Combining nearly three decades of motion picture experience, first as an executive, then as a highly prolific producer and finally as one of American film’s most versatile and successful directors, ROB COHEN (Director) maintains a unique place in the entertainment industry. Often on the cutting edge of culural (pop and otherwise) and technological developments, Cohen’s films as both producer and director have swept across a wide range of topics and backdrops.
Cohen most recently directed Universal Pictures’ summer 2001 blockbuster The Fast and the Furious, a powerful action drama set against the explosively charged backdrop of underground street racing in Los Angeles. The film, which starred a young ensemble of cutting-edge talent headed by Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, has grossed in excess of $145-million at the domestic box office, and won extensive praise for its highly visceral and imaginative reinvention of the dormant auto racing genre. The film continued its massive success upon its release on video and DVD on January 2, 2002, with consumers devouring 85% of the first DVD copies shipped to dealers in the first five days of release, and setting a first-week record in DVD rentals. The Fast and the Furious was honored with five 2002 MTV Movie Award nominations, including Best Movie, Best Male Performance (Vin Diesel), Breakthrough Male (Paul Walker), Best On-Screen Team (Vin Diesel and Paul Walker) and Best Action Sequence.
In 2000, Universal released Cohen’s provocative thriller The Skulls, which revealed the machination of Ivy League university secret societies. The film starred Joshua Jackson, Paul Walker and Leslie Bibb.
Cohen’s critically acclaimed The Rat Pack, an HBO film starring Ray Liotta as Frank Sinatra, Joe Mantegna as Dean Martin and Don Cheadle as Sammy Davis, Jr., chronicled an entire era as it toild the story of Hollywood and Las Vegas’ most famous swingers in their heyday. The Rat Pack garnered 11 Emmy Award nominations (winning three), won Cheadle a Golden Globe Award and earned Cohen a nomination from the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Direction of a Television Film.
Cohen’s previous directorial efforts reveal his expansive storytelling interests. His debut film, A Small Circle of Friends, starred the late Brad Davis and Karen Allen in a romance set against the political turmoil of late 1960s Harvard University (Cohen’s alma mater). Heralded both by critics and audiences, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story--which was both written and directed by Cohen--humanized the legendary Hong Kong-born action hero for new generations, and made stars of both Jason Scott Lee and Lauren Holly. Daylight, starring Sylvester Stallone, was a big-scale action thriller with high-tech special effects set primarily in a massive tunnel beneath New York’s Hudson River, which was re-created in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios. Daylight was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Sound Effects Editing.
For Dragonheart, visual effects made a quantum leap in Cohen’s epic fable of an unlikely alliance in mythical times between a knight (Dennis Quaid) and a fierce but noble dragon endowed with the powers of speech (voiced by Sean Connery). Cohen was intricately involved with both the design of the massive creature and implementation of the state-of-the-art effects by Industrial Light & Magic, the first time that a major motion picture character was fully rendered digitally. The film won the Saturn Award as Best Fantasy Film of 1996, and was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects.
Cohen was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson in New York. He attended Harvard University, from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in anthropology. He began his career in film during his sophomore year at Harvard, when he assisted director Daniel Petrie in making Silent Night, Lonely Night, an NBC made-for-TV movie. After graduation, Cohen moved to Los Angeles, where as a reader for International Famous Agency, he discovered The Sting, now a film classic.
He left IFA for 20th Century Fox Television and quickly acquired the title Director of Television Movies, developing such projects as Mrs. Sundance and Stowaway to the Moon. Desiring to expand into feature films, Cohen joined Motown as their Executive VP of the motion picture division while still in his early 20s.
At Motown, Cohen produced some key entries in 1970s cinema, several of them antidotes for the "blaxploitation" films of the era. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, starring Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones and Richard Pryor, was a serio-comic look at the "Negro Leagues" of the 1930s. The television movie Scott Joplin, which also starred Williams, as the story of the great early 20th century ragtime pianist and composer whose music was popularized in the soundtrack for The Sting. Mahogany and The Wiz both starred Diana Ross, the former a romantic drama set against the world of high fashion, the latter a screen adaptation of the smash Broadway hit musical. For The Wiz, Cohen received the NAACP Image Award for Best Picture, and Mahogany garnered an Oscar® nomination for its now-standard theme song "Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)."
At Motown, Cohen also produced Thank God It’s Friday, which was one of the decade’s quintessential disco movies. The film featured superstar diva Donna Summer and such young talents as Jeff Goldblum, Debra Winger and Terri Nunn (later the lead singer of the group Berlin) at early stages of their careers.
In 1978, Cohen set up his own production company for which he produced or executive produced numerous box office hits with major stars, including The Witches of Eastwick (Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, Cher; Academy Award® nominated in both the Music and Sound categories), The Running Man (Arnold Schwarzenegger), The Serpent and the Rainbow (Bill Pullman), Bird on a Wire (Mel Gibson, Goldie Hawn), Ironweed (Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep) and Light of Day (Michael J. Fox).
Cohen’s television directorial credits include an Emmy nominated episode of Miami Vice, as well as segments of thirtysomething, Hooperman, A Year in the Life and Private Eye. He also created, wrote and executive produced the series Vanishing Son, notable for being one of the very few to focus on Asian characters...with Asian actors filling all of those roles. Vanishing Son won two MANAA (Media Action Network for Asian-Americans) Awards for positive portrayal of Asians in media, one for the program itself, and another for star Russell Wong.
He is a father of a fifteen year old son, Kyle, a member of the "target audience."
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