Agent Brought Hollywood His International Touch

It is said, accurately enough, that the film business is more international than ever. Creators, productions and performers move around the world more freely and continuously than they ever have before.

A Swedish cinematographer shoots a Woody Allen film in New York, having finished an American production in provincial France. Five directors, none a U.S. citizen, are nominated for Academy Awards, and four of their films had principal American financing.

Yet what is also true is that film has always been international. There was hardly a time, from its earliest days, when the American industry was not enriched by arrivals from elsewhere. The first two great American stars were an English man--Charlie Chaplin--and a Canadian woman--Mary Pickford.

The Hollywood of the ‘20s and beyond was a league of nations that worked better than the League of Nations. Even before the forced exiles of the Nazi era, the arrivals from Europe were making enduring contributions to the image, the films and the workings of the American industry.

One of those arrivals in the ‘20s was Paul Kohner, who by the time he died (earlier this week at the age of 85) had become a legendary Hollywood agent who, as the obituaries noted, had represented everyone from Chevalier to Garbo to B. Traven and Liv Ullmann.

He had been brought over by another legend, “Uncle” Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal. Laemmle imported many real or honorary relatives, deducting the cost of passage from the modest salaries he paid them. Paul, I think, paid $5 a week out of a $25 wage.

He and another new Laemmle import named William Wyler started out together in Universal’s New York publicity offices. Wyler, who was from Alsace, translated releases into French; Kohner, who was only 18 when he landed, put them into German.

They made for Hollywood as soon as they could, Wyler to pursue his dream of being a director, Kohner to be a producer. Laemmle had had the idea of shooting simultaneous versions of a film in several languages, rotating the casts in and out of a set, shot by shot. Kohner, who spoke six languages, was a natural to head the operation.

He produced several dozen films in various languages, including English, before he decided, in 1938, that there might be more stability in becoming an agent in a studio-dominated town where there were not yet many agents.

His first client was Walter Huston, quickly followed by Huston’s son John, whom Kohner represented for nearly a half-century.

It was possibly the most durable agent-client relationship in Hollywood history. Other relationships were more transitory but Kohner, always philosophical, told his novelist brother Frederick, “Success and failure should both be like meals, consumed and then forgotten.”

Another of his long-staying clients was Charles Bronson. Bronson promised Kohner that the first time he got Bronson a million dollars for a movie there would be a Rolls-Royce at the door of the Kohner agency on Sunset Boulevard, Bronson’s thank-you note on wheels.

It was, I think even Kohner imagined, a sort of running joke between them. Then Kohner got Bronson his million-dollar contract and a few days later the Rolls was at the door. Kohner shook his head sadly and refused the gift.

“I told Charlie,” Kohner explained later, “that if I didn’t get him a million the next time he’d feel betrayed and be furious with me.” The friendship went on, sans Rolls.

Kohner had no doubt that he was at heart a salesman, who sold talent and taste. But he seemed to me unique among agents for his passionate admiration for all art but most especially for the art of film and those who created it.

Another of his very durable client relationships that was also a close and affectionate friendship was with Ingmar Bergman. Kohner had found American distribution for Bergman’s often difficult films (and American financing for a few of his later productions). Kohner could fairly claim that he had done more than anyone to help establish Bergman’s lofty American reputation.

(It was a minor despair in Kohner’s life that the reclusive Bergman could so rarely be lured into the limelight to accept the honors the world wanted to pay him.)

To the end of his life, Kohner could get equally excited about the work of young film makers whose reputations had yet to be made. He campaigned vigorously on behalf of a small, charming film called “A Great Wall,” made by Peter Wang, about a Chinese-American making a first visit to China. Kohner’s potential commission seemed hardly likely to pay for the screenings he arranged, but he loved the film and wanted it to find audiences.

With the great director Ernst Lubitsch, Kohner created the European Film Fund, to help wartime refugees from Hitler’s Europe when they arrived in Hollywood, often penniless, to try to begin their careers again.

Kohner and the other established emigres contributed percentages of their earnings to the fund, and Kohner helped with visas and then with the job-hunting. After the war, the German Federal Republic gave him a medal for his work.

Thanks partly to the movies about Hollywood, the Hollywood agent has had an image that could at best be called mottled. But Paul Kohner--courtly, gracious, charming, amusing, cosmopolitan and, not least, constructively creative in the matching of clients and projects, films and buyers--towered above the cigar smoke and the hustlers, forever an oasis of dark-suited dignity and good taste.