Crocker’s Early Life

Crocker lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his partner and four delightful children.

A New York native, Crocker grew up on the Upper West Side in the 1970s and has fond memories of taking public transportation to elementary school, wandering alone through Central Park, and dragging his parents to avant-garde films and theater productions. When Crocker was eleven, his parents fled the pressures of NYC private school expense to suburban Connecticut where they felt safe from dog excrement and alternative culture and music.

Crocker’s father, Robert Coulson, was a leader in the field of international arbitration and dispute resolution, helming the American Arbitration Association over two decades in which the reach and acceptance of ADR surged. He was also a renowned ocean racer and dinghy racer, having won the national junior championship Sears Cup two years in a row along with countless regattas. Crocker’s mother, Cynthia Coulson was a television news writer and researcher who worked at CBS and later as an editor for local newspapers in Connecticut.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Crocker became a passionate sailor and ranked fourth in the national championships for double-handed dinghy racing as a high school senior. From his mother, Crocker inherited a predilection for writing, becoming first the Editor-in-Chief of the acclaimed Greenwich Beak and then the only slightly less illustrious Yale Daily News. The latter experience enabled Crocker to attain a deathly pallor and enjoy the ministrations of the Yale Health intensive care unit for acute pneumonia. But even from his hospital bed, he never missed an editorial deadline.

Crocker in Journalism

After graduation, Crocker had the enormous good fortune to land a spot at The New Republic magazine, where he had the opportunity to work with journalistic giant Michael Kinsley and cultural arbiter Leon Wieseltier. Fellow writer-researchers of the era included super-blogger Andrew Sullivan and future Slate editor-in-chief, Jacob Weisberg. Weekends were spent fruitlessly trying to outrun roommate Malcolm Gladwell, while later getting revenge in sets of blow-pong. Crocker also scribbled for publications including the Los Angeles Times, Art News, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Crocker Gets Educated

Having shortchanged his studies at Yale by toiling into the early morning putting out the YDN broadsheet, Crocker resolved to obtain a thorough grounding in continental philosophy at the Freie Universität of then West Berlin as part of a Fulbright Scholarship. There he studied the works of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche and translated the work of East German expressionist poet, Uwe Kolbe. Crocker then embarked on a doctoral program in comparative literature at UC Berkeley, studying under the West Coast’s then-reigning queen of literary theory, Avital Ronell. Upon learning of the paucity of tenure opportunities for literary scholars in major urban centers, Crocker reconsidered the wisdom of completing his doctorate and decamped shortly thereafter for Los Angeles.

Crocker Makes Films

Having arrived in the midst of America’s popular culture machine, Crocker concluded that there was an untapped market for highly abstract art films in the vein of European filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and the later works of Goddard. The first such film that Crocker wrote and produced, Trumpet#7, debuted at the Cannes film festival and was released theatrically in France, but never “found an audience” with the broad American public, or Crocker’s family members. Crocker went on to produce several other independent films, including The Secret Life of Houses, The Blind Owl, Naked Jane, and Mascara that played at prestigious film festivals like Sundance and enjoyed release on cable and PBS outlets. Crocker spent several years developing a film project based on Paul Theroux’s masterful novel Picture Palace but was unable to secure the financing required to produce it. Heartbroken, penniless, and sick of the Hollywood culture of “dog that doesn’t return dog’s phone calls,” Crocker opted to enter the “dog-eat-dog” realm of finance.