Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on March 13, 2015

Imagination might carry us to new worlds, but the people doing the imagining are often exactly as you'd expect.

The executive with the greatest influence on family entertainment is Pixar chief John Lasseter a jovial, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing father of five. The creator behind some of the most notable stoner man-child comedies of recent years is the stoner man-child comedian Seth Rogen.

Etan Cohen has been responsible for some of the more ribald work Hollywood has produced over the last couple of decades. The longtime screenwriter was a protg of Mike Judge and worked on "Beavis & Butt-head"; he also penned the foul-mouthed antics of "Tropic Thunder." And come Monday, Cohen will make his directorial debut when "Get Hard," the prison-prep comedy starring Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell, premieres at the SXSW Film Festival ahead of its March 27 release.

Cohen's movie features shots of frontal male nudity, Hart describing in Tennysonian detail the ways in which Ferrell's prison-bound character will soon be sodomized, and material so raunchy that the film was initially given an NC-17 rating (Cohen and Warner Bros. then trimmed it to an R).

Yet Cohen is not at all as you'd expect. He's a strictly observant Jew--a member of the Orthodox synagogue B'nai David who sends his three children to an Orthodox school, an alumnus of a prestigious Jewish day school in Boston and a post-high school yeshiva in Israel, and someone who still studies Torah every week with his rabbi from said yeshiva.

In a Hollywood proud of its rock-ribbed secularism, Cohen and his wife, Emily, abide by a deeply held set of tenets obeying the biblical prohibition against work on Saturday and major holidays (most of "Get Hard" was shot on a Sunday-Thursday schedule), keeping strictly kosher and filtering all choices through the prism of the normative rules of halacha.

Hard-R comedy by day, Talmud study by night can create some uncomfortable internal divisions. It also makes Cohen something of a double outsider. He's an anomaly in modern moviedom, which shies away from overt displays of religion (even the recent wave of evangelical movies tend to be made outside the studio mainstream). Cohen is also an outlier in the religious Jewish world, which--despite Hollywood's high proportion of secular Jews--tends to view the place warily. There are, in fact, a handful of observant creatives in Hollywood, but they tend to be writers, a far more flexible job. And most aren't making full-frontal comedies.

"People in our community ask me when the movie's coming out, and I make it clear I never want anyone in our shul to see it," Cohen said with a small laugh. "Someone was even saying 'You should make an announcement and have a kiddush [post-services reception] and I said, 'Uh, no.'"

Turning more serious, he said, "This has been a tension for me for many years. I always feel like I have a foot in two worlds."

Cohen, 40, is at an upscale kosher restaurant in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood. He is wearing trendy jeans and the Silver Lake-ish newsboy cap he often prefers to a yarmulke. He has a low-key demeanor and brings up religion only when asked about it.

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Etan Cohen, director of 'Get Hard,' is used to confounding expectations

Category: Talmud
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