New York real estate magnate Charles Cohen builds a movie studio

Charles Cohen, the New York real-estate mogul, is sitting quietly in his massive corner office at the Pacific Design Center (PDC), the landmark red-blue-green triptych of West Hollywood buildings he owns, when his two top executives burst in to deliver their morning report.

Cohen is unfazed by the intrusion, barely looking up from the stack of paperwork he is signing, as the two men take their seats on the outer edge of his prodigious desk.

“Talk to me,” Cohen says, still signing papers.

He sits tall and straight in the windowy vortex of his V-shaped office, which has towering ceilings and sky all around, making it feel like the hull of a ship. At 62, Cohen is its young-looking captain, with a thick coif of salt-and-pepper hair and Cary Grant’s cleft chin. Always sharply dressed, he wears a crisp pinstripe suit, and with each autograph, a hulking Panerai watch bulges out from under his sleeve.

“This whole week has been a revelatory week!” Cohen declares, after his director of leasing announced that the World Economic Forum had agreed “to take the entire fourth floor” of one of his buildings in New York. “Good man,” Cohen says.

This was early December, and Cohen was doing a cross-country tour of his holdings — in New York, Florida, Texas and Los Angeles — before business slowed down for the holiday break.

But Cohen’s travel schedule never slows. A few weeks earlier, he told me, he and his wife, Clo, a South African beauty 17 years his junior, just celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary by taking the corporate jet to Napa Valley, “where we drank $12,000 worth of wine.” Then they flew to Bora Bora, where they’d originally honeymooned, and finally to Hualalai, Hawaii, where they relaxed a little more.

Asked what present he gave his wife to honor their special occasion, Cohen replied: “What didn’t I give her?”

And yet, of all the extravagances afforded by three decades of helming his family’s Manhattan-based real-estate development company, Cohen Brothers Realty Corp. (CBRC), the most lavish gift by far is one Cohen gave himself: a film company.

Launched in 2008, Cohen Media Group (CMG) quickly established itself as a full-scale film production company with serious ambitions. Backed by the weight of Cohen’s vast real-estate empire, CMG has pounced upon the scene, snapping up films and taking them to market, rapidly transforming Cohen’s cherished hobby into a legitimate business.

In only six years, CMG has acquired and distributed nearly 40 independent films and become one of only a handful of U.S. distributors to invest in the foreign-film market. Cohen involves himself in every detail — every detail — ensuring that the film library reflects his taste, his goals and his values. So far, his interests lie in the classic. Cohen has a soft spot for foreign films, French ones in particular, which he considers more “mature” than their American counterparts.

“The French do certain things very well — maybe even better than we do,” Cohen said. “What I’m attracted to in the foreign films is not the language, it’s the universality of the themes. And I think film allows you to experience things you wouldn’t otherwise experience; it takes you places that you can’t easily go.”

From the outset, CMG has voraciously picked up French titles, becoming the largest American distributor of French films. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Cohen received a National Order of Merit — “That’s one level below the Legion of Honor,” he said.  Next month, he added, he will get his second state honor when the French Ministry of Culture knights him with an Order of Arts and Letters at the French Embassy in New York. “It’s pretty substantial,” he said.

The film work is an obvious boon to Cohen’s cultural prestige, elevating his image from a rich tycoon into the more preferred cultural connoisseur. Last fall, Cohen became an official member of the Hollywood elite when he was voted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And on Feb. 22 — Oscar Sunday — he will walk the red carpet for the fourth time, in support of CMG’s French-Mauritanian film “Timbuktu,” which is vying for a shot at best foreign language film.

And this is where Cohen surprises: Even on the cusp of Oscar glory, he is careful not to conflate his artistic goals with mainstream Hollywood: “I have nothing to do with Hollywood,” he insisted over lunch at the PDC restaurant Red | seven, just downstairs from his office. This was during a 15-minute break before Cohen had to rush off to meet HBO President Michael Lombardo. After a brief back and forth with the waitress, who serves him regularly and calls him “boss,” Cohen settled on spaghettini — “but not al dente,” he said.

