Founder | Cogknockers Filmmaking Company
“For it would be better to die once and for all than to suffer pain for all one’s life.”
― Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Eric Wayne Key is a writer, filmmaker, musician, and composer — a Southern-born storyteller forged by trauma, tethered to legacy, and propelled by a need to burn through illusion to get to something real. He is the founder of Cogknockers Filmmaking Company, an independent studio built not on the promises of Hollywood, but in deliberate defiance of them.
Raised in Jacksonville, Alabama, in a mill village wrapped in kudzu and steeped in contradictions, Key grew up surrounded by the ghosts of both history and personal pain. His great-grandmother, Bessie Key, was burned alive in her home. His father, Jackie Wayne, was set on fire by another child — an act written off as, “boys will be boys,” but which left Jackie permanently disfigured and emotionally scarred. Jackie was six years old.
Those burns left a scar across generations. Fire was no longer metaphor — it was inheritance. And Eric carried it forward.
As a child, Key swears he heard what he believed was the devil’s voice while playing with matches inside a makeshift tent. The tent ignited, as did something inside him — not fear, but something else: an understanding that fire would follow him, or he would follow it.
Years later, working as a pyrotechnician at Disney-MGM Studios, Key choreographed explosions for a living. It was poetic — and it was real. During that time, his parents’ house caught fire. His childhood bedroom was lost, along with everything in it. Another chapter reduced to ash.
In 1990, Key suffered a debilitating back injury while working at Disney. He was 26 and suddenly disabled. The fire, it seemed, had turned inward. When he recovered, he moved to San Francisco to write — chasing story instead of spectacle, honesty instead of artifice.
There, he became a pioneer in the early digital design era, working as a web manager and content lead for Mindscape, Broderbund, and Mattel Interactive. He met his wife, Soyung, during those years, and together they would go on to run a successful boutique design studio for nearly two decades, raising two sons and building a life rooted in creativity and shared values.
But the desire to tell deeper stories never faded.
On the eve of their marriage, in 2000, Key optioned his first screenplay, A Tiller of the Field, to Zeta Entertainment — a milestone that should have launched a career. Instead, it nearly ended one. The film was never made. The process was bruising. The machinery of Hollywood — its ego, its bureaucracy, its indifference, its addictions — left Key hollowed and furious. He stopped writing. For many, many years.
It took time — a long time — to bring him back.
Back in 1999, Key had met Ken Rotcop, the acclaimed screenwriter and producer best known for For Us, the Living: The Story of Medgar Evers. Rotcop became Key’s mentor, guide, and anchor. The two worked together — off and on — for nearly two decades, until Rotcop’s death in 2018. It was Ken Rotcop who helped Key reclaim his voice — but never his tolerance for the industry.
Today, Key embraces the path of the outsider. Through Cogknockers, he is writing, directing, and producing bold, character-driven stories that reject convention and celebrate imperfection.
Currently, Key is developing a historical limited series based on the life of radical abolitionist Benjamin Lay, blending rigorous research with a bold, stylized approach to storytelling. He is also pursuing a degree in Artificial Intelligence after nearly forty years away from college.
His current active project, a 30 minute film shot in the desert, in and around Lovelock, Nevada, embodies this ethos completely. With its stripped-down cast, open desert setting, and themes of introspection, choice, and transformation, the Lovelock production is both a cinematic exorcism and an act of reclamation. No middlemen. No compromise. Just a story, a lens, and the truth.
At 60 years old, Key’s work is sharper, more urgent, and more personal than ever. His 2023 diagnosis with a rare Intramedullary Spinal Cord Tumor — a condition that cannot be surgically removed — has only intensified his sense of purpose. Despite enduring chronic pain and ongoing surgeries, Key refuses painkillers, a personal vow rooted in his father’s long battle with addiction.
Despite the tumor, Key continues to create with clarity of purpose and a passion for cinema without compromise. His films are collaborative, not-for-profit projects that reflect a lifelong commitment to art and innovation.s is not a man chasing fame. This is a man creating before the fire burns out.
Eric Wayne Key makes films because he has to. Because the South still echoes in his bones. Because stories are how we survive. And because sometimes, to tell the truth, you have to bury the lie first.
Key’s mantra?
“Yeah, that would be, Life is way too short for bulls**t.”
