Biography

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Charlie John grew up in the picturesque, natural setting of the Missouri River Bluffs outside Kansas City, Missouri.

His first babysitter was his maternal grandfather who owned a vintage movie palace. Charlie formed his first memories exploring the old movie house and observing curiously, from the front of the theater, the strange people who would come to his play space daily to sit in the dark and experience black and white movies from Hollywood's golden age.

He studied Finance at the University of Missouri and while still an undergrad had a job on Wall Street and literally had a desk with his name on it waiting for him in the World Trade Center. But the allure of movie making gradually turned his head to the opposite coast.

On advice from award winning producer Kathleen McLaughlin among others, he formulated a plan to learn every facet of the process of an idea for a movie becoming a screenplay, a screenplay becoming a movie property, a movie property becoming a green-lit movie production, that becoming a distributed movie, and that becoming a financially successful movie that is widely embraced by the type of movie audiences he had studied so closely at his grandfather's theater.

He served his apprenticeship working for fifteen years in various capacities inside the machinery of the Hollywood system, making independent films, and in Kathleen McLaughlin's words, studying "like you never have before" subjects as diverse as the history of the movies, the evolution through the years of Hollywood's power structure, screenwriting, directing, editing, lighting, composition, production design, sound in film, and of course the unique world and psychology of the motion picture actor.
- IMDb mini biography by: T.B. Collins