“I’m only into what I’m doing,” he continued, drawing a distinct line between himself and the rest of the industry. “That’s it. My stuff is more of a world thing; it’s an international thing.”

CMG acquired “Timbuktu” last year at Cannes, where it was in competition. The film depicts a jihadist takeover of an isolated African town and the brutal consequences of implementing Sharia law. It earned high, early praise from the festival’s notoriously tough critics. A year later, after a spate of ISIS beheadings and the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Cohen’s instinct for universality looks prescient, even newsy. And with the help of a savvy marketing campaign, “Timbuktu” also has received eight French Cesar nominations and made history in Mauritania as the first-ever Oscar entry from the West African nation.

Even if it wins, “Timbuktu” won’t make Cohen much money. But more important to him is that it fits into the category of social importance, a quality he hopes to cultivate in his film work. “Life is short,” he mused. “I want to be involved in meaningful films that can serve a purpose.”

Another of those was Claude Lanzmann’s 2014 documentary, “The Last of the Unjust,” about the Viennese Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein — a member of the despised Jewish Council of Elders in the Theresienstadt ghetto — who worked closely with Adolf Eichmann, helping the Nazi chief carry out his orders. The film is a sequel of sorts to “Shoah,” Lanzmann’s iconic 9 1/2-hour Holocaust documentary, and, although Cohen said he only saw “pieces” of it, he said he felt a “duty to be able to distribute the film.”

As part of CMG, Cohen also established The Cohen Film Collection, a library of more than 700 rare classic movies he acquired with the purchase of the Rohauer Library. Originally assembled by film collector and curator Raymond Rohauer, the renowned collection of vintage movies includes early to late-20th-century titles, among them the worldwide rights to the collected works of star Buster Keaton (Cohen also owns the rights to Keaton’s image and life story) as well of the oeuvre of director D.W. Griffith, among others. Cohen’s passion for Hollywood’s long-gone golden age is evident in his milieu: The hallways leading to his L.A. office are decked with vintage film posters, which he collects, and on the second floor of the adjacent Blue Building is a display from his classic Italian collection. Each year, Cohen partners with film archives around the world to digitally and photochemically restore a number of prints in his collection for long-term preservation.

It would be easy to dismiss Cohen as a dabbler, treating film as a rich man’s hobby, a celluloid Panerai. But it would be more accurate to say film for Cohen has been a lifelong passion — his first passion — that a lifetime in real estate has finally enabled him to pursue. In 1984, Cohen wrote a movie trivia book under the pseudonym Xavier Einstein. “My publisher told me, ‘You sold more books than Mark Twain did in his lifetime,’ ” he said.

Today, Cohen’s taste is far more niche. In a world of fantasy blockbusters, will it prove too limited or elitist for mega success? Cohen insists he is on to something. There is a strong market for his films, he said, among well-educated, worldly adults who want smart entertainment that makes them think.

Hollywood, he complained “is not making stories for mature audiences. Today you’ve got genre films and horror films and vampire films and comic-book stories. There’s just not a lot of intelligent filmmaking going on here — because it’s all about money.”

Born in New York City in 1952, Cohen grew up in a postwar era of massive economic growth. Cohen’s father, Sherman, tried his hand at a variety of vocations — including a stint running car dealerships — before landing on a career that was more “lucrative, and, I guess, would make [him] feel important,” Cohen said. In the 1950s, Sherman and his two brothers, Edward and Mortimer, founded Cohen Brothers Realty and Construction Corp. and began buying low-rise apartment buildings around Westchester County, where Cohen grew up. Their big break came in 1955, when Manhattan’s elevated railway line along Third Avenue, known as the elevator train, was dismantled, opening up abundant property for development. The brothers quickly bought chunks of land and began building apartments and office spaces.

Despite their success, Cohen said he didn’t grow up thinking he was wealthy. “My father built a house, and he had a car,” Cohen said. “We didn’t have a swimming pool; we did not belong to a country club” — Cohen now belongs to five — “and I imagine at that point in my life I had everything that a kid could want. I didn’t know any differently.”

