Caleb Cooks '93

By Alicia Nemiccolo MacLeay '97

For filmmaker Caleb Cooks '93, it's the mission, not the money. And for Cooks the mission is race. "It's a journey I feel that I have to be a part of," he said. "This race thing, it's in my blood."

His choice of projects range from the 2003 PBS series Matters of Race to an award-winning public service announcement about the backlash against Muslim and Islamic Americans following September 11.

Cooks is currently a director, writer and executive producer overseeing television and film projects for the New York production company Edgeworx. He joined Edgeworx in September of 2001 after four years at PBS headquarters in Alexandria, Va., heading development of the network's digital advertising department, which promoted programs like Antiques Roadshow using the high definition TV format.

Cooks's first project as executive producer at Edgeworx was a 30-second public service announcement in collaboration with the National Geographic Channel. "I got to New York and realized it made the most sense to do a project I felt tied into--the extraordinary recovery of this city," said Cooks. The emotionally charged result, "The Road," features non-actors from Brooklyn promoting tolerance and unity. It recently won a 2002 Promax award for best cable PSA.

In his position at Edgeworx Cooks remains involved with PBS, working on projects like Matters of Race with producer Orlando Bagwell. The documentary is scheduled for broadcast in January. Cooks calls it a documentary unlike any he's ever seen. Matters of Race will feature narration by people "who are not scholars," he said, "but people who are mixed or Latino or Native American. They might not even know who they are." The creators hope to create a national dialogue on race in America by bringing viewers into study circles on college campuses before and after the broadcast.

"It's really interesting how this project reminds me of what I was doing not even 10 years ago," said Cooks, who made a 30-minute film on the marginality of students of color for a sociology class his senior year at Colby. He went on to serve as project director for Tolerance on Campus: Establishing Common Ground, a 1993-95 program at Colby funded by a Philip Morris Foundation grant to deal with racial conflict on college campuses. For two years Cooks lived in Runnals Building and helped students produce movies about diversity and tolerance. "I think diversity is more internal than external," said Cooks. "It's experiences--your beliefs."

In 1995 the opportunity to write and produce a 90-minute documentary on the post-apartheid housing situation in South African townships for US AID came along. For six weeks Cooks worked with a film crew, visited townships and met the people who were bringing the first running water and electricity to their neighborhoods. "That was life-changing," said Cooks, who had never been abroad before.

In 2000, while a producer at PBS, Cooks began working independently on a documentary about the D.C.-based Hip Hop Theater Junction. "They're really flipping black theater into new meaning, fusing hip-hop performance technique with actual Shakespearean acting," he said. The 12-member group attracts audiences ranging from hard-core hip-hop enthusiasts to traditionally white, older theatergoers. "They're coming out and seeing 20-something African Americans on stage break dancing," Cooks said. "That's the type of cultural homogenization that I'm very interested in."

Hip Hop Theater Junction performed the first hip-hop theater play ever staged at the Kennedy Center. The play, Rhyme Deferred, is the Biblical story of brothers Cain and Abel, but flipped, says Cooks. It centers on the divide between hip-hop's original noncommercial honesty and its contemporary flash. "Kain is a very commercialized emcee and Gabe is underground," Cooks said, "and yet one still feels the need to emulate the other."

In February Cooks optioned the rights to develop Rhyme Deferred into a feature-length screenplay and wants to produce it as an independent musical on film--"sort of Moulin Rouge meets Dancer in the Dark, but for hip-hop," he said. He has several networks interested in the project, including PBS, and hopes to release the documentary and Rhyme Deferred as a television series and as companion components on a DVD. "It's the first-ever fully packaged program on this subject," Cooks said.

He hopes all of his films express his vision and values. That means making sure a film crew realizes and believes in "the point of why we're all in this thing together." It's a philosophy he also applies to life.