Herman Cohen(1925-2002)

Herman Cohen's motion picture career began at his local cinema, the Dexter Theater in Detroit, during his preteen years--he worked there as a "gofer" and later as an usher. He next became assistant manager of Detroit's Fox Theater. After a Marine Corps hitch, Cohen worked as sales manager for the Detroit branch of Columbia Pictures, then relocated to Hollywood and worked in the publicity department of Columbia there. He produced his first movies for Jack Broder's Realart Pictures in the early 1950s and made several subsequent pictures for Allied Artists and United Artists. Cohen made exploitation history in the mid-1950s when he began producing some of American-International's earliest hits, among them the cult favorite Les griffes du loup-garou (1957). Many of his later horror pictures were shot in England, among them the Joan Crawford-starring Le cercle de sang (1967) and L'abominable homme des cavernes (1970).