Cokliss, Harley
Entry updated 4 May 2026. Tagged: Film, People.
US film producer and director (1945- ), sometimes credited as Harley Cokeliss, also active in the UK and New Zealand. His first sf feature was the much-loved Children's Film Foundation title The Glitterball (1977), after which he served as second unit director on Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, and went on to direct the low-budget sf adventure films Battletruck (1982; vt Warlords of the Twenty-First Century) and Black Moon Rising (1986), from a script by John Carpenter.
His most interesting film is the short Crash! (1971), which features J G Ballard wandering around car parks, overpasses and wrecked cars, while expounding his views on the links between cars, violence, fetishism and eroticism, and reading extracts from The Atrocity Exhibition (coll 1970), along with some wordless dramatizations; it predates Ballard's novel Crash (1973) by two years. Cokliss also made the documentary It's Fantastic, It's Futuristic, It's Fatalistic, It's Science Fiction (1973) as part of the BBC's Omnibus arts programme strand, with Forrest J Ackerman, Brian Aldiss and Isaac Asimov among the interviewees. [CWa]
Harley Louis Cokliss
born San Diego, California: 11 February 1945
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