two TV films on the spot, which were properties he had found in the voluminous books of Fox’s unproduced properties. A week later, he duplicated the feat at CBS under Philip Barry. Fox president, William Edwin Self, was not happy that a junior employee had garnered these commitments without permission but grudgingly gave Cohen the title Vice President of TV Movies.
Barry recommended Cohen to is friend impresario, songwriter, producer and record label founder Berry Gordy. Who was looking to bring his company Motown into the film business. He connected with Gordy and he was hired to be the Executive Vice President and head of Motown’s Motion picture division.
Cohen went straight to work and developed Motown’s first movie from his own idea about the burgeoning phenomenon of African American Super Models he felt was perfect for Motown star Diana Ross. He sold the package to Paramount and in 1974, the cameras rolled on Mahogany in Chicago and Rome. At the same time, he developed a unique film from the Bill Brashler novel The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) starring Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones and Richard Pryor.
To direct he hired an unknown Tv director John Badham to make his feature debut, a critical hit set in the 1930s Negro National League (1920–31) Departing Motown in 1978, Cohen went on to produce and direct films and television series, including Miami Vice, Light of Day, The Witches of Eastwick, Ironweed, and The Wiz.
From 1990 Cohen moved on to directing full-time. Much success followed in his early years in the 90s films. Such being Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Dragonheart, Daylight and the Golden Globe award-winning film The Rat Pack.
At the age of 52 Cohen had became an action director, he directed the 2001 film The Fast and The Furious. It was a hit opening with $40 million its first weekend, starring relative unknowns Paul Walker and Vin Diesel. He later again partnered with Vin Diesel on XXX.
In 2008, he directed the third installment of The Mummy, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, grossing $401 million worldwide, and he directed Blumhouse Productions’ The Boy Next Door starring Jennifer Lopez in 2015.
Cohen is also a director of commercials housed at Original Film, having made over 150 television commercials for products such Disney’s Star Wars, Verizon, Ford, GM, Mercedes, Chevy, Saab and Burger King among many others.
Rob Cohen Movies
- The Fast and the Furious
- XXX
- The Hurricane Heist
- The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon
- The Boy Next Door
- Alex Cross
- Stealth
- Dragonheart
- Daylight
- Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
- The Skulls
- A Small Circle of Friends
- XXX: State of the Union
- Scandalous
Rob Cohen Accusations
February 21, 2019, Cohen’s transgender daughter, Valkyrie Weather, accused Cohen of sexually assaulting her as a child, as well as sexually assaulting another woman. Weather further claimed that Cohen had taken her to visit sex workers in Thailand and the Czech Republic when she was 13, supposedly in an attempt to “turn [her] straight”. Cohen denied this claims but his first wife and Weathers mother confirmed she had witnessed one incident of sexual assault against Weather while she was a child.
Rob Cohen Networth
Cohen has a networth of 40 million dollars
Rob Cohen Interview
Mr. Cohen, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to talk to me. I’ve been a fan of your work for a while now, so this really is an honor.
Thank you for that. I really appreciate it, more than you think.
No, I absolutely mean it from the bottom of my heart. Daylight was one of the first films I saw as a kid.
[Laughs]
Now, you’re very unique in that you started off producing and directing a lot of television before transitioning into the film genre. And I’m wondering, did your experiences on actiony shows like Miami Vice and Private Eye prepare you when it came to doing action movies like Fast and Furious and The Hurricane Heist?
Yeah, you know my first film was a sensitive drama about my experiences going through Harvard during the 1960s antiwar movement period. And a lot of times, when you start out making a movie, you have some crazy idea of what stories you want to tell.
But in 1985, when Michael Mann asked me to direct as many episodes for Miami Vice as I could, I went to Miami and for the first time I had guns, fast cars, sexy women, and handsome men. And man, did I have a blast doing that show [laughs]. And there was a point where I looked inside myself and I said “you know, this is who you are. These are the movies you love, so stop trying to be Truffaut and go do what’s in your heart,” which is create your own unique brand of action films. Because you’ll have a lot more fun going to work every day doing this kind of genre stuff that you love than you do agonizing over other things. So go for it.
And from that point on, I did. And I wrote Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story, which had both action and heart, and continued on with Daylight and so on. And it was like, okay I’m trying to do action films where the characters are actually more vivid and believable than one would guess from the trailer. And that’s where I found my great joy in the work I’ve done.
Oh for sure, and I think it definitely shows in a lot of your films where you think it’s just going to be a straight up action film, but you end up becoming invested in the characters. Like I remember in Daylight, there was the African American security guard, I forget the actor’s name…
Oh, Stan Shaw.
Yes, that’s him! It’s so sad when he has to be left behind when his neck gets broken, I almost cried. Now, you mentioned that you wanted to create a unique brand of action films, and I think that with The Hurricane Heist, you can’t get any more unique than that. This is such an outlandish premise and I really loved it because you don’t see this kind of innovation in films, especially bank heists. I know you didn’t write the script, but was it that creativity that initially attracted you to the project?
Yes, because it had an idea. The original script was like 20-some years old, so it needed to be modernized a bit, but the concept that [Jeff Dixon and Scott Windhauser] had come up with was so great. The idea of doing a heist under the cover of what these robbers think is going to be a kind of average hurricane: they don’t expect it to be the biggest one that’s going to hit the gulf coast.
And the complexity of that for me technically was how to do it. It was about how to A) make a hurricane, and B) how to make audiences reinterpret all the action film tropes. Cause a gun battle is no longer just shooting. You’ve got crap in the air going 116 miles an hour [laughs], and cars flipping and jumping around and it becomes a very different action scene than if you would have imagined this as a heist without a hurricane. Like in Ocean’s Eleven, where you’re in the real world, the danger is always “are they going to get caught, what are they actually doing?” And I love Ocean’s Eleven, but imagine if suddenly the casino was put on lock down, not that you’re going to get a hurricane in Las Vegas.
[laughs]
You have to reinvent chases and shoot outs, and any kind of stunt sequence has to be re-thought through because of the overpowering power of nature.
Now, when you talk about inventive action sequences, I remember reading in a past interview that you wanted to rely more on practical effects than CGI. And it shows in the movie where I feel a greater sense of danger for the actors because you know the wind they’re feeling is from real wind machines. Why did you want to emphasize practicality over CGI?
Because I think CGI…Marvel has taken CGI to create a whole universe, and they’ve done it brilliantly. But when you go to Earth and you’re not dealing with Asgard, and you’re not dealing with superheroes, it seems to me that audiences don’t want to have a digital fest. They want to feel like “if I were caught in a hurricane, what would it be like? What would it sound like? What would it feel like?” And for me, I feel that’s the way to create an experience.
The film did not have a big budget, but I wanted it to have the gripping thing of “you are there, the reality is immersive.” And I think to create immersion, artifice, which is what digital creation is, doesn’t get you there. It gives you an experience and visual candy and all that, but it doesn’t make you feel like “god, how would I survive this?”
I want to start a new wave of analog filmmaking [laughs].
[laughs]