Directing Against the Age Curve in Hollywood

“Look, man, at the way this light is bouncing around the room--it’s going to look soooo cool.”

The best comedy is fueled by anger, envy and inspiration, which is why Rob Cohen can do such a wicked impression of a hotshot commercial director. Framing a shot with his hands, Cohen waves his arms and amps up his voice, capturing the over-caffeinated bravado of a video whiz who’s fallen in love with his every bad idea as he shoots his first feature film.

“I’m gonna kick this 10 K [Klieg light] through all this glass,” he says. “And after it kicks up some sparkles on your eyes, then we’ll ride the crane down like a roller coaster and blow everybody’s mind!”

As a veteran 52-year-old film director who’s never had a big hit, it’s hardly a surprise that Cohen might be jealous of every 28-year-old wunderkind who comes along to take a job away from him. But this time the roles have been reversed. Cohen is Hollywood’s It Guy of the moment, thanks to “The Fast and the Furious,” a high-octane drama about street racing with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker that arrives in theaters Friday, accompanied by so much buzz among teen moviegoers that it’s already been labeled a good bet to be the sleeper hit of the summer.

After a checkered three-decade career as a studio executive, director and producer, Cohen is relishing a rare victory for maturity in youth-obsessed Hollywood, where knowledge and experience usually count far less than having directed a Nike ad or being friends with Michael Stipe or Courtney Love. “A lot of studio executives think that you’re in touch with young moviegoers just because you have an earring and a Japanese tattoo down your chest,” says Cohen, who has a graying goatee, a shaved head and, it must be said, an earring in his left ear. “But if you ran it through a computer, I’d bet that a lot more hit movies come from experienced directors than from phenoms. Audiences don’t say: Look how cool the restaurant looks in that shot. They say: Why do we have to wait an hour for something to happen in this movie?”

In Hollywood, everyone wants to discover the next Hot New Thing. “The young executives are always looking for the hot new French video director,” says Cohen. “But no one’s asking--will his talent translate to a different culture? In fact, no one’s asking--can he speak English?” Universal’s Sid Sheinberg was the most revered studio boss of the 1980s in large part because he’d discovered Steven Spielberg. UTA’s John Lesher is viewed as today’s hot agent because his client roster is bursting with such ultra-cool directors as Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

Coolness has currency. Studios hire young directors because they’re magnets for the young stars who get movies green-lit. And many young stars prefer working with directors who have made a cool Weezer video--as Spike Jonze once did--or hang out with the Beastie Boys. Hollywood is a generational business. Twentysomething agents and studio executives often work with twentysomething actors and directors because they socialize with talent of their own age, just as the fortysomething executives who run the studios prefer spending time with talent who share their cultural references.

“Ageism is one of our industry’s biggest problems,” says Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing, who at 56 is the dean of studio chiefs and one of the few people in Hollywood secure enough to say she’s over 50. “We’re the only business where experience and wisdom is often viewed as a negative. It’s hard to imagine another business where people would rather hire someone who’s never done the job before over someone who’s already proven themselves.”

Lansing is open to newcomers--she just hired “Traffic” screenwriter Steve Gaghan to make his directorial debut. But she’s made or is making films with such over-50 vets as Bruce Beresford, Harold Becker, Frank Oz, Phil Alden Robinson, Jerry Zucker, Lee Tamahori and her husband, Billy Friedkin. “Someone’s age should be irrelevant,” she says. “We just think about someone’s talent.”

Frugal Studios Wary of Seasoned Directors

The only antidote to ageism is success. At 63, Ridley Scott remains one of Hollywood’s hottest directors, having had huge hits with “Gladiator” and “Hannibal.” Most 55-year-old TV writers are considered relics, but everyone wants to be in business with fiftysomething “Sopranos” creator David Chase, though he’s so wary of age bias that his exact age is a closely guarded secret.

Most studio chiefs simply prefer youth over experience for practical reasons. Young filmmakers work cheap and don’t get final cut. They can be locked up with option deals that give studios a guaranteed second film if their movie’s a hit. Studios also believe that it’s easier to control a younger director. Once Barry Levinson or Michael Mann starts shooting a film, the studio has little influence over the movie’s direction. Worse still, directors often want to make more important films as they grow older, which puts them even more out of step with bottom-line crazed studio execs who would happily make an entire slate of films like “Animal” if they could.

So it’s an uphill struggle for veteran directors. Just ask International Creative Management agent Ken Kamins, who represents such legends as Robert Altman, Norman Jewison and John Frankenheimer, who are all in their 70s. They have to sell themselves to production execs who weren’t even born when the directors made “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Cincinnati Kid” and “The Manchurian Candidate.”

‘It’s about perception, not talent,” says Kamins, who also represents 39-year-old “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson. “If you’re a 28-year-old production exec in a Monday morning staff meeting, you have to be able to make a passionate case for the person you want to hire. But if you’re 28, are you going to lobby for a 60-year-old director or are you going to say, ‘There’s this hip commercial director from Anonymous Content who we can get for scale and two options and Vin Diesel loves his reel’?”

It’s understandable that young actors might bond more easily with young directors. But as it turns out, Cohen got along great with the 33-year-old Diesel, who, among other things, shared a passion for the musical instrument the didgeridoo, which Cohen plays each morning before he meditates. “Vin isn’t glib,” Cohen says. “He likes to probe you with his [expletive] detector to see if you’re like all the other silver-tongued salesmen in Hollywood. But I talked straight with him, and I think he liked that.”

Cohen knows from phenoms; he was one himself. He ran Motown’s film division at 23 and was barely 30 when he started directing. His early films were clinkers. Cohen admits he directed too young, saying, “I really wasn’t ready.” Switching back and forth between producing and directing, he became a driven Hollywood careerist. He had a heart attack at age 42, and during the pressure-filled making of “Dragonheart” he found himself crying uncontrollably in the middle of shooting a key scene.

“I realized I had to embrace something new and let go of all my hostility and anger,” he says. “I had to stop worrying about being invited to the right parties and trying to stay young forever.”

Cohen fell in love and had a spiritual awakening, embracing Buddhism and yoga. Now when he has a rough day on the set, he does some down dogs or salutes to the sun. He hasn’t entirely left his old self behind. He finishes off lunch with a double espresso and is so worried about his movie’s opening that one Universal executive refers to Cohen as “the most nervous Buddhist you’ll ever meet.” But Cohen believes experience has made him a better director.

“I’ve learned my craft, I understand the studio’s needs, I communicate better, and I know how to marshal my resources. I might cost more than a young video director, but I brought this movie in $2 million under budget, and when we had days where we only had two hours of light left, I knew how to get the shot without throwing the schedule out of whack.”

When Cohen was making “Fast and the Furious,” he often relied on the judgment of his personal target audience--his 14-year-old son, Kyle. An anthropology major at Harvard, Cohen argues that you need some distance to understand teen tastes. “I observe my son and the music he likes and how his friends behave, but I watch them, I don’t join them. Otherwise you get lost in the sauce of what you’re doing.”

It’s no wonder Cohen gets a special kick out of the scene in “The Fast and the Furious” where a cranky older pizza delivery man, overwhelmed by a noisy crowd of kids, bellows, “[Expletive] street racers!” If you see the movie, take a close look at the guy. When it came to voicing middle-aged angst, Cohen wanted the part done right, so he played it himself.

* “The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.