Hollywood Producer Kevin Cooper to film "Shakey" in Chicago

Not all roads in the movie making world end in Hollywood. Sometimes they pass through, perhaps to return another day. For Kevin Cooper, film production has taken him from Munich to New York to Los Angeles to Chicago. And the journey probably isn’t over yet, it may just be the beginning.

Kevin Cooper’s company, Amarok Productions, is in the beginning stages of a new film titled, “Shakey”, the semi-autobiographical tale of a dog that in Kevin’s words, “was so dog gone loyal … it hurts me to even say this to this day.” It is the story of a faithful pooch that tugged on Kevin’s heart strings at the outset of his career. “Shakey” is a family film to be shot in Dupage County, located west of Chicago. “It’s a tale of loyalty,” Kevin explains, “and what family means and staying true to your friends.”

But Kevin doesn’t plan on being tied to family films. His focus is more on films that work. “I think of greater importance is to do responsible films … financially … try to do lower budget films that have commercial appeal.”

Having grown up in Toledo, Kevin’s return to the Midwest with his wife and kids is a coming home of sorts. “We had never been to Wheaton before. Before L.A., we had lived in New York City. So we kind of grew accustomed to big city life, and yet I also wanted the comfort of the Midwest and suburbia, as strange as that sounds to some people at least in the city. I had not been in suburbia for many years.”

The Kevin Cooper filmmaking saga has taken a few turns along the way, beginning as an Army interrogator in Munich during the Cold War and eventually leading to Los Angeles where he was instrumental in the production of “The Fight Club” and “Second Hand Lions”. It was in Los Angeles that he headed Digital Domain, a company partnered by James Cameron and responsible for a long list of digitally enhanced films, most famously among them, Titanic.

But despite much success in Los Angeles, the pull of the Midwest was strong enough to bring him home. Although the venue has changed, his passion is still filmmaking. In Kevin’s words, “Artistically, I needed time to breath.”

Kevin Cooper is also a professor at Columbia College in Chicago. The following is his interview with the Examiner:

What prompted the move from L.A. to Chicago?

Kevin - A couple of things. I was running Digital Domain … for six years. It’s a very small industry, very small … where everyone kind of knows one another. I, for lack of a better term, grew up in the industry. I’m from the Midwest originally. As soon as I graduated from film school I went there to my first job. Established friends in a professional sense. I had two kids at the time and they were young. They were going to school, and one day one came back from school and said, ‘Jimmy was asking me if his dad could give me a script’ (laughter). Also, I’m from a big family, and my kids, this saddened me a little bit, they didn’t know my family. My dad in particular, he’s a great guy. The housing market had gone through the roof. Our house had quadrupled in a few years. We said, ‘You know what? Let’s just throw this all to the wind,’ in terms of living there.

We had never been to Wheaton before. Before L.A., we had lived in New York City. So we kind of grew accustomed to big city life, and yet I also wanted the comfort of the Midwest and suburbia, as strange as that sound to some people at least in the city. I had not been in suburbia for many years.

Where were you born?

Kevin - Toledo Ohio. It’s a pretty tough little town in terms of the auto industry. It’s been beat up over the years and continues to be beat up pretty good. It was a great place to be raised.

You had never lived in the Chicago suburbs before?

Kevin - Never. It worked out really nicely for us. We really like it here.

Maybe if you’re in the film industry and you’re in Los Angeles, you’re so surrounded by it, that it becomes your whole life.

Kevin - Exactly. As a creative person, as an artist, and maybe this is a flaw of mine, I had a difficult time detaching myself. Artistically, I needed time to breath. But we had a great run there. It was really the kids in particular, it was time. And now, with the beauty of blackberry … up until about three or four years ago, screenplays were always hand messegered and now it’s all through PDF’s. When you’re talking to an agent, they don’t ask where you’re at.

It seems that Chicago might be going through a resurgence. Maybe the film industry is branching out geographically, or maybe not. The studios still hold the cards.

Kevin - That’s the key. Let’s use an even more generic term, where does film finance come from? And that sort of encapsulates studio financing. It’s all there (Los Angeles). If you took a pie chart of the last five years of the top 200 films. How were those films financed? The overwhelming majority of financing for those films came from Los Angeles. By the way, there’s a whole foreign sales component too. Generally you’ll go from Dubai to L.A. and then out. Even though foreign financing plays a critical role, it generally goes through L.A.

How about the production, the on location shooting, is that being spread out a little bit?

Kevin - The incentives work very well in certain cases. Tax incentives in Iowa were pulled under some fairly controversial conditions. It’s not free money and at some point the taxpayers begin to pay when the economy is down like this.

I think that New York and Chicago have natural settings that lend themselves to some types of films.

Kevin - Absolutely … as a location I think it’s a great place. By the way, I want to spin it toward my project. And I have been just recently in particular kind of courting the finance community in Chicago. And that will be the day … if a group of filmmakers can go and prove that there’s a way to create an industry like there was 100 years ago in Chicago, I think there’s an opportunity, absolutely. In fact, I have some meetings next week with some high up individuals that are interested in exploring and I know how realistic it is, especially when you give them the numbers, because realistically it’s not the greatest … the return on film is not great, generally speaking. Yeah, I think it’s a great place to shoot. In fact, I’ve made a lot of films in my day, but I’ve never made one in Chicago so I’m looking forward to this.

