Abrams, J. J.

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J. J. Abrams

Personal

Full name Jeffrey Abrams; born June 27, 1966, in New York, NY; son of Gerald W. Abrams (a television movie producer); married; children: two. Education: Attended Sarah Lawrence College.

Addresses

Home—Los Angeles, CA; Maine. Agent—Endeavor, 9701 Wilshire Blvd., 10th Floor, Beverly Hills, CA 90212.

Career

Screenwriter, actor, producer, director, and composer. Bad Robot Television (production company), founder. Producer of films, including The Pallbearer, 1996, and The Suburbans, 1999; actor in films, including Regarding Henry, 1991, Six Degrees of Separation, 1993, Diabolique, 1996, and The Suburbans, 1999; director of films, including Mission: Impossible 3, forthcoming. Composer of theme music for films and television programs, including Nightbeast, 1983, Felicity, 1998, and Alias, 2001.

Awards, Honors

Rave Award nomination, Wired magazine, 2002, for Alias.

Writings

(As Jeffrey Abrams) Taking Care of Business (screenplay), Touchstone Pictures, 1990.

(As Jeffrey Abrams, and co-producer) RegardingHenry (screenplay), Paramount, 1991.

(As Jeffrey Abrams, and executive producer) ForeverYoung (screenplay), Warner Bros., 1992.

(As Jeffrey Abrams) Gone Fishin' (screenplay), Hollywood Pictures, 1997.

(With others) Armageddon (screenplay), Touchstone Pictures, 1998.

(With others; and co-creator and director) Felicity (television series episodes), Touchstone/WB Network, 1998.

(With Clay Tarver, and producer) Joy Ride (screenplay), Twentieth Century-Fox, 2001.

(Creator, producer, and director) Alias (television series episodes), Touchstone/ABC, 2001—.

(Creator, producer, and director) Lost (television series episodes), Touchstone/ABC, 2004—.

Also author of a Superman screenplay for Warner Bros.

Adaptations

Alias was adapted for a video game of the same name, and has been released on DVD.

Work in Progress

Creator of television series The Catch, Touchstone/ABC, 2004-05.

Sidelights

J. J. Abrams "has established himself as one of Hollywood's most versatile hyphenates," according to Daily Variety writer Josef Adalian. The multi-talented Abrams is, as Adalian noted, "a writer who's able to direct. A filmmaker who's two-for-two creating successful TV shows. And, just for good measure, he also dabbles in composing music—including the way cool techno theme for Alias." Producing and acting could also be added to that impressive list of achievements in both film and television. The series Alias, one of Abrams's most notable television successes, is a spy thriller geared for younger audiences that became a hit on television and again when it was released on DVD, while his big-screen credits include penning portions of the script for the popular 1998 film Armageddon, which stars Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.

Abrams began his career in film with writing credits such as Regarding Henry, Forever Young, Armageddon, and Joy Ride. In 1998 his Hollywood-based career took a turn when he worked with Matt Reeves to co-create the television series Felicity, directing and writing many of the show's episodes as well. "I lucked into this incredible medium," Abrams told Adalian. "The hours are brutal, the pressure's tremendous and the need for material is insatiable. But it's so exciting to work with the same group of people on a long-term basis, and you're writing something you know is going to get shot. That just doesn't exist in the features."

Coming of Age in Hollywood

Born in New York City in 1966, Abrams was raised in Los Angeles where his father, Gerald W. Abrams, worked as a television movie producer. With movies and television a strong part of his family's life, Abrams began drawing pictures outlining stories he made up before he was able to write them down. By age eight he was making Super-8 movies, having been inspired by a visit to a Hollywood studio. As a teen Abrams made many amateur films and entered them in student film festivals, going on to win a number of awards. It was at one such festival, which he entered at age thirteen, that he met his future collaborator on Felicity, fellow teen Matt Reeves. Attending Sarah Lawrence College in New York City, Abrams teamed up with a friend during his senior year to write the treatment for a feature film. This treatment was produced by Touchstone Pictures in 1990 as Taking Care of Business, and stars actors James Belushi and Charles Grodin. This "cute comedy," as Leonard Maltin described the movie in Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide, tells a story of identity theft and impersonation.

While Taking Care of Business was not a huge box-office success, it did lead to other screenwriting credits for Abrams. Regarding Henry, which he also produced and acted in, appeared in 1991. Directed by well-known filmmaker Mike Nichols and starring Harrison Ford and Annette Bening, Regarding Henry is the story of a powerful and ruthless lawyer named Henry Turner, who is a thoroughly contemptible sort; he is mean to everyone equally, including his wife, his child, and his mistress, a fellow lawyer. His life changes one night when he is shot during a store robbery and suffers a brain injury. Now forced to start the learning process all over again, a more humble Henry learns good behavior, and turns into a loving husband and father as well as a more compassionate attorney.

