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In 1964, Leonard Cohen wrote a letter to a friend explaining that he’d sold what he called his manuscript “junk” to the University of Toronto, who shelled out $3,850 for the collection. How times have changed, especially in the rock memorabilia world. Next month, an auction of Cohen’s working drafts, correspondence and other items will include that letter, which auction organizers predict will likely go for multiples of that amount.

Sales of pop star items, alive or dead, are increasingly commonplace. In 2019, Christie’s auctioned off a collection of 50 love letters from Cohen to his muse,...

Ron Howard’s ‘Eden’ Makes Int’l Premiere As Opening Film Of Torino Film Fest

Rob Howard’s thriller Eden will make its international premiere as the opening film of Italy’s Torino Film Festival next month in the presence of the Oscar-winning director. The picture stars Jude Law, Ana De Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney as a group of people who flee 1920s Europe to start over and build paradise on the Galapagos Islands, with disastrous consequences. Italian rights for the film – which world premiered in Toronto – have been acquired by Italian International Film in collaboration with Rai Cinema, and 01 Distribution will handle the local theatrical release. The film was sold to Amazon Prime Video during Cannes in a multi-territory deal including the UK & Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Scandinavia, Spain, Latin America, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, India, Turkey, West Indies, and Asia pay-tv.

In the first few minutes of his first Zoom casting call with actor Alex Wolff, Oystein Karlsen knew he had found his Leonard Cohen.

“He came on the screen like this,” the Norwegian director and screenwriter puts his hand over his face, with one eye poking out. “He said: ‘Sorry, I’m so hung over. I know I’m not going to get the role. I feel horrible.’ I thought: That’s Leonard!”

Karlsen already had his eye on Wolff to play the famously melancholic Canadian singer-songwriter in his new TV miniseries about Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, his great love, muse and the woman who inspired the song that gives the series its title: So Long, Marianne.

Alex Wolff as Leonard Cohen and Thea Sofie Loch Ness as Marianne Ihlen in So Long, Marianne.

“I wanted a professional musician and singer because I wanted our Leonard to really sing, to really play Cohen’s music,...

Cineflix’s Rights’ Leonard Cohen series starring Alex Wolff as the iconic singer-songwriter has revealed presales in the U.K., Greece and Cyprus, with Ard’s Fabfiction in Germany joining as a co-producer.

Titled “So Long, Marianne,” the drama has sold to Itvx in the U.K., Cosmote TV and Star Channel in Greece and Movies Best HD in Cyprus. Ard’s Fabfiction has joined original co-producers Nrk in Norway and Bell Media’s Crave in Canada.

According to its official description, the series “tells the legendary love story of Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen, and his muse Marianne Ihlen who inspired the titular song. It’s an intimate tale of two lonely people falling in love during a period of their life when they are trying to figure out who they are and their place in the world, while one is becoming one of the most famous singers of all time.

“Poets don’t make great husbands”, Aviva Layton, wife of the great Canadian poet Irving Layton tells us in the first few minutes of Marianne & Leonard, the latest work from documentarian Nick Broomfield (Whitney: Can I Be Me). We can trust her advice: Aviva was Layton’s second wife of five.

As a mentor in both literature and love, Irving offered seminal advice to a young poet – another Eastern European Jew in Montreal – named Leonard Cohen. Though Broomfield’s gaze is focused primarily on the fiery relationship between Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, which inspired many of his greatest fights and finest apologies, Marianne & Leonard is by the same token a timely entry into the growing body of work depicting the relationship between artists and their often-forgotten partners. What we usually learn from such tales is that the relationship between the artist and themselves is more urgent: the case of Leonard Cohen is no different.

Nick Broomfield’s longtime friendship with Marianne Ihlen is the point of entry for “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love,” which tells the story of the ’60s romance between Norwegian divorcee Ihlen and Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. It was a relationship that cast a long shadow in both their lives, as well as in popular culture, though its sporadic nature also spoke to the era’s Free Love ethos and Cohen’s short-attention-span romanticism in particular. Broomfield, a dogged protagonist in films like “Tales of the Grim Sleeper” and “Tracking Down Maggie,” to name just a couple, pretty much keeps out of the way here, letting plentiful archival footage and a few latter-day interviewees (but neither Ihlen nor Cohen) tell the tale.

Since Cohen’s relentlessly self-reflective life has been amply documented, and Ihlen’s considerably less so, much of this ostensible dual portrait ends up being a recap of Cohen...