Cinema: Lubitsch for Cohen

Director Ernst Lubitsch, the beady-eyed, loquacious, stocky German-Jew whose long list of successes ending with The Merry Widow have made him one of the five most famed cinema directors in the world, last week got a new job: production chief at Paramount. Never before in the history of the industry has so spectacular a director been considered sufficiently responsible to run a major studio. The appointment caused Hollywood to rattle with astonishment. Director Lubitsch caustically suggested that the shock was due to the fact that he is a picturemaker not a banker, got to work on conference with the directors whose productions he will henceforth supervise. To help him in the details of his new job that he knows least about, he will have a “general manager”: Henry Herzbrun, the shrewd lawyer who has handled Paramount’s studio’s legal affairs for the past nine years.

Less unusual than the appointment of Lubitsch and Herzbrun last week was its cause. All Hollywood studios are packed with politics, jealousy, miscellaneous crockeries. Paramount, now in the throes of reorganization, has its share. Early last week, Emanuel (“Manny”) Cohen who succeeded Jesse Lasky as Paramount’s production chief in 1932, flew to New York, entered the office of Paramount’s aging president Adolph Zukor. When he emerged, Manny Cohen announced that he had been fired.