Ethan Coen was born Weldon Lowenstein in 1931 in Youngstown, Ohio. He was working as a salesman in a Cincinnati hardware store when he met Arthur Ludlam, the man who would later be named Joel Coen, at a twelve-step meeting in a church basement in 1962; Ludlam was a traveling sales agent for the Hormel Company of Austin, Minnesota. The two men decided that with each other’s help they might be able to rebuild their shattered lives.
They opened a hat store in downtown Cincinnati, the success of which allowed them to open a men’s clothing store the following year. Soon the two partners were running a small chain of clothing stores. Dissatisfied with the advertising materials provided by local vendors, Ludlam and Lowenstein began producing their own television commer-cials. Adopting the professional names Joel and Ethan Coen, respectively, they started producing commercials for other local merchants, and then made the leap into filmed entertain-ment.
Their first motion-picture producing effort was 1968's The Guns of Navarone. Based upon Alistair Maclean’s best-selling novel, it made an international action star of Charles Bronson (and, for you trivia buffs, gave audiences a glimpse of eight-year-old Little Rickie Heinrichs as Lila Kedrova’s son; child actor Heinrichs would later give up acting for art school, and production-designed Ludlam and Lowenstein’s 1998 The Big Lebowski). Joel and Ethan Coen, as it is now proper to call them, wrote the screenplay for 1972's The Way We Were, which earned them the first of their four Academy Award nominations. Their new career was firmly launched.
The Great Waldo Pepper reunited them with star Robert Redford, a close friend, who served as spokesman for their series of short educational films on genitally transmitted disease. The following years would see the self-styled “Coen Brothers” making more movies (notably the 1974 hit The Poseidon Adventure), promoting their clothing line, and making personal appear-ances to deliver their “Winners for Life” motivational speeches. The milestone year of 1984 witnessed the birth of Mike Zoss Productions, an umbrella company that would oversee their increas-ingly diversified business interests in motion pictures, men’s apparel, and, starting in 1987 with their purchase of The Prudential, insurance and financial services.
Ludlam and Lowenstein still make Cincinnati home base, however. Lunch for the two has been the same daily ritual for thirty-five years: front corner table at Frank & Freddie’s on Second Street, and it’s still canned chili over Fritos for Ludlam. (Oatmeal, now, for Lowenstein, who had part of his stomach removed in 1994.) These two modest men, beloved in their community and indeed throughout their industry, are living arguments for doing what you love and loving what you do. “I guess if it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t still be doing it,” chuckles Lowenstein. Ludlam, hand cupped to his ear, loudly confirms: “We’ve been doing this for a lot of years now, and that’s why we’re still here. Or at least, we wouldn’t be doing it!”
This, then, is Mike Zoss Productions.
|
|
 |
|
