"Do you want to see my black widows?" Kyle Cooper asks as he walks through his studio - past tanks holding an octopus and two Burmese pythons - to a padlocked shed beside his house. Inside sits a tiny aquarium filled with more than 50 spiders. It feels like the set of Fear Factor. But these are Cooper's pets - and the stars of his latest two-minute masterpiece, the opening credits for Spider-Man 2, due in theaters June 30. "I caught the first black widow in my library," he says, pointing to the bloated queen in the corner. "I've been studying it and its offspring to photograph and model ever since."

Cooper, 41, specializes in crafting title sequences - the short introductions and closings to films, videogames, and television shows that list the names of the cast and crew involved in the production. In this boutique industry, Cooper is king. He has designed the lead-ins to 150 features - including Donnie Brasco, the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Sphere, Spawn, Twister, and Flubber. The movies themselves may not be cinematic classics, but Cooper's credits - which operate as minifilms in their own right - consistently stun and entertain audiences. For this spring's Dawn of the Dead, he even used real human blood. Critic Elvis Mitchell, in his New York Times review of the movie, summed up the Cooper effect: "The opening and closing credits are so good, they're almost worth sitting through the film for." Indeed, the word in Hollywood is that some filmmakers have refused to work with Cooper, says Dawn of the Dead director Zach Snyder, because he's "the guy who makes title sequences better than the movie." Not since Saul Bass' legendary preludes to The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Vertigo (1958) have credits attracted such attention. Cooper counts Bass' work, along with Stephen Frankfurt's lead-in for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as his greatest influences.

Directors don't call on Cooper for a signature style; they hire him to dig under the celluloid and tap into the symbolism of a film. That aptitude first became apparent in 1995, with the abrasive and highly stylized intro to David Fincher's Se7en. In it, the letters - hand-scratched by Cooper with a needle onto film stock, frame by painstaking frame - disintegrate to the industrial rhythms of a remix of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer." The oft-imitated setup perfectly captured the addled mind of the movie's serial killer and set the tone for the entire film. "It's a unique blend of auteur and creative genius that makes his sequences memorable - but not at the expense of the film," says Grant Curtis, coproducer of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. "That's what makes Kyle truly unique, his innate sensibility that opening title sequences are not separate from the film, they're part of it."

Propelled by Se7en's success, Cooper left the design firm R/Greenberg Associates, where he'd spent seven years - first in New York and then in Los Angeles. In 1996, with RGA colleagues Chip Houghton and Peter Frankfurt, Cooper founded Imaginary Forces, which quickly established itself as the hottest design shop in Hollywood, creating everything from the Netscape browser's comet field logo to the increasingly elaborate main titles for dozens of films. For The Mummy, Cooper conducted extensive historical research and designed a unique typeface that was part roman letters, part hieroglyphics. The words were then superimposed on a torch-lit backdrop of ancient Egyptian scrolls and pyramid inscriptions. For Arlington Road, it was all about the edits; he spliced together serene images of suburbia - picket fences, kids on bikes, American flags - then added harsh yellow and red hues to give a sense of paranoia. "Kind of like, 'Hello, welcome to suburbia as hell!'" says Arlington Road director Mark Pellington, who drove through dozens of neighborhoods with Cooper, capturing footage on super-8 and 16-millimeter film for the sequence.

As Imaginary Forces grew, Cooper found he was spending more time managing than creating. Last year, he went solo. "To be honest, the move was about me just wanting to do my own work," he says. "People stand in line waiting to ask you things. I prefer to execute my own ideas." Frankfurt has a slightly different spin on the breakup, as he explains in Andrea Codrington's biography Kyle Cooper. "More often than not, Kyle is saying, 'I know how to make these pieces fit together. I have this recipe in my head, and none of you know how to work together in the way I know you should.'"

With his new venture, Prologue Films, Cooper has scaled back and refocused. He promises to make only a few films at a time and not to grow the staff beyond eight, give or take a few freelancers. "I'm not sure Prologue will take the design world by storm, but I do know that we will never do anything that I do not think is perfect. I will never compromise again." Flubber II, it seems, will have to find somebody else.

As a filmmaker, Cooper is all about precision. When you're doing a two-minute movie, being obsessive about every cut, every transition, and every manipulation of every letter is a job requirement. But so is letting go, something Cooper has a tough time with. When he was 14, he spent seven weeks etching the texture of a dragon's body - from its jagged teeth to the individual hairs on its back - with a pin onto a metal plate. "I would deal with things in my life, difficult things, by just being very introspective," he says. Cooper's first full-length feature, New Port South, bombed at the box office in 2001. Stung, he brought the movie back to the editing bay, where he still obsessively refines it.

The production on Spider-Man 2's titles, from conception to delivery, has stretched almost an entire year. Cooper began by digitally scanning dozens of vintage Spider-Man comics and editing them together in a blink-and-you-miss-it five-second montage that encompasses the entire story arc of the first film. After that, "the credits get caught in the web. I love the moment when you kind of figure it out," he says. "Oh wow, metaphors! Flies in a web, type in a web like flies. That's great!"

Unlike the first Spider-Man's title sequence - which took months of tweaking with software apps including Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, Maya, and Photoshop - Cooper this time relies on old-school filmic techniques. The credit's primary conflict between Spidey and arch nemesis Dr. Octavius is presented in striking stop-motion animation. Which brings us back to Cooper's black widows and the octopus. "I always liked the black cat fighting the white cat in the main titles for Walk on the Wild Side," Cooper says, citing Saul Bass' classic work. In homage to Bass, Cooper pits his spider and his octopus against each other. "They both have eight legs and very similar body designs," he says, showing off the photos he took of his pets for inspiration. "The metaphors of these animals already existed. I just thought the animals fighting would look good together."

Like a lot of Hollywood heavies, Cooper is translating his skills to videogames. His goal is to enliven game openers with interactivity. For Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, due from Konami in November, Cooper makes the gamer the director. Players can tap a button on the joystick to transform the credit's type, say, from a snake to a snake skeleton. "I like seamlessly dissolving between camouflage, which is intrinsic to the gameplay," he says, "and the texture of the snake's skin." Offering such control to the player comes at a cost, though. "It's like making four different titles," Cooper says.

Cooper's success has brought new attention to an art form that has long been considered an afterthought, spawning a host of rivals and copycats. "There's a lot of people trying to be Kyle now," concedes Cooper. But how many of them have an octopus at home?

Jon M. Gibson (jon@jonmgibson.com) profiled sound designer Dane A. Davis in Wired 11.11.

Kyle Cooper

credit Photo Illustration by Frank Ockenfels 3