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| Ten Thousand Motels |
CBC TV profiles concert promoter Michael Cohl
By SHELDON KIRSHNER
Staff Reporter
CJ News.com.
The reclusive, Toronto-born impresario, whose clients have ranged from the Rolling Stones to Michael Jackson, has been notoriously close-mouthed and inaccessible, at least until now.
But on Monday, July 24 at 8 p.m., the CBC TV documentary Life & Times of Michael Cohl, directed by Barry Avrich, will be broadcast, and the veil will finally be lifted.
Blending interviews with archival and concert footage, this is a film that draws a surprisingly open portrait of a man – the world’s most powerful concert promoter – who values his privacy and keeps a low profile.
Avrich’s revealing documentary is the story of a driven, strong-willed, disciplined visionary who found a niche and exploited it to its fullest potential.
Marty Onrot, a competitor who clearly admires him, says Cohl “created opportunities.” In addition to promoting rock stars, Cohl has produced major sporting events and theatre productions (Cats and The Lion King, to name but two) and has crafted extremely lucrative merchandising and sponsorship deals for which his clients should be eternally grateful.
In a frank admission, Cohl acknowledges that he has made tons of money for his roster of clients. An example: His first Stones tour grossed $240 million, a record. No wonder Mick Jagger and Keith Richards speak highly of him.
Cohl, whom Onrot describes as a combination of aggressiveness and intelligence, hails from a middle class Jewish family. Little is said about his father, who was a lingerie manufacturer. But his mother, Adele, is held up as an influential factor in Cohl’s life.
Portrayed as ambitious, Cohl admits he had a burning desire to succeed. “Whatever I did do, I had to win,” he says.
A star debater in high school, Cohl still has a way with words and can out-argue virtually anyone, Jagger says.
Eager to establish a financial base, at the age of 18, Cohl opened a strip club in Ottawa. But it was soon busted by police.
When he learned that a friend had earned $5,000 from promoting a rock concert, a light lit up and he realized he had found his calling.
His first venture as a promoter was a fiasco. The band he had booked didn’t bother to show up. But fortune beckoned when Harold Ballard, the owner of Maple Leaf Gardens, signed a contract giving Cohl exclusive rights to stage concerts at that popular venue.
In another coup, Cohl wrested the Rolling Stones away from the legendary Bill Graham, who fumed, “Today, I watched my lover become a whore.”
To his credit, Avrich does not glorify Cohl, mentioning a Toronto Star allegation that accused him of skimming concert receipts.
All in all, Life & Times of Michael Cohl is a balanced and entertaining account of a Canadian entrepreneur who has practically cornered the market in a cutthroat business.
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Documentary tells story of how a Toronto music promoter became the guy the Rolling Stones, U2 trust to handle their concert tours
Chronicle Herald.ca
July 21,2006
WHETHER OR NOT the Rolling Stones bring their road show back to North America any time soon depends on how much the numbers make sense to one man.
That’s the big picture element of Michael Cohl’s job. On a more detailed level, the veteran Toronto music promoter will lock up deals on behalf of his clients for everything from tour sponsorship and home video products to leather jackets.
That visionary ambition is saluted in Satisfaction: The Life and Times of Michael Cohl, a documentary airing Monday at 8 p.m. on CBC and July 27 at 11 p.m. on Newsworld.
Directed by Toronto-based filmmaker Barry Avrich — who helmed the acclaimed The Last Mogul: The Life and Times of Lew Wasserman, a 2005 documentary about the Hollywood power player — Satisfaction is built around one lengthy interview with its subject and is supplemented with backstage footage and interviews with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards from the Stones as well as a humorous clip of U2’s Bono taken from a private tribute event.
Instead of being of interest to just celebrity junkies, Satisfaction concisely tells a broader story about how Cohl navigated his way to the top of a risky business.
"It’s rock ’n’ roll. It’s entertainment. They’ll recognize a lot of the faces," Avrich said during a phone interview from a beach in Nantucket, Mass.
"I come from an advertising background where you’re dealing in a pile of information for 30-second spots. I’ve done hundreds of those. This is a longer format, but you prepare for it going in. We sit down and put together the entire arc of his life and do the interviews and then sit down with 500 Post-its on a table trying to figure out how best to get this story out."
