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Combining nearly three decades of motion picture experience, first as an executive, then as a highly prolific producer and finally as one of American film's most versatile and successful directors, ROB COHEN (Director) maintains a unique place in the entertainment industry. Often on the cutting edge of culural (pop and otherwise) and technological developments, Cohen's films as both producer and director have swept across a wide range of topics and backdrops.

Cohen most recently directed Universal Pictures' summer 2001 blockbuster The Fast and the Furious, a powerful action drama set against the explosively charged backdrop of underground street racing in Los Angeles. The film, which starred a young ensemble of cutting-edge talent headed by Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, has grossed in excess of $145-million at the domestic box office, and won extensive praise for its highly visceral and imaginative reinvention of the dormant auto racing genre. The film continued its massive success upon its release on video and DVD on January 2, 2002, with consumers devouring 85% of the first DVD copies shipped to dealers in the first five days of release, and setting a first-week record in DVD rentals. The Fast and the Furious was honored with five 2002 MTV Movie Award nominations, including Best Movie, Best Male Performance (Vin Diesel), Breakthrough Male (Paul Walker), Best On-Screen Team (Vin Diesel and Paul Walker) and Best Action Sequence.

In 2000, Universal released Cohen's provocative thriller The Skulls, which revealed the machination of Ivy League university secret societies. The film starred Joshua Jackson, Paul Walker and Leslie Bibb.

Cohen's critically acclaimed The Rat Pack, an HBO film starring Ray Liotta as Frank Sinatra, Joe Mantegna as Dean Martin and Don Cheadle as Sammy Davis, Jr., chronicled an entire era as it toild the story of Hollywood and Las Vegas' most famous swingers in their heyday. The Rat Pack garnered 11 Emmy Award nominations (winning three), won Cheadle a Golden Globe Award and earned Cohen a nomination from the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Direction of a Television Film.

Cohen's previous directorial efforts reveal his expansive storytelling interests. His debut film, A Small Circle of Friends, starred the late Brad Davis and Karen Allen in a romance set against the political turmoil of late 1960s Harvard University (Cohen's alma mater). Heralded both by critics and audiences, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story--which was both written and directed by Cohen--humanized the legendary Hong Kong-born action hero for new generations, and made stars of both Jason Scott Lee and Lauren Holly. Daylight, starring Sylvester Stallone, was a big-scale action thriller with high-tech special effects set primarily in a massive tunnel beneath New York's Hudson River, which was re-created in Rome's Cinecitta Studios. Daylight was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Sound Effects Editing.

For Dragonheart, visual effects made a quantum leap in Cohen's epic fable of an unlikely alliance in mythical times between a knight (Dennis Quaid) and a fierce but noble dragon endowed with the powers of speech (voiced by Sean Connery). Cohen was intricately involved with both the design of the massive creature and implementation of the state-of-the-art effects by Industrial Light & Magic, the first time that a major motion picture character was fully rendered digitally. The film won the Saturn Award as Best Fantasy Film of 1996, and was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects.

Cohen was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson in New York. He attended Harvard University, from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in anthropology. He began his career in film during his sophomore year at Harvard, when he assisted director Daniel Petrie in ma

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