THE COSMIC ROOM

When Bob Cohen’s film studies at UCLA failed to qualify him for a student deferment in 1954, the US Army had no idea who they were letting in the door. THE COSMIC ROOM is about Bob's accidental discovery of a top-secret NATO plan to annihilate the world and how this information – which he preferred not to know – completely overturned his life.

Leaving his station in Germany for the Left Bank in Paris, Bob joined the Sixth Annual Youth Festival to the Soviet Union, followed by a seven-week journey across Red China, filming a country he knew little about for NBC. As the son of a wallpaper hanger, Bob was captivated by working people everywhere: How much did they earn, what did they eat, what did shoes cost and could their children go to school? Traveling over 6,000 miles, he discovered a profound disconnect between how the US portrayed China, and the people he met while filming. When the CIA started their own program for students traveling abroad to counter the successes the communists had, the stakes tightened in the race to win young hearts and minds.

By connecting ‘enemy nations’ through films, Bob believed his work could thwart nuclear ambitions — which he took as a personal affront. With defiance in his blood and the FBI and CIA hot on his trail, Bob returned to the US, edited his footage, and booked screenings at universities and lecture halls around the country. People were hungry for information outside mainstream news.

Ever in search of truth and humanity during one of the most forbidden eras in history, Bob made it his mission to film ordinary people in regions where access was deemed impossible by the State Department and illegal by the FBI. As he traveled, his archive of film, photographs and news events grew. So did the files kept on him by the FBI and the CIA. Not long ago, Bob retraced his 1957 journey in China, co-producing 300 hours of material for Chinese TV.

While Bob’s journey is a global one, the story of his wife Kim, back on the home front, is national. Through Kim we learn about the profound impact war policies - real and imagined - had on ordinary American lives.

THE COSMIC ROOM will be built around master interviews, personal film and photo archives, historic footage and the massive paper trail created by intelligence agencies at every turn. Bob’s story appeals to people born before the Cold War, who are curious to know what young people were doing during that dark era, and how that era is re-emerging in new forms. THE COSMIC ROOM will be a compelling American story with a great new generational twist on the old Cold War.