At 14, Cohen decided he wanted to work. On weekends, he took the train into Manhattan and began showing apartments for his father. At 16, he made his first short film and entered it into a Kodak Teenage Movie Awards competition and won an honorable mention. Foreshadowing his future, his childhood was split between business and movies. Cohen remembers taking the train into New York to see “Easy Rider” when it came out in 1969. He also took a bus to a shopping mall in White Plains to see movies there, and he remembers the bus line passed by the General Foods headquarters, which, he notes, he later bought.

After graduating high school, Cohen spent a year and a half at NYU before transferring to Tufts, where he majored in English — “which didn’t prepare me for anything,” he said. So after earning a liberal arts education in 1974, he decided to enroll in Brooklyn Law School. “I like to call it the Harvard of King’s County,” he joked. (Cohen’s descriptions are often aspirational: Westchester County, for example, “is like Brentwood”; and the Pacific Design Center “is the Neiman Marcus of high-end design.”)

Cohen toyed with becoming an entertainment attorney, but found it difficult to get a foot in the door.

“It was very nepotistic at that time,” he said.

Instead, he got a job working for a bank in the real-estate loan workouts department, dealing with so-called problem loans, and it was there he learned the business of real-estate finance and “how to turn things around and then sell them.” He was 25. After a few years, Cohen decided there was not much future for an ambitious young Jew at a bank — “a Jew wouldn’t rise to the highest levels [of a bank] in those days,” he said. So, in 1979, his father invited him to join the family business. “My father offered me an opportunity, and I’m an opportunist, so I took it,” Cohen said.

He started off as the company’s general counsel and handled leasing. Over the next 10 years, he immersed himself in every aspect of real estate: finance, construction, management and development. Things changed dramatically in 1983, when Cohen decided to purchase an office building in a bustling neighborhood off of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street and completely redevelop it. “It was like a switch went off in my head,” he recalled. He liked the idea of repositioning and improving existing properties according to his vision. “It allowed me to be creative,” he said. Around the same time, he set his sights on a row of brownstones on Lexington Avenue, which he planned to tear down and turn into a state-of-the-art, “Class A” office skyscraper. At the time, though, the buildings housed 22 rent-controlled residential tenants and about 20 businesses. Cohen “got everybody out,” he said, for about $4,000 apiece, except for the last five tenants, who held out. Four waiters who worked at the Plaza Hotel cost him $2.5 million, and one little old lady refused to move at all. “They call that a famous holdout,” he recalled.

Cohen built around her. “We cut the top off of the building, the back of it off, and she lived there until she passed away,” he said.

His success with those properties gave Cohen the confidence to take over. In the mid-1980s, he bought out his father and one uncle (the other had passed away), and he has since expanded Cohen Brothers Realty holdings from 3 million square feet of commercial property to 12 million. The Lexington Avenue property with the famous old lady holdout is now the International Plaza — located directly across from the flagship Bloomingdale’s store on 59th Street — and the location of CBRC’s headquarters. When I visited Cohen there in December, I discovered that his New York office is as stunning as the one in L.A., this one with verdant, panoramic views of Central Park.

In New York real-estate circles, Cohen fits into an elite group of major developers who run multigenerational family outfits. At a time when most urban development involves groups of corporate investors, each owning a slice of the pie, Cohen presides over his empire singly.

Back in L.A., Cohen tires of talking in his private PDC conference room, and we return to his office. As he traverses the cavernous halls, Cohen wears the PDC like a crown; the Red Building where his office is located is his baby — he built it from scratch after purchasing the Cesar Pelli-designed 14-acre property in 1999. The ambience of his floor, home to the L.A. office of CMG, is architecturally and artistically magnificent: full of oval-shaped offices and conference rooms encased in glass, glowing steel columns, cutout ceilings, marble floors and red leather couches. Art covers the walls. It is almost planetary; a universe of color, geometry, texture and arrangement. Every detail feels accounted for, and just the tilt of an eye takes in a bold, sculptural, unfolding new vision. This is Charles Cohen, artist.

