THE PICTURES DETOUR Tom Shadyac Used to Be the Biggest
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Talk Friend Shadyac, Revision 6 : Friday, November 5, 2010 : 4:23:34 PM : Page 1 1 THE PICTURES DETOUR om Shadyac used to be the biggest comedy director going. His films, includingT “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Nutty Professor,” “Liar Liar,” and “Bruce Almighty,” grossed more than a billion and a half dollars around the world. He perfected the formula in which hard laughs are annealed with homilies: relinquish your power, follow your bliss, and don’t talk out of your ass unless you’re Jim Carrey and it totally kills. Late last month at Lincoln Center, Shadyac screened “I Am,” a handmade documentary that cost a hundred and seventy-four million dollars less than his last comedy. Youthful and shaggy at fifty-one, the director welcomed the au- dience by saying that he hoped this film, unlike his others, would change the world. Met with mere politeness from a crowd that has a sizable stake in the world as it stands, Shadyac, looking worried, remarked, “You’re so well be- haved.” After the screening, however, he was swarmed by young acolytes. In “I Am,” Shadyac narrates his own fall from—or perhaps into—grace: a tumble from a bicycle, in 2007, that led to a post-concussive infirmity so severe that he began, almost as a valediction, to canvas the world for meaning. The re- sult is a passionate, if patchwork, film that interweaves interviews with evolu- tion scientists and Desmond Tutu, quo- tations from Emerson and Einstein, a discussion of quantum entanglement, and footage of an emotionally suscepti- ble dish of yogurt, all to suggest that the natural world is deeply intercon- nected—and that we are by nature coöperative; that markets don’t measure our value; and that the heart, not the brain, is our primary organ. It’s what he was saying all along in his comedies, but this time with feeling. Shadyac’s own response to his discoveries was to give up his private jet (as well as his cell phone), sell his seventeen-thousand- square-foot compound in Pasadena and Talk Friend Shadyac, Revision 6 : Friday, November 5, 2010 : 4:23:34 PM : Page 2 move into a trailer park in Malibu, help build a shelter for the homeless and fund the rescue of African child soldiers, and tour around the country—some- times by bicycle—screening the film. At Trattoria Dell’Arte, a few days after the screening, Shadyac prefaced a lunch conversation by following the monastic practice of emptying his pock- ets of his possessions: a billfold wrapped in a black scrunchie, and a white scrunchie. As his meal consisted of a cup of peppermint tea, the server’s check-ins grew increasingly skeptical, but Shadyac always responded warmly: “I’m doing good, brother—how are you doing?” His dark night of the soul now seems to him a providential course correction. “I think the bike accident knocked me into my heart,” he went on. “As a direc- tor, our society teaches you that you can stand on top of the movie and say, ‘I’m the most valuable—or maybe the sec- ond most valuable, after our star—so I deserve all this stuff. Give it to me.’ But if I ever do another Hollywood movie, I’ll arrange to get something like the Di- rector’s Guild minimum”—$210,392, versus his customary eight-figure fee. “The rest will go into a charitable ac- count.” He knows that his character arc could inspire satire, as it emulates that of the comedy director in Preston Stur- ges’s “Sullivan’s Travels,” who journeys as a hobo to gather material for a planned film about the downtrodden, to be called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Shadyac said, “I’m not doing this to punish myself—I’m doing it be- cause it’s awesome. Imagine being able to have a dialogue with a freed slave from Ghana, James Kofi Annan, and then taking the resources that I have, which would otherwise sit in a bank ac- count, and buying him a boat so he can go back and free others. Now, c’mon— it’s going to take a heck of a Maserati to beat that.” One of Shadyac’s interviews was with his father, Richard, a lawyer who helped found St. Jude Children’s Re- search Hospital, in Memphis—and who died before “I Am” was finished. “My father, if he saw the movie, might say ‘Utopian,’ ” Shadyac said. “In the film, I ask him, ‘Is it possible to build a business where we don’t leave our prin- Talk Friend Shadyac, Revision 6 : Friday, November 5, 2010 : 4:23:34 PM : Page 3 ciples at the church door?’ And he says, ‘No, not knowing man.’ And yet he did it. He built St. Jude, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. It epitomizes our sickness that my father, with all he did, was still stuck inside the sack of our cul- ture. What I hope the film does is split the sack and say, ‘Stick your head out and look!’ ” In sticking his own head out, Shadyac realizes that it’s not all about him—which, as he’s a natural ham, poses a conundrum. The middle way forward, surely, is to host a talk show. A show called “Shift Happens” is already in the works. “As strange as it sounds, you may be looking at the next Oprah,” he said, collecting his cash and his scrunchies and heading off to bike to Virginia. —Tad Friend.