Movie trailer: “I Am”
In 1988, an acquaintance from my college days at the University of Virginia showed up in Los Angeles. His name was Daryl Richman and I guess you could say he was an unofficial ‘campus pastor’ in the 70s. He asked to meet with me which we did in my office on the second floor of the Fred Astaire Building on the old MGM lot in Culver City.
At the end of our chat, Daryl handed me a business card with a name and phone number on the back, contact information for a UVA grad who was going to film school at UCLA. “You should look him up,” Daryl said. “He’s talented.”
As I recall, I did call the number, but never reached anybody.
Cut to more than a decade later. I was cleaning out some files when I found Daryl’s business card. I flipped it over to see the contact information. The name read: “Tom Shadyac.”
Yes, that Tom Shadyac, director of such movies as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, Liar Liar, Patch Adams, and Bruce Almighty (he also co-wrote the screenplays for Ace Ventura and The Nutty Professor).
So it was with some interest when I saw the trailer for Shadyac’s new movie, a documentary called I Am:
Some background:
The documentary recounts what happened to the filmmaker after a cycling accident left him incapacitated, possibly for good. Though he ultimately recovered, he emerged a changed man. Disillusioned with life on the A-list, he sold his house, moved to a mobile home community, and decided to start life anew. Armed with nothing but his innate curiosity and a camera crew, Shadyac embarks upon a journey to discover how he as an individual, and we as a race, can improve the way we live.
“I Am” has already appeared at the Hampton Film Festival and is now set to appear in theaters in February, in limited release.
Here is a Q&A with Shadyac after a screening of I Am:
Part 1
Part 2
I have read quite a few news items re Shadyac and this documentary, many of them cynical and snarky. Why? Here is someone who had a genuine life-altering experience, causing him to ask some fundamental questions about the very meaning of existence, then made some radical lifestyle choices. Those type of things are okay in movies, but not in real life?
As to what appear to be two central messages of the film, the interdependence of biological entities and the call for individual change, allow me to quote Carl Jung:
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual.
This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals.
In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.
If anybody knows Tom and cares to forward this post to him, please tell him I’m happy to do anything on this blog including a Q&A to help promote his documentary.
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