Jim Kouf has spent forty years putting two people who do not want each other in the same car, in Stakeout, Rush Hour and Grimm. The pairings are dependable and often funny; the plots around them rarely rise above the pitch.
Fi1m perspective
Watch any Jim Kouf story for ten minutes and two people who would rather be elsewhere will have been made to work together. In Grimm (2011) it is Nick Burkhardt, a detective who has begun to see animal faces under human ones, and Monroe, the grumbling, reluctant creature who turns out to be the show's best company. Kouf has written that pair in one costume or another since the 1980s: two policemen in Stakeout (1987), Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour (1998). The plot exists to keep them talking.
He started in comedy, writing with David Greenwalt on Class (1983) and Secret Admirer (1985), then directed Miracles (1986) himself. Stakeout made his name, and in the same year, under the name Bob Hunt, he wrote The Hidden, a science-fiction horror about a creature that has since gathered a small cult following. That is the shape of the next two decades: studio scripts (Another Stakeout in 1993, Rush Hour, Snow Dogs in 2002, Taxi and National Treasure in 2004) alongside films he directed, Disorganized Crime (1989) and Gang Related (1997). Around 2000 he moved to television, working on Angel and Ghost Whisperer, and in 2011 he, Greenwalt and Stephen Carpenter made Grimm.
Grimm is his largest piece of work and the one we can speak to. Sewing a fairy tale into every police case is a good hook, and it carried 122 episodes over six seasons, from 28 October 2011 to a short final run in 2017. It is also pleasant, tidy and a little less than it might have been. David Giuntoli is a bland lead, the creature effects are rubbery, and the mythology grows until the show can no longer hold it. We kept watching, and after a while we noticed we were watching for Silas Weir Mitchell, whose Monroe complains his way through the whole enterprise and is funnier and warmer than anything the cases give him. He is worth the evening. The show will not frighten you.
The strengths and the weaknesses hold across the career. Kouf builds high-concept premises a studio can sell and gives them enough character to survive the meeting; National Treasure is the clearest case, a script that kept a large adventure moving. What he does not do is let a premise breathe once it has been bought. The reviews of Taxi called it formulaic, and Another Stakeout showed what happens when a pairing that worked once is asked to be broader the second time. His most constant collaborator is Greenwalt, with whom he shares some thirty credits, and his most recent screenplay of note is Money Monster (2016), about television and money.
Kouf has said: "It's all about the characters. And the world they have to survive in. And I don't want to bore anybody. So I try to keep things moving." He rarely bores. He also rarely stops long enough to find out what his characters would do if nobody were chasing them.
Biography
Jim Kouf is an American screenwriter, producer and director. Born on 24 July 1951 in Hollywood, California, he graduated with a B.A. in English from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo in 1974. He began writing for film in the early 1980s.
Kouf wrote the screenplays for Stakeout (1987), for which he received the 1988 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay, Rush Hour (1998) and National Treasure (2004). He co-created the NBC series Grimm (2011–2017) with David Greenwalt and Stephen Carpenter, serving as executive producer and writer on all 123 episodes and directing several.
His other credits include writing Taxi (2004) and Money Monster (2016), and directing the films Miracles (1986) and A Fork in the Road (2009). He is married to producer Lynn Kouf.
