By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Harley Cokeliss (pictured above right with actor Timothy Spall), who helmed That Summer!, Battletruck, Black Moon Rising, Malone, Dream Demon and more.
Like many filmmakers who have featured in the Unsung Auteurs column, the seemingly now retired Harley Cokeliss has a small but interesting collection of films to his name, across a few genres, but with a focus on one. In the case of Cokeliss (who is also sometimes credited as Cokliss), that genre is science fiction, for which he has always shown an obvious sense of passion and understanding. The fact that Cokeliss was the second unit director on one of the greatest science fiction films of all time – 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back – is wholly fitting for this director, who has worked consistently in both the US and the UK.
Harley Cokeliss was born Harley Louis Cokliss on February 11, 1945 in San Diego, California, and was raised in Chicago. He moved to England in 1966, where he studied at The London Film School. Cokeliss moved into TV documentary filmmaking after graduating in 1970 with titles like the very fitting It’s Fantastic! It’s Futuristic! It’s Fatalistic! It’s Science Fiction! (1973) and The Need For Nightmare (1974). Cokeliss also directed the 1970 music doco Chicago Blues, and a seventeen-minute 1971 short film based on J.G Ballard’s classic, controversial cult novel Crash (later adapted in feature form by David Cronenberg in 1996), showcasing his taste for unusual material.
Cokeliss moved into more substantial filmmaking in 1977 with two hour-long theatrical mini-features aimed at young audiences; both films also provide some indication of where the director would go with his career. Charming and thoughtful, The Battle Of Billy’s Pond follows youngsters who butt heads with an avaricious chemical company paying illegal dumpers to dispose of dangerous chemical waste. Created for The Children’s Film Foundation (which made hour-long films for children’s matinee cinema screenings), The Glitterball, meanwhile, is about two teenage boys trying to help a tiny spherical alien get back to its mothership. Mmmm, the spherical element aside, that certainly sounds familiar…
In something of a career redirect, Cokeliss made his official feature-length film debut with the slightly out-of-character 1979 teen drama That Summer! Notable for featuring the big screen debut of the great Ray Winstone (just after his breakout in the notorious TV film Scum), this gritty little drama follows two young men out for a good time in Torquay who get mixed up with two girls and a gang of Scottish thugs. After his youth-based sci-fi outings, Cokeliss once again showed a real affinity for working with young actors, and stays in touch with the story’s inherent toughness despite its sunny trappings. A rock-solid youth flick, That Summer! is certainly more than a little undervalued today.
Upon the sudden passing of Star Wars production designer John Barry, the sci-fi proficient Cokeliss offered his services to the production crew of The Empire Strikes Back, which was shooting in London. “I got a phone call from [producer] Robert Watts and I came down to the studio the next day to meet [producer] Gary Kurtz and [director] Irvin Kershner, and I started the next day and did it for four months,” Cokeliss told MJ Simpson in 2015. “I thought it would be a four-week job and it turned out to be a four-month job. I got the nicest compliment from George Lucas who said to me: ‘Harley, your unit’s not the Second Unit, it’s the Other Unit.’”
After working on The Empire Strikes Back (and yes, Steven Spielberg did see The Glitterball via George Lucas), one of the key films on Cokeliss’s resume came next. Though forgotten by most, 1982’s Battletruck (also known by the far dumber title Warlords Of The 21st Century) maintains a small but keen cult who remember it fondly as a VHS video shop curio. A New Zealand/UK co-production backed in part by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, Battletruck was one of many (many, many) films to roar in on the afterburners of George Miller’s Mad Max. Shot in chilly New Zealand but set in rural America, this grim but highly entertaining post-apocalyptic actioner features Michael Beck’s motorbike riding ex-soldier protecting a peaceful community against a sadistic US military leader (James Wainwright). Though it obviously suffers in comparison to Mad Max, the visually compelling and well-directed Battletruck is one of the classic film’s better imitators.
Cokeliss took on a more grounded kind of sci-fi flick with his next effort, which, like Battletruck, also has a small cult mainly via its VHS video shop days. Originated and co-written by cult legend John Carpenter (“It was my ‘My car is stolen and I’m going to get it back’ story,” the director said in 2016. “I have never seen the final film”), 1986’s Black Moon Rising stars a pre-massive-credibility-jump Tommy Lee Jones as a thief who ends up behind the wheel of The Black Moon, a prototype vehicle which can reach speeds of 325 miles per hour and runs on tap water! Boasting a great support cast (Linda Hamilton, Richard Jaeckel, Robert Vaughn, Keenan Wynn, Bubba Smith, Lee Ving), Black Moon Rising is a very nifty little 1980s low budget actioner well deserving of rediscovery.
Burt Reynolds’ output in the 1980s wasn’t exactly stellar, but Cokeliss made one of the actor’s better films of the era with the enjoyable action thriller Malone, a modern western (“Let’s be honest, the film is Shane,” Reynolds said) in which Burt’s CIA hitman defends a small community against the evil businessman (Clif Robertson) who basically owns it. With another strong cast at his disposal (Lauren Hutton, Scott Wilson, Cynthia Gibb, Kenneth McMillan, Tracey Walter), Cokeliss again delivers a highly entertaining piece of work with enough character nuance to make it memorable…though the film now sadly and unjustly sits alongside 1980s Burt bombs like Stroker Ace, Stick, Switching Channels, Heat and Rent-A-Cop…not all of which are bad, by the way.
Cokeliss returned to the UK for 1988’s hallucinogenic, surrealist horror flick Dream Demon, which allowed the director to really let loose visually, and then directed the amnesia-themed 2000 thriller Pilgrim with Ray Liotta and Gloria Reuben. Cokeliss’s final film credit remains 2010’s decidedly non-auspicious Paris Connections, a thriller based on a novel by trash mistress Jackie Collins which was also the first direct-to-DVD film produced by the British supermarket chain Tesco when attempting to switch things up and diversify its business…and yep, that’s like Woollies or Coles getting into the movie biz. Despite this rather ignominious career end (he is now 81 and his last credit came in 2017 with the TV series Starhunter Transformation), Cokeliss remains a quietly fascinating filmmaker.
He nearly directed the excellent 1984 sci-fi flick The Philadelphia Experiment (which again originated with John Carpenter and was directed by Unsung Auteur Stewart Raffill), and even had a failed dream project in the form of his envisioned adaptation of the Conan-style Thongnor novels by Lin Carter, which were cancelled when intended star Arnold Schwarzenegger opted to star in John Milius’s Conan The Barbarian instead. Cokeliss also planned films based on the famed UK 2000AD comic strips, and was one of the principal directors on the popular Hercules and Xena TV series. That’s quite the cult cache indeed.
An inspired, original, energetic and always interesting director of highly underrated science fiction and action flicks, the wholly unsung Harley Cokeliss deserves far greater acknowledgement, especially in cult and genre circles.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Jeannot Szwarc, Craig Gillespie, David Greene, Ernest Pintoff, Paul Williams, Jo Heims, Lee H. Katzin, Christoper Cain, Ken Wiederhorn, Barbara Loden, David Mackenzie, Alan Rudolph, James Lee Barrett, Edwin “Bud” Shrake, Joan Tewkesbury, Jamaa Fanaka, Jack Starrett, Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