Pelli’s first building for the PDC, the blue one, with 750,000 square feet, was built in 1975, and the Green Building, adding 450,000 square feet, followed in 1988. The planned trio of buildings remained incomplete, however, until Cohen came along. The design center was said to be floundering when Cohen reportedly paid $157 million for it, with the help of a consortium of investors, whom he bought out (some say forced out) four years later, thus igniting a prolonged period of lawsuits and countersuits, all of which were eventually dismissed. The PDC is now one of five design-showroom buildings that Cohen owns across the country, including the Decoration & Design Building (D&D) and Annex in New York, the Decorative Center Houston (DCH) in Texas, and the Design Center of the Americas (DCOTA) in Dania Beach, Fla., in total more than 8 million square feet.

Cohen’s interest in design showrooms was sparked by what he saw as an opportunity to distinguish himself beyond office and apartment buildings. He was attracted to the challenge of marketing property to a highly specialized community of upscale design professionals. His initial purchase was the 600,000-square-foot D&D building in New York, for which he paid $63 million in 1996. The following year, Cohen found himself at the PDC in L.A. for a design trade show. “And I am just completely knocked out by the architecture of these buildings,” he recalled. Cohen decided, almost instantly, that he should own the PDC, too. So after the trade show, he marched straight up to the management office, introduced himself and told the building manager he would like to buy the building.

Turned out, the PDC was in pretty bad shape at that moment; payment on its mortgage was five years past due, though the bank was not eager to repossess the specialty behemoth. Cohen persuaded Jon Cushman, an L.A. real-estate broker, to convince the mortgage holder, Teachers Insurance in New York, to put the property on the market. Cohen knew of only one other corporate bidder who made an offer; Cohen won.

It seems that things come easily to Cohen. He doesn’t appear to doubt himself, or question whether he will ultimately prevail. “You shouldn’t be nervous if you believe in yourself,” he said. But, success requires more than just confidence, he admitted. “I also worked it politically,” he said of the PDC purchase. “For real estate to be successful, you’ve got to be connected to the community.”

Cohen has worked on upgrading the PDC over the last 12 years. “You can buy a building and leave it as it is,” he said. “But it doesn’t make it better.” Cohen said he has invested $90 million over 10 years in refurbishing the Green and Blue buildings, and he financed the completion of Pelli’s original vision when he built the $150 million Red Building. He is notoriously uncompromising on the quality of his buildings — and on the quality of his tenants.

“I think he’s less prone to try to make a deal with somebody if he doesn’t feel that they fit the profile of the building,” Eric Eidelman, a home theater designer and tenant at the PDC, said. Eidelman is a longtime Cohen colleague and friend, and he designed the PDC’s in-house screening room, as well as all of Cohen’s home theaters. “Sometimes it’s like, you know, there’s space here, and why wouldn’t you just rent the space? But Charles doesn’t compromise. He can always accomplish what he wants to accomplish.”

Beyond the exacting standards Cohen holds out for his design tenants, he admits the PDC caters to high-end buyers only — people who can spend $30,000 on a couch, or $15,000 on a chair — through licensed designers. PDC showrooms are generally not open for retail buyers, though the public is welcome to walk in and gape longingly.

“What designers do is very special,” Cohen said. “I like to say that design allows someone to express their individuality; you don’t want to be exactly the same as the next person. You want to have your own identity. So designers need to feel special, because what they do is special. If we were open to the public, designers would not be happy, because then what they do would become very un-special — it would become ordinary.”

Cohen’s plans for the PDC are not quite finished: He is currently in a heated negotiation with West Hollywood city officials to develop an adjacent 11-acre megaproject called Design Village, designed by the architectural firm Gruen Associates, that, according to LA Curbed, would include 335 residences (with special designations for the elderly), a 250-room hotel, a movie theater, nightclubs, bars, restaurants with patios, office space and a 680-seat outdoor amphitheater. It would also include a new West Hollywood sheriff’s station and City Hall. Not everyone is in favor: West Hollywood Mayor John D’Amico called the project “an amateur rendering of a disaster,” according to reports, and Cohen responded to the controversy with an ingratiating letter to the West Hollywood City Council at their meeting Feb. 17.