Reviewing Regarding Henry, critics generally felt that Abrams' "born-again" conceit is valid if overused. Time's Richard Corliss, for example, called the film an "effective, infuriating . . . weepie" with a "script that insists epiphanies be spelled out in capital letters." Similarly, People reviewer Ralph Novak found the film "sometimes endearingly silly but more often just plain silly," further complaining that "too many plot turns are pat." Novak also noted instances of "stilted lines" in Abrams's script. Less complimentary was a review by New Republic critic Stanley Kauffmann who dubbed Regarding Henry "a disease-of-the-week TV drama, spun out flossily." Despite some less-than-rave reviews, Regarding Henry did well enough at the box office to further propel Abrams's career in film.

The 1992 Mel Gibson vehicle Forever Young, produced and written by Abrams, is a romantic fantasy comedy that takes place in 1939 and focuses on an aircraft test pilot who takes part in a cryogenics experiment. Thawed out by accident five decades later, the pilot becomes intimately caught up in the lives of a young boy—who has unwittingly thawed him out of his permafrost condition—and the boy's mother. People reviewer Karen Schneider found Forever Young to be "one long strum on the heart-strings," while Ty Burr, writing in Entertainment Weekly, found it "dispiriting," with miscast characters and very little tension. More positive in his evaluation was Time contributor Corliss, who allowed that Forever Young is "Rip Van Winkle, The Time Machine and E.T., plus all their hundreds of heirs and assigns, rolled into one." Despite the story's triteness, Corliss went on to note, "there is something very agreeable about Jeffrey Abrams' affable script." Maltin also found much to like, writing that the movie "may play out by the numbers as it tugs at your heartstrings, but it's engaging just the same, and hard to resist."

In addition to writing the script for the 1997 film Gone Fishin', Abrams added his name to the list of screenwriters who produced the script for the blockbuster 1998 adventure film Armageddon. As its name implies, the 1998 end-of-the-Earth epic tells of an asteroid about the size of Texas that, unless somehow thrown off its course, will collide with Earth and destroy all life on the planet. With only eighteen days left to save Earth, an oil rig operator (Willis) oversees a team of wildcat oil drillers whose mission is to land on the asteroid and drill a hole deep enough to hold the nuclear bomb scientists hope can change the asteroid's course. With no space training, so the oil men must be rushed through a NASA course to train them in the elements of space flight, creating friction between NASA's science nerds and the blue-collar drillers. After this hasty training—and a subplot involving a love affair between one of the drillers and the daughter of the rig operator—the unlikely and unruly team of eight, led by Willis, manage to land on the asteroid and drill the hole, only to discover that the detonating device for the bomb has a problem and that one of the team must remain behind on the asteroid and detonate the bomb manually, thereby sacrificing his life.

As pure summertime entertainment, Armageddon scored well with reviewers and filmgoers. A reviewer for Maclean's wrote that the film "delivers all the guilty thrills and adrenaline rushes that summer blockbuster should," going on to quip: "Fast-paced, raunchy and funny, Armageddon really kicks asteroid." Time contributor Richard Shickel commented that, "stupid as [the premise of the movie] may sound, there's some fun in this conflict." Gerald Kaufman commented in the New Statesman that the collaboration between Abrams and company played like "an outer space version of The Dirty Dozen."

Further noting that like all "entertainments of its type, [it] has no plot, simply a premise," Kaufman concluded that nonetheless "this film about a global holocaust has the chutzpah to end with a lovers' clinch, followed by a white wedding." Less complimentary was the opinion of a reviewer for Entertainment Weekly who called Armageddon "willfully bombastic" and people by "third generation Xeroxes of cliches." Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy expressed a similar complaint, noting that "Willis saves the world but can't save Armageddon."

Makes Move to Television

While Armageddon was in production, Abrams was already busy on a new script idea with long-time friend Reeves. Together, the pair came up with what they thought was a comedy film about a high school graduate, shy and unused to making her own decisions, who suddenly finds herself on her own as a freshman in a cosmopolitan, New York City college. The protagonist, Felicity, leaves her hometown for the bright lights to follow her high school crush, who has decided to attend school in New York. Felicity soon discovers that such a move offers possibilities far beyond simply being close to her beloved when she learns the ins and outs of dorm life and meets fellow students and other denizens of her college. When Abrams and Reeves submitted their story to Touchstone Pictures, it was decided that the script would make a better television series than a movie. Because of this decision, Abrams was soon propelled into the world of television, and Felicity made its debut in 1998.