Cohl is not exactly reclusive, but he does not seek publicity. It helped that Avrich had a passing acquaintance with the promoter going back several years.
"I’ve known him for over 15 years. I worked for an ad agency years ago that was Michael’s ad agency. I did not handle his business but I watched him from afar and I saw the rock concerts come and go and I watched his empire grow and watched him sell his Rolodex over and over and do tremendously well. I just kept piling away notes and saying ‘You know, one day this will be an incredible story.’ "
Doing a film was the suggestion of Michael’s cousin, Dusty Cohl, co-founder of the Toronto International Film Festival. Avrich said he remained skeptical about getting the necessary cooperation from Michael.
"He did agree, but it wasn’t as easy as that. He agreed and then he said, ‘You know what? I really don’t want to do this.’ And then he agreed and then he pulled out — several times," said Avrich.
Even hearing a seemingly final "Let’s do it" foreshadowed a rocky path for the filmmaker because it just meant more effort trying to arrange a time and place for the main interview.
Avrich’s standard working method is to interview the peripheral subjects first and the main subject last, so he can use the accumulated information during the main interview. He got so anxious that Cohl might back out again that he changed his whole style after receiving a coveted invitation.
"One day he called me and said ‘OK, Miami.’ So we flew down to Miami and he walked into my hotel room that we booked to do the interview in and said ‘Alright. You’ve got 20 minutes.’
"I said, ‘Michael, you were born in 1948. I can’t possibly do this in 20 minutes.’ "
After more negotiations Avrich was the beneficiary of a four-hour session — with his subject fuelled by cases of diet cola — that forms the spine of his film.
"He just basically spilled and I ended up with substantially more than I ever could have expected," said Avrich.
"It is about control. To sit down and do this film and not have final cut, it’s so unusual for him."
If the worst that is ever said of Cohl is that he’s a control freak, he’ll be way ahead of a lot of his competition. The rise fuelled by his visionary business acumen more or less sounded the death knell for a host of old-school concert promoters.
"It was Bill Graham for a long time, and then one guy out of Canada — which is incredibly staggering. I mean this is a man who could have moved to L.A. and controlled his empire from anywhere he wanted and he still sits in Toronto," said Avrich.
"He’s the antithesis of all the promoters. All the promoters, no question, have an element of Barnum & Bailey about them. Michael is not that. I’ve always said he lived his life on the edge of the spotlight and is happy with that. Any time he gets dragged in, it’s another story. . . . There’s not a lot of carny about him, but there is certainly eccentricity. He’s a man of few words and those words are carefully chosen and generally dead on."
Cohl’s sometimes erratic early years in the concert industry (highlighted by a disastrous Buck Owens show at Maple Leaf Gardens) merely amounted to dues paying for opportunities he would seize in the ’80s. What should have been a no-brainer — Michael Jackson’s Victory tour — was floundering and Cohl volunteered to step in and fix it.
A subsequent proposal to entice the Rolling Stones back on the road by delivering a huge guarantee up front shook up the concert industry, at least as far as superstar acts are concerned.
"The Rolling Stones is what ultimately took Michael global, although he’d been testing out his business model idea of one tour, one promoter. . . . What’s interesting to me is the level of trust they had in him," said Avrich.
"What was amazing is that the Stones bought into what he was doing quickly, got it and appreciated his business sense."
The business model Cohl established with the Stones for the Steel Wheels tour in 1989 is just as appealing in 2006 to diva Barbra Streisand.
"She basically reacted to the same bait and she’s out there," said Avrich. "He looks at every possible revenue stream and perfects it and then on top of that invents new ones."
The director said that the reluctant subject has seen the film and conveyed his compliments for a job well done.
"He’s not suing, so I think we’re in good shape."
’He’s the antithesis of all the promoters. All the promoters, no question, have an element of Barnum & Bailey about them. Michael is not that. ’
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
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| Jumacfly |
Fire this wanker!! |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
Jumacfly wrote:
Fire this wanker!!
 Fire him!???? Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!???! Oh no. |
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| glencar |
CBC = duller than MSNBC. |
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