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For Sheldon Cohn, the seeds of cinematography were planted at age 13, when in the Jewish religion, a boy becomes a man.

“I wanted to make a movie ever since I got a camera for my bar mitzvah,” he recalls.

Now, nearly five decades after his bar mitzvah, he’s co-written a movie with Gary Wolfson, “The Pickle Recipe,” a 97-minute comedy filmed in Metro Detroit, in which a  party entertainer sets out to steal his grandmother's award winning pickle recipe with the help of his shameless uncle. 

The movie is showing five times daily at the Emagine Theater in Novi and the Maple Theater in Bloomfield Township.

Detroit News reviewer Tom Long gives it a "B," writing: "You can see where all this is going in the first 15 minutes, but getting there is plenty of fun." (The Free Press doesn't have a review.)

The cast includes Lynn Cohen, who appeared in "The Hunger Games," played Golda Meir in Steven Spielberg’s "Munich" and was the nanny, Magda, in "Sex and the City." The uncle is played by David Paymer, an Oscar nominee who was Billy Crystal’s brother in "Mr. Saturday Night."

Cohn, who lives in Metro Detroit,  is no stranger to creativity. For 33 years, he worked at Doner Advertising Agency in Southfield, rising to director of broadcast production and director of content, where he created award winning commercials including the memorable talking animals one for the Detroit Zoo. He left in 2011. 

While at Donor, Cohn said he collaborated on commercials with Gary Wolfson and the two talked about movie ideas. Wolfson left Donor, but the two continued to talk about making a movie.

One day, in  2010, Wolfson talked about his Russian-born grandmother dying, and leaving no one the recipe to her “to kill for” amazing pickles, Cohn recalled.

Voila. “I said ‘Gary, that might be a good idea for a movie," Cohn recalls.

They raised money from family and friends and got a grant from the Michigan Film Office for their low-budget, seven-figure film.

They went to director Michael Manasseri, a former childhood actor who appeared in more than 40 national commercials. Manasseri moved back to Detroit to be closer to family and worked with Cohn on commercials at Doner. 


Sheldon Cohn

"He loved it," Cohn says of the movie idea. "We could shoot the whole thing in Detroit.and we didn't need to build sets, And it was funny."

They filmed in May and June 2015 around Metro Detroit, including in Hamtramck, Hygrade Deli on Michigan Avenue in Detroit and Temple Shir Shalom in West Bloomfield.

"We cranked it out," he said. "We had such good actors. They were able to deliver their lines so we didn't have to shoot hat many takes."

Last February, the PG-13 film ("brief suggestive humor and drug references") premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festivial to a sold-out crowd and was nominated for an award. On Monday, it played at the Jewish Community Center in New York.

"People thought it was great, they loved it," Cohn says of this week's screening on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Cohn shot a lot of commercials over several decades, and says the film was something special.

"This  is the most fun I’ve ever had shooting anything," he said. "I was very sad on the last day of shooting. I just loved it."