From the outset, Abrams's series enjoyed critical acclaim and attracted a loyal fan base. Reviewing the series pilot, Ray Richmond commented in Variety that Felicity has "real magic." Richmond went on to observe that the series "hits the air with that assessment still intact, emboldened by a heavy buzz that
bestows imminent greatness onto both the show and its angelic star, Keri Russell." While Richmond viewed the series as a "coming-of-age soap opera" that "carries massive appeal . . . , roping in teens by the bucketful," a reviewer for Entertainment Weekly dubbed it both the "most talked-about show of the season" and the "most sensitively written new young-adult drama." After the first successful season and what Entertainment Weekly contributor Shawna Malcom dubbed a "scrumptious season-ending cliff-hanger," the show moved into its second year hoping "to avoid a sophomore slump," according to the same critic. Felicity becomes a dorm advisor in this second year, and the usual cast of characters continue their adventures and misadventures in New York. Ken Tucker, writing in Entertainment Weekly, called Felicity "a series to champion," further praising the program as a "crackling comedy-drama, [and] a caffeinated soap . . . [with] a vivid, quick-witted ensemble." According to Adalian, Abrams' show "helped put the then-fledgling WB Network on the map."

Abrams scored another winner with the 2001 television series Alias, featuring unconventional graduate student Sydney Bristow, who not only has to balance books against her boyfriend, but must also throw a career as a spy into the mix. Sydney is a CIA operative who finds herself continually in hot water, caught in the mind games and double crosses of the world of espionage. Phil Gallo, reviewing the series for Variety, described Alias as an "intriguing melange of double-dealing and counter-spying, with gunfire and twisted allegiances." However, for Gallo, the series is also praiseworthy for focusing on the "splintered relationship" between Sydney and her father. Similarly, Alan Sepinwall, writing in the Newark Star-Ledger, called Alias an "action-packed adventure series. But wait, there's more! It's also a touchy-feely drama, a dysfunctional family saga, a paranoid thriller, a far-fetched sci-fi/fantasy tale, a quirky comedy and a fashion extravaganza." Critics have also pointed out the comic-book super-hero aspects of the show, something Abrams—who also served as an episode director as well as executive producer of the series—has freely admitted. Speaking with Daily Variety's Jon Burlingame, he described the series as "very much a comic book brought to life." Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker rated Alias as "one of the most exciting shows" of the season, while Leslie Ryan of Electronic Media observed that the "series not only won over critics but was the second-highest-rated new drama . . . in the adults 18 to 49 demo." Ryan further noted that "richness doesn't seem to be a problem for a show that takes viewers to a colorful, complex world of spies, double agents and plots and counterplots each week, not to mention three or four exotic locales."

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Reviewing the DVD release of the first three seasons of Alias, Allyssa Lee, in Entertainment Weekly, called the series a "whip-smart spy family drama."

Despite his television successes, Abrams has continued to maintain a prominent place among Hollywood screenwriters. In 2001 he wrote and produced Joy Ride, "a hot-wired, white-knuckled thriller," according to Joe Leydon writing in Variety. The ultimate car-chase movie, Joy Ride focuses on a college student at Berkeley who buys an old Chrysler Newport in which he hopes to make a road trip across the country to his home in New Jersey. Lewis, the Berkeley student, plans to pick up his friend Venna at the University of Colorado and perhaps get to know her much better in the course of the trip. However, en route to Colorado, Lewis detours to Salt Lake City, where his older and less-angelic brother Fuller needs bail posted for him; he is being held on drunk and disorderly charges. As the brothers head back out on the road, Fuller buys a CB radio. As a gag, he convinces his brother to fake a woman's high-pitched voice and flirt with lonely long-haul truckers on the CB. One of these truckers, with the CB handle "Rusty Nails," does not find the brothers' hoax funny, especially when he is tricked to a room at a motel only to discover a male inhabitant there who is not amused. Things quickly turn nasty after the unwitting motel guest is found the next morning nearly dead. When Venna comes on board, events spin out of control as "Rusty Nails" begins to stalk the trio in his big rig.

Leydon praised Abrams and cowriter Clay Tarver for creating "a not-quite-airtight but mostly efficient blueprint for a slick scare machine." Hollywood Reporter writer Michael Rechtshaffen had similar praise, calling Joy Ride a "character-driven thriller that combines the right proportions of taut angst and comic relief." Joanna Connors observed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the film "plays like a shivery, scary story whispered between the bunks at summer camp," and further commended it for withholding "the blood and gore until the very end, relying until then on the basics of classic horror stories: the power of suggestion and things that go bump in the night." In fact, Connors further commented, Joy Ride accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do: "your heart beats faster and your teeth clench as the tension amps up." And Lisa Schwarzbaum, writing in Entertainment Weekly, also had kudos for the film's "knowing and chatty script."

