The Coen Brothers: A Biography

It all started with a parachute.

Sometime in the mid-sixties, after mowing every yard in their neighborhood, little Joey Coen saved enough money to buy a Vivitar Super-8 camera for him and his brother Ethan. They were soon proud filmmakers, and produced Ziemers in Zambia (named after leading man and neighborhood friend Mark Zimering). Loaded with amateur special effects, the film featured a “spectacular” shot of a man parachuting from a plane, the boys using miniatures and a white sheet as background. The problem was, their suburban Minnesota home was nowhere near a flight path, so they had to wait for weeks to get a shot of a plane passing overhead. This kind of patience–present in them even as children–was just one of the qualities that would establish them as modern cinematic marvels.

Growing up in the Minneapolis suburbs, the Coens were influenced by an odd array of films; Joel once claimed that PillowTalk, with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, had a “surreal influence” on their theatrical vision.

After finishing college–Joel at NYU, Ethan at Princeton–the pair began patiently forging their niche in the film industry. One huge breakthrough was Joel’s job as assistant editor on the 1981 cult horror classic The Evil Dead, made by Sam Raimi (later of SpiderMan fame). The two quickly forged a lifelong friendship, and Raimi became a mentor of sorts to the brothers.