"Co-Creating The Kohner Agency: A Paul Kohner Production 1920-1955"

The legendary Paul Kohner is best known for his talent agency, The Kohner Agency, the second oldest in Hollywood, and for his masterminding the European Film Fund, which helped save and support around two hundred Central European artists in Hollywood by providing jobs, affidavits-visas, and financial support. Yet the "origin story" of his agency has not yet been told. Kohner worked as a producer for eighteen years at Universal Pictures, including a two-year stint in Berlin--which is why these artists flocked to his fledgling agency in the late 1930s. In Berlin, he was a big-time producer, but when he started his agency in early 1938 he worked from home and had no clients. He was just a failed producer.
Yet he had one of the best transatlantic networks at the time through his producing work. Two people, in particular, invested in his new venture: the director William Wyler and the producer Joseph (Joe) Pasternak. Friends. Kohner had met Wyler as a twenty-year old fresh off the boat in New York; Pasternak was sent by the studio head (Carl Laemmle) to supervise Kohner after a half-a-million-dollar failure in the film, The Man Who Laughs (1928). Betting on their friend, actor Walter Huston and his son (then screenwriter) John Huston, became among his first clients. If one connects his friends and colleagues on the Universal City lot in the 1920s with his friends and colleagues from Berlin in the early 1930s, one also has the largest donors to the European Film Fund--located in his agency's office.
The Kohner story exemplifies this infusion of Jewish, Central European talent that helped create the Golden Age of Hollywood. But first these people needed an agent. With help from his network of friends and colleagues, Kohner stepped up.