Kohner spins tales from his decades in the movie business in this memoir.

Kohner inherited the traditions of filmmaking and travel from his parents. His father, Paul, was born in Czechoslovakia. After emigrating to America, Paul worked as a Hollywood producer and talent agent, managing the careers of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Billy Wilder. Paul was one of the founders of the European Film Fund, an organization dedicated to helping European creatives like Alfred Döblin and Bertolt Brecht escape the continent in the years before the Second World War. Kohner’s mother, Lupita Tovar, was a Mexican actress who starred in the Spanish-language version of Dracula and in Santa, Mexico’s first talkie. From the start, Kohner was raised in a cosmopolitan milieu that included an extensive international network of relatives, family friends, and regular artistic collaborators. Though he and his sister were raised in Los Angeles, they grew up speaking German until they started elementary school, and they spent summers with relatives in Mexico (where family friend Diego Rivera once painted a portrait of them posed in traditional peasant garb). Kohner attended college in Mexico City and Paris, after which he joined the Munich production of John Huston’s film Freud(which also starred Kohner’s sister, Susan, as Sigmund’s wife). In this memoir, Kohner recounts his rise in the film industry—not in Hollywood, but in Europe, first under the tutelage of Huston and Spain-based producer Samuel Bronston, later via jobs across the continent, including the memorable shooting of The Bridge at Remagen in Czechoslovakia, which coincided with the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion. Eventually, Kohner would team up with Hollywood action star Charles Bronson to produce a number of films, including The White Buffalo (which required the construction of a giant mechanical bison) and Love and Bullets (a film that originated as a title in search of a story; it would ultimately follow the travails of “an Arizona police detective who tries to go by the rules but is pushed to take the law into his own hands”). Kohner would win an Emmy for producing a children’s television series based on a book by a friend of his parents—Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline.

The eclecticism of Kohner’s career does not feel random. Indeed, the way he tells it, all his projects—from Charles Bronson movies to adaptations of novels by Knut Hamsun and Carlos Fuentes—seem organic outgrowths of the timeless storytelling instinct. “A good story is everything,” writes the author, “and the search for original, well-constructed stories is like searching for pearls in a sea of oysters.” Arising from his anecdotes is his own story arc of professional success and frustration; marriage, divorce, and fatherhood; his fondness for fast cars and his affinity for languages. Readers will learn the disparate factors that informed film production during Kohner’s era, many of which remain relevant in the present day. The greatest pleasure of the work, however, is the author’s portrait of a continuous creative community, across art forms, stretching from the silent films of prewar Europe through 1980s action movies and beyond.

An engaging story of film and family that plays out across decades and continents.