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"“New York loves a scoundrel,” says Matt Tyrnauer. “This city has a certain affection for bad guys that’s just baked in.” And he’d certainly know. The filmmaker’s latest feature is Where’s My Roy Cohn? , a documentary about the late lawyer, social fixture, and all-around boogeyman whose own roguish behavior—including a ringside seat for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist rampage, legal representation of organized crime figures, and eventual disbarment for unethical conduct—burned a path through the 20th century. What’s most fascinating about Cohn, however, isn’t just the life he lived—which included fake engagements, wild nights at Studio 54, a bustling home base and unparalleled access to power and was pretty fascinating—but the influence he continues to wield more than three decades after his death. Not only has his own paranoid, aggressive style become a mainstay in the American political arena, but Donald Trump, one of his most important clients and greatest students, has become President of the United States thanks in part to what many say are tactics straight from Cohn’s playbook. “Overnight,” Tyrnauer says, “he became a modern Machiavelli and created a president from beyond the grave.” Here, the director talks to T&amp;C about making the film, what surprised him most about Cohn, and what lessons from his late subject’s life we might still have to learn. How did you begin working on this movie? Did you know before the 2016 election that Roy Cohn was a character you wanted to explore, or did it come together after? It started with my Studio 54 movie . I was making it in 2016 and it was a combination of an archival film and a cinema verité film, but a lot of the archival footage featured Roy Cohn because he was the lawyer for Studio 54. When I made the movie, I watched hundreds of hours of that footage, so I was basically marinating in Roy Cohn through all of 2016 and started wondering why nobody had made a movie about this incredible character. I put it out of my mind because I was convinced Hillary Clinton would win the election. Then when the election happened, it came right back; I wrote the treatment the day after the election, raised the money, and made it as fast as I could. The more I researched it, the more passionate I became about doing this movie. Cohn would have been a footnote in American history except for the election of Trump. Did that direct line from Cohn to the White House make it an easy sell? No, not at all. It wasn’t entirely surprising to me that when I called around in late 2016 to some of the usual suspects who back documentaries that there was a kind of “oh, tell me more,” but not a leaping interest. One place I looked for money was the Upper East Side. What I mean by that is that there are so many extraordinary, committed, brilliant people in New York who have deep pockets and care about politics and social justice. Along with one of the producers on the film, Marie Brenner, I had some meetings and at a certain point, Marie and I just looked at each other and realized there was a fear of this project. You could tell that the people we were talking to themselves, what if the IRS audits me, do I really want my name on a project that’s so determinedly anti-Trump ? That was chilling to us because it felt like McCarthyism. Beyond just finding backers, you had to find people who knew Cohn to talk on camera. How did you figure out who you wanted to help tell the story? His heyday was 30, 40, 50 years ago. A lot of the key people were dead or pushing 100. So, I always start with the nonagenarians. I make a list and rank it by age, and those are the first phone calls we made. It was obvious we needed the people who knew him, the people who had covered him in that period, and family members. We succeeded on all fronts. Was there anyone you wanted and couldn’t get? Barbara Walters has a particular place in the Cohn story. They met when they were young, and Cohn helped her father get out of a tight legal spot. They were devoted to each other for his entire life. I think it’s a peculiar and ugly story about transactional New York and the kind of sordid media culture that has always existed here. Through several emissaries, I reach out to Walters and it was pretty clear she wasn’t making any public appearances let alone comments. The other ones who wouldn’t speak were Robert Morgenthau, who just died, he was the district attorney who indicted Cohn three times and never succeeded in convicting him, and Stanley Friedman was a Bronx politician who became Cohn’s law partner. We all have the All the President’s Men fantasy of knocking on the door, but it doesn’t always work out that way. The film also gets into how the money and power that Cohn’s family had impacted him. Who knew he was from the family behind Lionel Trains and Q-tips? I knew he came from a prominent Jewish family, but I didn’t understand how rich they were. The brand names associated with the Marcus family—his maternal line, where all the money was—included Bank of United States, Phillips-Van Heusen shirts, Lionel Trains, and Q-tips. How did we not know that? There is this panoply of Jewish industrial might, and that’s where he comes from. He went to school at Horace Mann, and in his class were S.I. Newhouse, Jr., and Gene Pope, who’d go on to run the National Enquirer . This represents that post-war generation of privileged, cosseted children of New York, not of the old-line WASP variety, who were the Masters of the Universe in the mid-20th century. Cohn was the dark prince of this group. So much of Cohn’s strategy has been apparent in the way Trump operates. Are there things we haven’t seen yet but should look out for? Cohn rewrote the demagogue’s handbook for our time. He was brilliant and for some reason he was attracted to the politics of the right. He understood how politics worked; he studied at the knee of J. Edgar Hoover and was one of the great boosters of Joseph McCarthy. He was one of the inventors of what’s sometimes called the paranoid style of American Politics, and that persists to this day. I think we had all been lulled into a false sense of security that it had been wrung out of our society, but apparently it has not. There’s a Mark Twain adage that history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. And while I don’t think we’re in a new McCarthy era per se, the Trump era—which is really the Roy Cohn era—is an echo of that. Cohn was part of McCarthy’s downfall but was able to come back from it. He was embraced after that, specifically in New York high society. What made that possible? Many people have asked me how Cohn could have exited the Army-McCarthy hearings in total disgrace, taken the train back to New York, and seemingly overnight reemerged unscathed to become the darling of New York society. My answer is simple: Have you met New York society? It’s the most transactional, get-ahead group imaginable, and he was the man for the moment."
<https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a29191261/roy-cohn-new-york-society-matt-tyrnauer-interview/>