Cohen is not immune to challenges, but he is deeply discomfited by them. The only time he asked for the recorder to be turned off was when conversation turned to the subject of his first marriage, which ended badly (although it produced a daughter, 30, who teaches kindergarten, and a son, 26, who works in real-state finance — though, not for his father). Cohen said his divorce was “the most difficult thing” he has ever been through, and that his life with Clo and their two children, ages 6 and 8, is very happy and family-oriented. Cohen is so openly enamored of his second wife, the former marketing and publicity executive for Jimmy Choo, that he insisted I meet her.

“I’m not just saying this, I think Charles is the most brilliant person I’ve ever met,” Clo gushed when we met at Cohen Bros.’ New York office in December. She is, at once, exactly the woman you’d expect a billionaire real-estate developer to marry — impossibly fresh-looking, elegantly dressed, fresh out of spin class — and also a total surprise — vivacious, insightful and deeply intuitive.

“My husband, he just cuts through everything so quickly,” Clo said. “He juggles so much, he has so much mental energy. I’ve never met anyone like him, who can keep as much going in his head as he can.”

Cohen’s colleagues and friends are avowedly awed by his ability to multitask: They speak of his action-packed days, from early morning exercise routines to late-night meetings, dinners and social events. “He fits everything in,” Eidelman told me. “I’ve done more with him in a couple of hours than I usually do in a week.” The ability to manage so many things simultaneously is probably what enables Cohen to run two entirely different businesses — real estate and film — at once. Even Clo is amazed how, at 62, Charles has the boundless energy of teenager, without ever needing coffee. “Charles is naturally caffeinated,” she joked.

Nevertheless, on Friday nights, Shabbat dinner is when it all slows down, and the family gathers together for quiet time. “My favorite night of the week is Shabbat,” Clo said. “I never understood the meaning of Shabbat until I was married to Charles. He was working, and we were always tired, and we just decided to shut the world out on Friday nights. We never, ever, ever go out to dinner. Ever. We never see people. We have family at home, but we’re always at home, and we relax, we put on sweatpants, we have massages. I make dinner every Friday night, and it’s just the two of us, and that’s our time to really be together.”

The Cohens live on Park Avenue in an 8,000-square-foot apartment in one of Manhattan’s most exclusive co-ops. Cohen assembled their home by buying six adjacent units. On weekends, the family typically retreats to their 39-acre country estate in Greenwich, Conn., and they also have homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and West Hollywood, where Cohen purchased three condos off of Sunset and joined them into one.  And yet, Clo still insists that at heart they are “low-key.” “Charles and I will go to JG Melon’s and have hamburgers,” she said. “He’s not the kind of man who’ll ever go to a nightclub and, like, order Cristal champagne.”

That would be a little too Hollywood for Cohen’s taste. He is much more likely to spend money on philanthropic causes: He supports three Jewish Federations — in New York, Florida and Los Angeles — and earned a medal in 2002 for raising $52.4 million for State of Israel Bonds (even though he said he has never been to Israel). Cohen is a trustee at a number of arts and educational institutions, including The Cooper Union in New York and the Museum of Art and Design, and he was formerly a trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles (he resigned because of time constraints but said he continues to support the museum and brought a MOCA satellite space to the Pacific Design Center). He and his wife also contributed $1.2 million to the vision-loss advocacy organization Lighthouse International to help the group renovate its East 59th Street theater, which also has long been the East Coast home of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Cohen also antes up for his film work. In 2008, he plunked $300,000 into the film “Frozen River,” the first film he produced. It went on to earn two Academy Award nominations — for best actress and original screenplay. “With that success,” Clo said, “it gave him the feeling that he could do this. It was now or never because he’s not getting any younger. And I think he had the feeling that if he didn’t do it now, he would never do it. And then it would be one of those things on your checklist in life where you say, ‘I really wish I’d done something.’ ”

Within the industry, idle gossip suggests Cohen Media is just an expensive vanity project. But Bob Bookman, a literary agent at Paradigm Talent Agency, who has done business with Cohen, said he was impressed with the slow and studied way Cohen has approached the film business. Since they first met at the Toronto Film Festival in 2010, Bookman said, Cohen “was very smartly taking kind of baby steps.”