The DVD release of the first three seasons of Alias ultimately led Abrams, ping-pong like, back to movies; when actor Tom Cruise saw the episodes, he decided that Abrams would be the perfect choice to script his new film project Mission: Impossible 3. Meanwhile, Abrams also was working on two new series: Lost, about the survivors of a plane wreck who end up on a remote island, and the bounty-hunter drama series The Catch.

Whether working in the medium of television or that of film, Abrams maintains the same credo, as he explained to Adalian. "Having strong, balanced characters is important to me, whether they're men or women." "Identifying with a character and feeling there's a struggle worth telling is important," the writer/producer/director added. "No matter what I'm working on I have to feel a sense of passion about it." Speaking with Ryan, Abrams confided that "the key is to do work that you believe in and not work that you think people will like."

If you enjoy the works of J. J. Abrams

If you enjoy the works of J. J. Abrams, you may also want to check out the following films:

The Usual Suspects, starring Kevin Spacey and Gabriel Byrne, 1995.

Tomorrow Never Dies, starring Pierce Brosnan, 1997.

The Bourne Identity, starring Matt Damon, 2002, and its sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, 2004.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 46, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2003.

Maltin, Leonard, Leonard Maltin's Movie and VideoGuide, Signet (New York, NY), 1997.

PERIODICALS

Daily Variety, May 31, 2002, Jon Burlingame, "TV Sound on Tight Turnaround," p. B5; August 30, 2003, Josef Adalian, "J. J. Abrams," p. 15; February 5, 2004, Michael Schneider, "Alias Creator Spies New Touchstone Deal," p. 6.

Electronic Media, June 3, 2002, Leslie Ryan, "In a World of His Own," p. 12.

Entertainment Weekly, February 7, 1992, Ty Burr, review of Regarding Henry, p. 66; June 11, 1993, Ty Burr, review of Forever Young, p. 62; July 17, 1998, review of Armageddon, p. 62; September 11, 1998, "New Shows," p. 48; September 19, 1999, Shawna Malcom, review of Felicity, p. 114; October 15, 1999, Ken Tucker, "Curl, Interrupted," p. 59; October 12, 2001, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Joy Ride, p. 63; October 19, 2001, "Secret Agent Fan," p. 85; November 23, 2001, Ken Tucker, "Undercover Angel," p. 30; February 7, 2003, Dan Snierson, "Spy Jinx?," p. 6; December 5, 2003, Allyssa Lee, review of Alias (DVD release), p. 76; May 21, 2004, Dan Snierson, "Spy Games," p. 69.

Hollywood Reporter, September 13, 2001, Michael Rechtshaffen, review of Joy Ride, p. 9; October 4, 2002, Gregg Kilday, "Scribe Abrams Defuses Kryptonite Web Reviews," p. 8; June 25, 2003, Nellie Andreeva. "Abrams on Hunt in ABC Series," p. 1; September 3, 2003, Chris Marlowe, "Man behind Alias Show Helps Steer Video Game," p. 10.

Los Angeles, December, 1992, Rod Lurie, review of Forever Young, p. 144.

Maclean's, July 6, 1998, review of Armageddon, p. 55.

National Review, August 26, 1991, John Simon, review of Regarding Henry, p. 48.

New Republic, August 12, 1991, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Regarding Henry, p. 28.

New Statesman, August 7, 1998, Gerald Kaufman, review of Armageddon, p. 42.

New York Post, December 15, 2002, "Starr Report," p. 105.

People, July 22, 1991, Ralph Novak, review of Regarding Henry, p. 10; December 21, 1992, Karen Schneider, review of Forever Young, p. 19.

Plain Dealer, Joanna Connors, review of Joy Ride, p. 5.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 24, 2004, "Alias Creator Says DVDs Made His 'Mission' Possible," p. E6.

St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, MN), October 3, 2001, Chris Hewitt, review of Joy Ride.

Star Ledger (Newark, NJ), September 28, 2002, Alan Sepinwall, review of Alias, p. 9.

Time, July 15, 1991, Richard Corliss, review of Regarding Henry, p. 72; December 28, 1992, Richard Corliss, review of Forever Young, p. 65; July 6, 1998, Richard Shickel, review of Armageddon, p. 88; August 30, 2004, James Poniewozik, review of Lost, p. 58.

Variety, June 29, 1998, Todd McCarthy, review of Armageddon, p. 37; September 28, 1998, Ray Richmond, review of Felicity, p. 86; September 10, 2001, Joe Leydon, review of Joy Ride, p. 60; October 1, 2001, Phil Gallo, review of Alias, p. 46.