Jeremy Coon

Who is Jeremy Coon?

Jeremy Coon is the executive producer and editor of the 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite, a cult hit made on a $400,000 budget that has earned more than $44 million since its release.

Coon attended film school at Brigham Young University and graduated in 1997 from Lloyd V. Berkner High School in Richardson, Texas.

He was friends at Brigham Young with fellow film student Jared Hess, where he was told of Hess' nascent screenplay for Dynamite and agreed to raise the money to produce the film. On the opening day of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Coon sold the film to Fox Searchlight Pictures for $3.2 million.

After a 22-day shoot in Preston, Idaho, Coon edited the film during a nine-day cram session using Apple Final Cut Pro software for the first time. "We spent about a year assembling our crew -- 95 percent were friends from the BYU post department," he told the Apple publication Pro. "People would come by to check on me and I didn’t even know what time of day it was."

Rhys Southan, a filmmaker who attended high school with Coon, operated a Beat Jeremy Coon weblog that documented his efforts to become more famous than his classmate before their 10th high school reunion in 2007.