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INDEPENDENT EXHIBITOR:
FILM BULLETIN
VOL. No. 2 No. 16
WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18, 1935
PRICE 10 CENTS
Sydney Cohen's Death And A Lesson In 'Harmony'!
The foremost figure in independent exhibitor ranks of a decade ago was suddenly and prematurely snatched from the industry scene last week when Sydney S. Cohen dropped dead on the street outside his office in New York City.
No other individual in the history of the motion picture industry occupied so dominant a position in the field of theatre owners' organization as that of Cohen when he ruled the then independent Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America. From 1920 to 1924 he held the post of president and, with New York's famous Jimmy Walker as counsel, Cohen moulded the one unified independent exhibitors' body film business has ever seen.
That was the organization which was powerful enough in 1921 to bring Adolph Zukor, then czar of filmdom, to the M. P. T. O. A. convention in Minneapolis to beg for his business life. Zukor's entrance into theatre operations had raised a storm of protest from theatre men and a movement for a complete boycott of Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount today) was slated for approval at that convention.
That Zukor was allowed to escape by proffering a mere list of promises, which he promptly ignored, was no fault of Sydney Cohen's. Aggressively, relentlessly, he carried on his fight against the growing tendency among the big film powers toward adoption of practices which today plague the nation's independent theatre owners.
Producers' aggressions into the exhibition field; the rapacious block booking system of selling film products, and all those trade practices which are now supinely and stupidly accepted by independent theatre owners, were being born in the minds of the film powers in Sydney Cohen's day of leadership, and he fought like a titan to balk them and stem the tide toward an unbalanced industry.
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