“From what I can tell, he’s a man of great passion,” Bookman said. “You just sense that when he sets out to do something, he doesn’t take no for an answer — even from himself.

“And he’s looking to carve a very small niche right now. It’s not like he’s trying to create another DreamWorks, saying, ‘I’m gonna be a studio and compete with the big boys.’ He’s picking very carefully.”

Indeed, the biggest challenge Cohen faces may be “being taken seriously,” Bookman admitted. “One of the hardest things to do is get access to material. The crème de la crème stuff does go to people like Harvey [Weinstein] and Scott [Rudin]. And if you don’t have material to start with, the odds are stacked against you. But there’s a lot out there; I’ve represented material that everybody picked over and passed on” — and that went on to become hit movies.

Even some of Cohen’s own employees can be skeptical of his entree into the movie business. “I’m pretty much convinced that there’s no way you can tell if a film is gonna do well or not,” David Fogel, CBRC’s senior vice president of acquisitions and finance, told me. It helps, of course, to have a top-notch creative team buying and developing content, and Cohen invested heavily in assembling a team to run CMG, appointing Miramax Films veteran, the English-born producer Daniel Battsek as president of production. Asked how much he has invested in CMG, Cohen batted away the answer: “It’s not important,” he said, dismissively. “It’s a new business, so I am investing in a new business.”

Nathan Powell, CMG’s vice president of marketing, has worked for some of Hollywood’s biggest-name producers, including both Weinstein and Rudin, and admitted that building the CMG brand will be an uphill battle. “We don’t make theaters millions of dollars a year,” he said, pointing to one challenge CMG faces as a start-up distributor. And when it comes to film acquisitions, CMG competes against the likes of Sony Pictures Classics and IFC Films, with its 30 years of experience cultivating relationships with willing and eager agents and producers. “We’re up against [big] competition, against economic forces we are not in control of — and when we go to festivals, we are fighting alongside six other distributors trying to get the same movies,” Powell said.

So what edge does CMG have to offer in an environment where competition is fierce, the products expensive, and the return on investment perennially risky?

“Passion,” Powell said. “And Charles’ passion for films is unmatched. I’ve been in rooms with Harvey Weinstein. I’ve been in rooms with Scott Rudin. And having worked with Charles for four years now, I can tell you he could go toe to toe with those guys.

Powell attributes Cohen’s passion to a long latent ambition. “I think after Charles conquered real estate,” Powell added, “he wanted to pursue his dream — his real dream.”

Whatever the challenges, Cohen is confident that what he plans to deliver through CMG will meet with eager audiences. Next up is “Deli Man,” a documentary about the history of Jewish deli owners, operators and fanatics. (A story on the film is on p. 31) It is a small, specialty film, but Cohen is banking on a cult following.

He also expressed interest in producing a documentary on anti-Semitism.

“My taste is taste that other people like,” Cohen concluded. “It represents everything I’ve ever seen. And I think I have a discerning eye, just like I do for style and design. I see [the film business] as a natural extension of all of that.”

It would be unfair, however, to compare Cohen’s real-estate achievements with his ambitions in the film industry, as they are, after all, completely separate universes. “The real estate that I’ve been involved with is quite a legacy,” Cohen said, reflecting back. “When you’re able to take something like [the Pacific Design Center] and totally reposition it, it approaches monument status.”

Other men might be content to retire.

“But I think,” Cohen said, “it’s important to distinguish yourself in more than one area.”

Correction appended: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the World Economic Forum leased the entire fourth floor of L.A.’s Pacific Design Center. They leased the fourth floor of a Cohen office building in New York. Also, the Cohens have a home in Palm Beach, Florida, not West Palm Beach.