Paul Kohner
; Kohner, Paul (Agency); Paul Kohner Agency
Agent, Producer
* in Teplitz-Schönau
† in Los Angeles
The son of a Jewish manufacturer and cinema owner, who with the help of film producer Carl Laemmle had gone to the USA in 1920, started working as a production director for European Universal in 1931. Kohner left Berlin in 1933 with his wife, the actress Lupita Tovar, and two years later, they left Europe. In 1938 he opened his placement and booking agency on Sunset Boulevard. Together with Ernst Lubitsch and Wilhelm Dieterle, among others, Kohner co-founded the “European Film Fund”, which helped émigrés with affidavits, official guarantees and pro forma contracts. Paul Kohner and his agency in Hollywood continue to be viewed as a central hub and pivotal for German-speaking film professionals in exile in the USA during the 1930s‒1940s. Even after 1945 Kohner’s agency represented a bridge to filmmaking in the Federal Republic of Germany.
About the Estate
The estate of the Paul Kohner Agency, Inc., acquired in 1988, contains the most extensive inventory among the Personal Papers and Company Archives at the Deutsche Kinemathek. It documents an essential component of German-speaking film emigration in the USA, covering a phase in cinema history from 1937 to 1977, Correspondence, contracts, scripts and photographs, including single – also personal – documents from the 1920s and 1930s are represented by approximately 155,000 sheets of paper. Last, but not least, the archive also includes an autobiographical sketch written by Kohner. The majority of around 5500 separate bundles of papers consist largely of client files, especially curriculum vitae, visa documents, invoices, contracts and reviews. They also contain files on film projects and scripts (from screenplays, treatments and lectors’ opinions, for example, for Fritz Lang’s ‘Hangmen Also Die’ from 1943 and Max Ophüls’ ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ from 1948). Countless interoffice messages provide detailed insights into the agency’s daily work; these are enhanced by nearly 500 folders with photos. Materials on the founding and work of the European Film Fund also belong to the archive. These holdings provide a central pool for general exile research and especially for film emigration. They represent the exodus of German-speaking cinema professionals from the Weimar Republic who fled from the National Socialists. (Text: Jennifer Borrmann)