Lens Buff Zooms In To Save Optics Firm
By CHARLES GOLDSMITH
Staff Reporter, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, March 23, 2000
LEICESTER, England -- It's a story fit for a Hollywood movie: Against all odds, a New Jersey businessman saves a dying small-town factory and becomes a local hero. That's just what Les Zellan pulled off with Cooke Optics Ltd., a little maker of movie-camera lenses. And this year the saga has its own Hollywood climax, with an engineering team at Mr. Zellan's company claiming a technical Oscar.
 "They're razor sharp but also very flattering on skin tones," says cinematographer Dick Pope, who used Cooke's new S4 lenses for "Topsy-Turvy." The movie title could describe Cooke's recent history, until Mr. Zellan came along.
The story begins here in central England, where Cooke was founded in the 1890s. Explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton took the company's still-photography lenses on his 1907 expedition to the South Pole. Cooke's light-enhancing Speed Panchro lenses, developed in the 1920s, were a hit when motion pictures with sound arrived on the scene 20 years later.
Along the way, one of Cooke's founding fathers also invented the dimpled golf ball, patenting it in 1905. In 1946, Rank Organization PLC, now the parent of the Hard Rock Cafe chain, bought Cooke's parent, Taylor, Taylor and Hobson, a Leicester company that made industrial measuring instruments.
Cooke's zoom lenses were industry leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, known for a spiffy design that kept dirt and moisture out. But Cooke became a sideshow as Rank increasingly focused on its resorts, casinos and other core leisure activities, leaving the lens maker on shaky ground by the 1990s.
 "The place was so run down that sea-gull feathers would float down through holes in the roof," says Steve Walsh, a 37-year veteran of Cooke's glass-cutting shop. "The place came very close to shutting down."
A spokeswoman for Rank says the London company wasn't neglecting Cooke, but acknowledges that Cooke became "peripheral" to Rank's core leisure activities.
Enter Mr. Zellan. A former theater-lighting specialist who lives in Mountain Lakes, N.J., he became Cooke's U.S. distributor in the early 1980s and fell in love with the company's lenses and lore. "As soon as I saw the place, I wanted to buy it," he says.
"There's something magical about lenses, how they look and feel, and what they do," says Mr. Zellan, 50, who taught lighting design at the University of Missouri before starting his New Jersey lens-distribution company. "You can't put light in a bottle, but these lenses capture these beautiful images."
Touring the Cooke factory in Leicester, he points proudly to a 1919 photograph of King George V and Queen Mary, arriving at Cooke in a horse-drawn carriage to honor the role played by the company's lenses in aerial photography during World War I.
It wasn't just the past that attracted Mr. Zellan to Cooke. He was convinced that Cooke's S4 series of "prime" or nonzoom lenses -- under development since 1993 -- held tremendous promise if properly nurtured.
 Although Rank had funded the S4 lenses' development, many doubted the company's commitment to making the new series a success. "Under a big parent organization, Cooke always had to battle for support -- sales, engineering and the like," says James Moultrie, who was project manager for the S4 series and is one of three Cooke engineers cited for this year's technical Oscar. (The technical awards, which recognize advances in film-making techniques, were handed out earlier this month.)
So Mr. Zellan resolved to rescue Cooke. There were several false starts.
Cooke was part of Rank Taylor Hobson, a Rank unit dominated by precision instruments such as tools to measure the roundness of ball bearings. When London's Schroders PLC investment bank acquired Rank Taylor Hobson in 1996, the buyers weren't even aware that Cooke existed.
"We bought Rank Taylor Hobson and found something inside called Cooke Optics," says
Robert Howard, part of the management team that ran Rank Taylor Hobson for Schroders. "Cooke was hidden and very nearly buried. It had been allowed to run down and run down. I was told to get rid of it and, if necessary, shut it."
Schroders put Cooke up for sale in 1996. Mr. Zellan bid for it, but was beaten by Tinsley Laboratories Inc. of Richmond, Calif. The Tinsley deal never closed, however, because Tinsley was first bought by Silicon Valley Group Inc., a San Jose, Calif., company that makes equipment used in semiconductor manufacturing.
For starters, it would cost 100,000 pounds ($157,700) just to launch exclusive negotiations with Schroders, which was seeking more than 2 million pounds for Cooke.
Mr. Zellan had some minority partners in the U.S. to help fund the purchase, but he still needed about 800,000 pounds, and British banks weren't rushing to loan him the money. Despondent, he sent a sketchy proposal to the Bank of Scotland.
Cooke's S4 lenses
Charles Wighton, Bank of Scotland's associate director of corporate banking, recalls the request. "My gut feeling at the time was to listen to what this chap had to say, but not to expect too much from it," he says. "That changed when Les came through the door."
At the bank's main London branch, Mr. Zellan opened a carrying bag and plopped two big camera lenses on Mr. Wighton's desk. The planned 30-minute meeting lasted for more than two hours.
"We were surprised that an American, or anyone overseas, had so much knowledge of Cooke," Mr. Wighton says. "He had a clear knowledge of the market and a clear vision of the company."
Mr. Zellan was able to convince the bank that he could run Cooke while commuting from the U.S., and the bank signed up. Armed with the loan, Mr. Zellan finally bought Cooke in July 1998 and erected a new 21,000-square-foot plant outside Leicester, with a canteen for the staff and plenty of free parking. Lord Richard Attenborough, the Oscar-winning director of "Gandhi" who grew up in Leicester, dedicated a plaque at the plant earlier this year.
 Cooke began to aggressively promote the new S4 lenses, and orders flowed in. Within two years, the company nearly doubled its staff to 60.
The S4 lenses have been hailed as a breakthrough because their design makes focusing far easier. Most lenses focus by rotating at a constant speed on interlocking threads, much the way a toothpaste cap is raised or lowered on the tube. Instead of the threads, the S4 lenses rotate on an elliptical track system that allows the lens to move at variable speeds, making it easier for the user to keep actors in focus as they move around.
"They're clear and sharp, and seem to read a bit more in the shadows," says cinematographer Roger Deakins, who used S4 lenses in "The Hurricane" and an upcoming George Clooney movie, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Mr. Zellan looks back and laughs when he remembers the time he and his business partners first set their sights on Cooke. "We certainly weren't a big player," he says. "We were hardly even a little player."
Copyright© 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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