Jack Epps Jr.

It was a fateful day in 1975 at the student union of Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI when Jack Epps Jr, a graduate and award-winning student filmmaker, returned to his alma mater for coffee and chili with one of his former instructors, Jim Cash. Epps had made the trek to Hollywood after graduation, and had begun to make some inroads, scripting episodes of such TV series as "Kojak" and "Hawaii Five-O." But he wanted to move to the big screen. During the course of a forty-minute conversation, Epps and Cash mapped out the skeleton plots for ten motion pictures, of which several would actually be produced. Although Cash chose to remain living in Michigan and the duo would rarely see each other face-to-face after that meeting, through telephone and computer modem, they became a commercially--and financially--successful writing team.