Joel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Coen (born September 21, 1957) grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their parents, Edward and Rena Coen, both Jewish, were professors, their father an economist at the University of Minnesota and their mother an art historian at St. Cloud State University.
When they were children, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television with a neighborhood kid, Mark Zimering ("Zeimers"), as the star. Their first attempt was a romp titled, Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go. Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966) became their Zeimers in Zambia,[4]which also featured Ethan as a native with a spear.
The brothers graduated from St. Louis Park (MN) High School in 1973 and 1976. They both also graduated from Simon's Rock College of Bard (now Bard College at Simon's Rock) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Joel then spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University where he made a 30-minute thesis film called Soundings. The film depicted a woman engaged in sex with her deaf boyfriend while verbally fantasizing about having sex with her boyfriend's best friend, who is listening in the next room.[citation needed] Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979. His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, "Two Views of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy."
In the late 70s both brothers lived in the Weinstein dormitory at 5-11 University Place, an NYU dorm noted for housing such creatives as Ralph Bakshi, Rick Rubin (Def Jam), and film makers Chris Columbus and Dan Goldman (Mr. Danny).
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