Bio of Dr. Bruce Cook

Dr. Bruce R. Cook, Ph.D.

Capabilities Assessment and Biographical Data

Producing, Directing and Writing Dr. Cook has been active in film production since 1969. He has produced and/or directed eleven features since 1978. He has also produced and directed dozens of short subjects, commercials, and industrials. He has written more than twenty screenplays. Eight of these have been made into finished films and several are still in video distribution.

Production Supervision He has supervised the production of feature films from development, through principal photography, to post-production, into distribution and order fulfillment. He has followed a twenty-year plan to become familiar with all technical aspects of production. To this end he has served as director of photography, production manager, assistant director, editor, sound recordist, post-production sound cutter, final soundtrack mixer, negative cutter, trailer editor, prop master, set dresser, gaffer, assistant cameraman, key grip, ADR director and recordist, location scout, foley artist, post-production supervisor, and line producer.

There are only a handful of professionals in the industry with this breadth of knowledge. Because of his detailed knowledge of the entire film making process, other producers have frequently hired him to rework films that were already complete in order to make them more salable, as well as to make them deliverable to foreign markets.

Sales and Distribution Bruce attended a number of film markets when other distributors were selling his own productions. In 1995 he represented over a dozen features for sale at the American Film Market and the Cannes Film Mart. He has been formally researching international market trends since 1989. His articles have been privately circulated on the Internet, where they have impacted the annual reports published by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

Promotion Dr. Cook has cut trailers for more than twenty features distributed internationally. His work includes Robert Altman’s Shortcuts, Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon, Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, The Crow, The Piano, Germinal, The Bank Robber, Especially on Sunday, Boxing Helena, The Music of Chance, Equinox, and The Ballad of Little Jo. He has designed posters for more than a dozen features, winning an award for Deadly Intruder in 1983.

Contacts in the Industry His work on more than fifty features has given him a contact list that is invaluable. He also has on-going relationships with labs, vendors, and service providers.

Since 1973 he has taught evening courses at a variety of film schools, including five years at USC and twenty years at Los Angeles City College. His former students number in the thousands. There are few studios, vendors, production companies, labs, or service providers where these former students cannot be found. This teaching experience has provided him with the skills to communicate clearly, rapidly and with depth of knowledge. Approximately fifty foreign filmmakers attend his course in film business each year, providing business contacts around the world.

Among his former students are Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons), actor Laurence Fishburn, Paramount VP of Marketing Lucia Ludovico, five Academy Award nominees and winners, numerous directors and producers, and ten Emmy nominees and winners.

Family members are in the industry as well. His two sons have credits on some 200 pictures as cameramen. The elder has directed three independent features. One daughter-in-law has produced 13 features; the other starred in a hit TV series for 7 years.

Consulting He has served as mentor to numerous first time producer-directors. Additionally he has been advisor to three start-up film production companies. One of these is issuing an IPO after producing nine films in thirteen months. The other two have established themselves as boutique production companies, with multiple productions per year.

In 1996 Dr. Cook was invited by ABS-CBN, the largest television network in the Philippines, to teach a series of seminars on improving the production techniques of the film and TV industry. While there, he also addressed an assemblage of 2,000 Filipino film industry professionals.

The seminars brought him to the attention of former Secretary of Agriculture Carlos "Sonny" Dominguez. He returned to the Philippines to conduct market research on Southeast Asian film production. Drawing on his engineering background, he designed the retrofit of a warehouse complex to be the first true soundstages in Southeast Asia. As part of this process he met with leading vendors and service providers, as well as several motion picture studios, building relationships for future cooperation.

Bruce met with the Irish Film Board in Dublin, investigating an Irish-US co-venture that would allow the importation of American films into the EEC without quota restrictions. Additionally, he visited New Zealand, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany, researching the health of the local cinema industries, looking for possible synergies and opportunities.

He also acted as consultant to Dansk Bakery during the past seven years. During that period it has grown from annual sales of $2 million to nearly $50 million.

Innovations Dr. Cook introduced digital audio workstations to low budget film making in 1991. He was the first to use then-new IBM-platform audio cards for feature films. He consults internationally on time code and video standards conversion.

Drawing on his own experience as an independent producer-director, he has taught seminars on the nuts and bolts of independent feature production since 1990. Bruce introduced PERT chart analysis and Gantt chart scheduling to independent feature production, and has offered formal instruction in their use since 1985.

In 1973 he began to project trends for sales of various film genres, using the mathematical techniques of regression analysis. Currently he is developing an econometric model to forecast box office performance.

Education Bruce received his BS in Physics from the University of Southern California in 1968, then matriculated as a graduate student in Cinema at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1969. After completing a year of graduate work, he took a position as a physicist at Hughes Aircraft, doing laser research in the Apollo Program.

Simultaneously he pursued a Master of Arts in Mathematics and a Master of Science in Film Education, receiving the MSFE in 1973 from the University of Southern California. He was hired to teach part time in the USC Cinema department while he completed his Ph.D. in Communications (Cinema Production Emphasis) in 1976.

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