Does the story “Shakey” have any personal connection to you?

Kevin - It does actually. It is somewhat semi-autobiographical. When I got out of film school in New York and went to L.A., I had a dog. I was young, I wanted so badly to sort of, you know “if shall” and the first place I moved in, a little apartment building, they wouldn’t let me keep my dog and I loved this dog as much as just about anything I ever knew. But they said I had to get rid of him and I put up posters and said, “Will you take my dog? He’s awesome.” You’ve probably seen those kinds of fliers around. You know, I cried …this is horrible, it hurts me to even say this to this day. I couldn’t get rid of him because he was so dog gone loyal and we would get a phone call, ‘OK bring him over on Friday’ and then Saturday morning they would call us to tell us to come pick him up. It’s a family film in the vain of a “Home Alone”. In that way it’s very much … emotionally it’s the same kind of story. It’s about a guy who moves from Toledo to Chicago and he’s a chef, but we’ve kind of taken some creative license to move it away from my actual life.

It’s one of the reasons I moved back to the Midwest in fact. It’s a tale of loyalty and what family means and staying true to your friends. As you know, when you’re in L.A., you’re asked to compromise those … in the industry part of living in L.A.

Will you use the Chicago suburbs as a backdrop?

Kevin - We plan to shoot the majority of the film out here (suburbs). But the film itself will portray … more of the city. And they will come out to the suburbs. One of the places they will try to get rid of the dog is Wheaton, literally. They have an adventure coming out here to get rid of the dog and that sort of goes awry and antics ensue. But we will double, for example, there’s a facility over on Butterfield … I’ve often thought, it looks just like the lobby of a big high rise building you’d see in downtown Chicago. We could use their kitchen facilities to double as a high end restaurant. The travel shots or as we say the second unit stuff, we’ll shoot probably in the city, but the majority of the film will be shot out here.

At what point in your life did you decide to go into film production?

Kevin - When I was sixteen I enlisted … I went into military intelligence. I was trained as an Army interrogator. I was stationed in Munich, which is where the various film studios are and my job was to … I had to debrief refugees during the cold war coming out of Eastern Bloc countries as a really young man. I worked for the DIA. As I was doing that during the day, the cold war was coming to the end about the time my enlistment was up. I kind of looked around, the language that military taught me was German and it became pretty apparent that the cold war was over. So at that point, I look around and my mentor said, ‘Well, you can re-classify and go work for the FBI, CIA or something like that or …’ and he knew my affinity, love for film … ‘You can go to film school,’ ‘What’s film school?’ So being sort of the cocky young kid that I was, I applied to NYU which is a very good film school. I got in … I had credentials, but it was Kevin Cooper, I wasn’t like James Bond. And I went from that to wearing black at film school.

But it was your superior that suggested it? You had no idea that you wanted to do it?

Kevin - Being from Toledo, I didn’t know what that meant. I just assumed it was nepotism or … I just didn’t understand it. I had also gotten the GI Bill so I felt like I had some money in my pocket. I did a little bit of research. I remember going to the library, you know, before the internet, and I remember trying to figure out what the best film school was, and the research sort of all came back to NYU. Scorsese and Spike Lee and all these great filmmakers … the Coen brothers, Oliver Stone and I said, ‘You know what, if I can get in, I should just go for it. I had been doing some pretty crazy stuff up until that point so … I got in. I was accepted. I got out of the military October of 1989, which was the month that the wall fell, so I was really feeling like those old images of seeing the allied soldiers going through the streets of Berlin, feeling like this victorious army. I had a lot of confidence.

Will Amarok Productions focus on family films? What is your favorite genre?

Kevin - When I was younger, I was very commercially minded. As I grew, my job was to find the value in something that I didn’t necessarily care about. I worked as a development executive for a number of years. I was one of the executives on the “Fight Club” at Fox. The early drafts of that were pretty tough to digest. We don’t have a mandate per se. The issue of genre is a little less important, although, yeah, I would love to do [family films]. I think of greater importance is to do responsible films … financially … try to do lower budget films that have commercial appeal.

You’re more familiar with the studios, do you think you’ll be going the film festival route?

Kevin - I’m actually on production on a film in China as a producer right now. My film before that was a movie called “Lora” which is Hungarian. So I have a pretty good idea of how the indie world works. We’ll just shoot for the top and we’ll go to the studios. We’ll go through acquisition executives at each of the studios first. If they pass we’ll go to the next tier, mini-majors as they’re sometimes called … I feel pretty confident. As I said … Hollywood is such a small place, everyone knows one another. If I don’t know a person, I’m sure I know someone who knows the person.

If the film is good, and it’s properly marketed, it will make it.

Kevin - We’re the underdogs with this specific film … this is kind of the Paranormal Activity, that movie really inspired me to want to do this, do it out here, because of the business part of it. It sent a signal to me that there’s a way to make a palatable or commercial film, and doing it at a price, and I mean a micro-budgeted price. Why do these ultra low budget films always have to be horror films? Why can’t we make a low budget family film?

I think it comes down to screenwriting. Understanding what makes a good story. I think the average moviegoer doesn’t really care that much about cinematography.

Kevin - I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s where I come from. I come from reading two, three scripts a day and reading thirty scripts on the weekend. That was my job. I really believe, if you build it, i.e. a screenplay, they will come. Screenplay and acting, those two things, if you can nail those, you’ve got a half a shot at making a successful film.