Chuck Kinnane remembers exactly where he was on a cool autumn morning in late 2017, when he received a call that would change his life.
“This is Kevin James,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “I’ve seen a short film you directed. How would you like to work on something with me?”
That was a little more than a year into Kinnane’s fledgling collaboration with six of his brothers — and one brother-in-law — on a start-up production company in their hometown, Little Compton, R.I. (population: 3,600).
He and James, the “King of Queens” comedian, made plans to work on a project sometime in the next couple of years. Then the pandemic happened, and TV and film work all but ceased. Kinnane worried the opportunity might disappear.
But James came to him with a new proposal: Would the brothers like to quarantine at his Long Island home and keep shooting?
“He was like, ‘If you want to do this safely, we can work out of my garage, do some short films,” Kinnane said in a recent conversation over lunch with his brothers at an Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.
Dozens of YouTube videos and tens of millions of views later, the brothers have turned their pandemic collaboration into a yearslong relationship. There was a Netflix sports comedy, “Home Team,” starring James, directed by Chuck and Dan Kinnane, and now their latest project is arriving in theaters: “Solo Mio,” a rom-com also starring James, this time as an American left at the altar who sets out on his honeymoon in Italy — alone.
There are filmmaker brothers of course — the Russos, the Duffers, the Safdies, the Coens — but it’s unusual to see more than a pair. The Kinnanes number eight: Chuck, 42 (director); Wil, 40 (producer), Dan, 33 (director); Pat, 31 (writer); Brendan, 29 (writer and music supervisor); Pete, 27 (editor); John, 25 (writer); and a brother-in-law, Jeff Azize, 39 (producer and writer).
“If there’s another group of eight brothers, I want to meet them,” Jeff said. “It’s pretty special.”
The Kinnane brothers grew up in a three-story house in Little Compton, a rural seaside town with no traffic lights. There are 10 siblings in all, including sisters, Janie and Maureen, who is married to Jeff, as well as another brother, Mike.
Enlisting neighborhood kids, the brothers passed many a summer day re-enacting “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies with their grandparents’ old VHS camcorder, then showing them in their basement or backyard in the evenings.
“We were just having fun,” Chuck said.
Seven of the eight brothers initially worked in the family business, carpentry, which Mike now co-owns. (John, the youngest, joined the film collective out of high school. The sisters, Janie and Maureen, run a surf camp.) But their passion for filmmaking endured, and in their off hours, they were liable to be found shooting shorts on their iPhones for kicks.
Then in 2016, Chuck, who had moved to New York City to work in film and television, landed a mini-series project with Jeff — with whom he had been working on film projects for years — and needed a “real crew” to pull it off. So he asked all of the siblings: Who wants to join me? Six raised their hands.
None had attended college, much less film school. But experience, Chuck said, proved to be the best teacher. He moved back home and started the company, which he called the Kinnane Brothers.
“Our dream was always to make movies,” he said. “So it was like, ‘Let’s see if we can do that.’”
Among their first collaborations were an NBC Olympics special and a short film, “Rigor Mortis,” which premiered at the Austin Film Festival. Despite their apparently seamless work flow — yes, they finish each others’ sentences — there were some initial blowouts, Dan said.
So, they came up with a few rules: The best idea wins. If they immediately agreed on a concept, they’d throw it out and try to do better. And no notes on Fridays.
“It works, because we can be brutally honest with each other,” Chuck said. They settled into their roles naturally, he said, but can all do a bit of everything.
“We get a lot of ‘I could never,’” Brendan said. “But we know we have something very special going on here that’s bigger than ourselves.”
When James first encountered the brothers, well, “inexperienced” would have been putting it lightly. For their first collaboration, a 2019 music video starring James, he had tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of lighting equipment delivered to the Long Island set, Patrick recalled.
They promptly spent several hours figuring out how to set it up.
“I was Googling ‘How to set up a C-stand,’” Pat said. “And then I looked around, and every single one of these guys was YouTubing how to turn on the lights.”
“We went into the lion’s den,” Jeff said with a laugh.
That scrappiness kept them going during the pandemic, when they holed up in an Airbnb near James’s home. For six months, they worked dawn to dusk in his garage, making dozens of comedic videos that starred the comedian as Sound Guy, a klutzy sound tech inserted into famous scenes from blockbusters like “Rocky,” “Jaws” and “The Notebook.”
The videos, posted to James’s YouTube channel, went viral. One, starring Sound Guy in a gun battle against Will Smith in the postapocalyptic horror film “I Am Legend,” has racked up more than 12 million views. And the channel went from a few hundred subscribers to nearly one million.
“It was just such an overwhelmingly positive response,” said Pat, who came up with the character and worked with his brothers to write, direct and edit the videos.
They parlayed that into their first feature: “The Home Team,” a 2022 football comedy directed by Chuck and Dan and produced by Adam Sandler’s production company, Happy Madison. Starring James as the former New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton, it hit No. 1 on Netflix.
“We grew up watching his movies, so working with him was a dream,” Chuck said of Sandler, who saw some of the YouTube videos the brothers made with James and brought Chuck and Dan in as directors.
Next came a 2024 documentary, “Water Brother: The Sid Abbruzzi Story,” a passion project about the godfather of New England surf. They reteamed with James later that year on “Solo Mio,” which represents their national theatrical debut. (Chuck and Dan directed, with a script by John, Pat and Kevin James.)
They filmed it in Rome and Tuscany over about 20 days. There were challenges, like the language barrier (Nicole Grimaudo, the actress who plays the Italian love interest, did not speak English and memorized her lines phonetically) and the constraints of an indie budget.
“We looked into how much it would be to shoot at the Colosseum, and it was like 30 grand,” Pat said. “We were like, ‘OK, no.’” (Still, the brothers were able to land some big cameos, including a classical music star, which won’t be spoiled here.)
Through it all, perpetual good spirits — think of cousins joshing each other at Thanksgiving — sustained them.
Jordan Harmon, a founder and the president of Angel Studios, the self-described values-based company that is distributing the film, is himself one of nine siblings. What struck him the first time he met the Kinnanes, he said, was the brothers’ apparent seamless dynamic, and their lack of ego.
“It’s very clear that they’ve created a working relationship as a family that’s allowing them to not only be successful, but to actually enjoy working with each other,” he said by phone.
The brothers just wrapped their next feature, planned for later this year. Their aim, Chuck said, is the same as when they started the company a decade ago: To make films that people will enjoy.
Despite working together, in their free time, they hang out together, watch movies together, have dinner together. Several of the brothers live in the same apartment building in Little Compton (Chuck is their landlord).
“Our mom is like, ‘You’re together every moment,’” John said. “But that’s just us. We get a kick out of each other.”
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
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