Director Harley Cokeliss has spent the last 36 years in London, but he keeps coming back to Chicago. Raised in Humboldt Park, Albany Park, and Skokie, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1966 with a degree in psychology. Though he considered film schools in New York and LA, he thought going overseas would be romantic, so he applied to, and was accepted at, the London Film School. “The notion of being in ‘Swinging London,’” he says, “was just too exciting to turn down.”
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Cokeliss, who’d often snuck into the Blue Note and other Chicago clubs as a teen, returned home in 1970 to make Chicago Blues. An independent television documentary about Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, and other blues and jazz legends, the film was picked up by the BBC and led to a full-time job in London producing and directing arts and science documentaries. “Suddenly, at the age of 25,” he says, “I had the opportunity to produce and direct films for network television.”
One day in 1979, while working on That Summer, a coming-of-age movie for Columbia Pictures, he visited a couple of his crew members who were moonlighting on The Empire Strikes Back’s second unit at London’s Elstree Studios. A few days later he got a call from one of the producers, who offered him the position of studio second unit director on the film. Since then he’s directed big Hollywood projects such as the Burt Reynolds action flick Malone, science fiction and fantasy films like the 1988 horror thriller The Dream Demon, and episodes of the popular TV shows Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. He even had a cameo as a medieval warrior in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness.
