The Knights' Tale

Enlarge

Power Couple: Phil Knight relies on a mix of outsiders and insiders to make Laika work. (“Not exactly textbook,” he laughs.) Here, CEO and Nike alum Dale Wahl (left) and director Selick, on set.

When he brought in Wahl to run the footwear division at Nike, Wahl had no footwear experience but wound up staying 16 years and thriving in all sorts of jobs he wasn't qualified for on paper. Same goes for Howard Slusher, Phil's right-hand man at Nike, a former sports agent so ruthless he earned the nickname Agent Orange. For Laika, Phil instructed Slusher to scour the globe for top talent in … children's book publishing. Slusher brought back Fiona Kenshole, the former publishing director for Oxford University Press Children's Books in London, to scout stories for acquisition. She doesn't have a film background, either, but her connections helped Laika win the rights to the best-seller Here Be Monsters, one of several projects teed up behind Jack and Ben.

"It's not exactly textbook, is it?" laughs Phil. But as he always says about Nike, "There's no sneaker school." To his mind, nothing beats on-the-job training. Being in over your head. Taking risks. Making--and learning from--mistakes. He's thrilled to be an underdog again after 40-plus years in sneakers. And thrilled to be grooming his son at Laika. "Extrapolate this out long enough, and one day it'll all be his," Phil says. "I probably have pushed him to take more of a management role than he's wanted to take. That's kind of the way fathers are, right?"

Hollywood has been quite an education for the Knights. In 2005, Travis, Phil, and the rest of the Laika brain trust shuttled back and forth between Hollywood and Portland, introducing themselves to studios as the "Miramax of animation," a nod to the old indie studio known for its surprising range. But first, Laika needed a distributor. Otherwise, Coraline would go nowhere. Lions Gate, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal--they all passed. After that, Travis says, "we did some soul searching."

Coraline producer Bill Mechanic, the former chief of Fox Studios (Titanic, X-Men), wasn't surprised. "Hollywood is a me-too place," he says. "They want what's safe." Phil, however, was taken aback. "I knew it was a tough business, but it's been even tougher than I thought," he says. "It's a hard process to get to yes." Phil, who went so far as to take a three-day screenwriting seminar with Travis, doesn't care much for what he calls the "Hollywood thing." That is, canceled meetings, postponed meetings, calls that go nowhere. In the movie business, even the founder of Nike gets blown off.

Finally, Selick managed to get the script to Focus Features, the art-house arm of Universal. Focus CEO James Schamus, a veteran producer (Brokeback Mountain) and screenwriter (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), thought Coraline stood out. And he thought Laika understood moviemaking in a way few newcomers do. Coraline, says Schamus, "is the most technically and aesthetically advanced movie I've ever worked on--3-D and stop-motion and high definition. And you're talking to the producer of The Hulk."

Laika was in business.

It's hard to imagine Travis giving up animation anytime soon to be a studio head. He's one of the first staffers to arrive each morning. A little after 8 a.m. on a Friday, he has already been at work for an hour, hot glue stuck to his fingers, dirt smudged on his jeans. The production takes place in a huge unmarked warehouse. Sealed off from the clamor of hammering and rock 'n' roll, a series of stages is defined by tall black curtains clipped shut. A red light indicates filming is under way. Eight animators (soon to be a couple dozen) are working on various scenes, hoping to please Selick, a famously exacting director. The space is disorienting, dark, so the alleys have names. Travis is on Easy Street.

At the moment, though, he's laboring to adjust a tiny brown disc ever so slightly on a puppet's eye. Suddenly he stops. Throws up his hands. "I lost the pupil!"

This part of the job comes more naturally to Travis, recently named one of 12 rising stars in Animation magazine. He lives with Coraline and the other characters, dreams of them. "I can find solace here," he says. After finding the pupil and putting it in place, Travis repeatedly toggles through frames on the monitor, making sure the movement looks natural. The puppet comes alive, eyes bulging. Satisfied, Travis hits a few buttons on the keyboard, and the 3-D digital camera captures another frame.

Only 129,599 to go for the 90-minute film.

Later, in a nearby screening room, Phil, Travis, and Selick don square, black-rimmed 3-D glasses--a trio of Buddy Holly impersonators--to watch some early footage. Phil's in a good mood. He hasn't seen Travis animate, but he hears about it plenty. Travis and his wife and two young kids are living in a wing of his parents' home--"like a Chinese family," Phil says--while a new house (this, too, by Nike and Laika's architect) is under construction nearby.

Today, Phil sees a few scenes--his first glimpse of actual footage--including one in which Coraline vies for her father's attention by dancing with a door.

"Who did that part?" Phil asks. "That's pretty good." He knows. And Travis knows he knows.

If all goes well, sometime next fall, father and son will be sitting in a real theater with a real audience watching their film debut. Phil is loath to disclose a box-office target, but admits, "Obviously, we'd love to do $100 million."

That's Laika, reaching for the stars. Who knows, maybe at the end of this journey, the dog will even walk away.