The artist’s life is one of constant searching. Theirs is a restless journey, one constantly straining to see over the next horizon — and filmmaker Tom Shadyac’s journey has taken some unexpected turns that have finally brought him to Boulder.
The journey began decades ago when Shadyac left his home of Falls Church, Va., to pursue a career in entertainment in Los Angeles. There, Shadyac began writing jokes for Bob Hope at the age of 24, an early start, but by no means an overnight success, and Shadyac wandered the wasteland that is the entertainment business for 11 years until his directorial debut 1994, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, catapulted him to success.
Shadyac followed Ace with seven feature films and one TV movie, but an unlikely plot shift placed Shadyac on another path, one that would lead him to make a documentary, write a book and enter the world of higher education.
Shadyac made a name for himself as a comedic filmmaker to the very lucrative tune of $2 billion in box office grosses with movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), The Nutty Professor (1996), Liar Liar (1997) and Bruce Almighty (2003). Shadyac reaped the financial benefits of those hit films, but as many will attest, you can’t buy happiness, no matter how much you have to spend. In 2007, Shadyac sold his 17,000-square-foot mansion, moved into a mobile home park and divested his material wealth in search of a higher truth.
But transitions like this don’t happen over night, and they certainly don’t happen simply. That same year, Shadyac was involved in a traumatic bicycle crash, one that left him with broken bones, a concussion and Post Concussion Syndrome, a nasty bit of business that forced Shadyac to look at the world with a new perspective.
“It’s not like I hit my head and saw God,” Shadyac says. “I hit my head and saw a doctor. And life became very precious at that point because I did believe I was going to die. I saw through my fear and decided to make a movie about things that were very important to me, so I did I Am.”
I Am, which will screen for free on Tuesday, Feb. 24 at the International Film Series, is Shadyac’s only documentary to date. In it, Shadyac asks two questions: “What is wrong with the world?” and “How can I fix it?”
Employing a crew of four, Shadyac self financed I Am and traveled the globe interviewing spiritual leaders, teachers, academics and scientists trying to find the answer to his two questions. The answer that Shadyac eventually comes to is a simple and universal one, but Shadyac sees more than the answer in the movie, and to him, it’s not the obvious break from his previous work that it might seem.
“In some way, the movies that I’ve made have all been I Am,” Shadyac says. “There are elements of I Am in every movie in the narrative form. So, when I woke up to the mental illness [of excessive material wealth] that you saw in the movie I Am, I talk about that mental illness in a narrative story like Patch Adams or Liar Liar, where it becomes about winning, not about what’s true or right.”
Shadyac’s travels have left him now situated at the base of the Flatirons and teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder this spring.
“There is a certain ethos here that I find expansive,” Shadyac told Boulder Weekly between sips of tea at a crowded Trident Booksellers and Café. “I spoke at CU three or four years ago [at the Conference on World Affairs], I looked around this town and I thought, ‘There is something here. There is something really cool here.’”
This leg of the journey began in 2003 at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., when a teacher invited him to co-teach a screenwriting class.
“About halfway through the semester, I noticed that the students were stressed,” Shadyac recounts. “The energy shifted radically from the beginning of the semester to the midpoint. A director knows how to read an audience, so I had a dialogue with them. … And out of that conversation with those students, and the next semester with those students, came a class I now teach called Storytelling and Life.”
Shadyac taught Storytelling and Life for eight years at Pepperdine until the class size became too large — 400 students — and creative differences caused Shadyac to split from the institution. Pepperdine’s loss is CU’s gain, as Shadyac joined the film studies faculty for the 2015 spring semester. He is elated to have a smaller classroom to engage with.
“I love it right now,” Shadyac says. “They top a class at 16, and then I got nine wait-listed, but they’re all in. I’m happy to have them.”
Smaller classes with a hands-on approach are crucial to Shadyac’s style. He isn’t a film professor concerned with lectures and rigid programming; Shadyac zeroes his focus in on the students. For his first class, Shadyac screened the viral video, “KONY 2012” (Jason Russell, 2012) in hopes of opening up a dialogue on the viewer’s perspective, a perspective that can often be cynical.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. So every comment was a comment not about the film [‘KONY 2012’] but about the person who saw the film. And that’s what we don’t see,” Shadyac says. “When somebody says, ‘Hey, those guys [making that film] haven’t done enough work. They’re too simplistic in their approach.’ — that was one of the comments you heard over and over — that’s actually a comment about that guy, or that girl. … But because [ Jason Russell] hasn’t dealt with his own hero’s journey, if you will, the first thing we always do is point out. So there was a lot of finger pointing out. … I love that conversation, because that’s where we’re going. We’re gonna get to a place where the finger gets pointed in, we start to heal and then we really do come together and things change.”
For Shadyac, pointing the finger in is just the beginning of his teaching style.
“My students teach me,” Shadyac says. “Education is upside down, we come to our students and we say, ‘Here’s what you need to know.’ And I try to flip it and say, ‘Who are you? And now how can I meet who you are with what I am?’ So, I have a bunch of movies I can show, short films, Internet clips, narratives, documentaries, long forms, and I get in a dialogue with my students. So, I don’t show my Memphis class the same films I’m showing my CU class, or the same films I might show my Pepperdine class or my Santa Monica College class.”
If art is a mirror that we hold up to society, then Shadyac is working to be the mirror reflecting the students back at themselves.
“Anything I say that has any power at all already exists inside of the students,” Shadyac says. “I am simply blowing the dust off of things they already know. They know they’ve been given a bill of goods that isn’t necessarily the whole truth, nothing but the truth. They know that they’ve been put into a system that only has one way to do things; they just don’t know how to get out. The second you give them the context and the freedom, and the safety to say, ‘Tell me what you think?’, they tell me.”
And with only four classes under his belt, Shadyac already can tell who the students of CU are.
“They are very intelligent,” Shadyac says with a smile. “They are artists. Most of the students in my class are artists of some sort, and they’re still finding out who they are. They’re young, of course, it’s appropriate, but they’re leaving the idea of what they’ve been taught and they’re discovering the courage to embrace who they are.”
Storytelling and Life may not sound like a typical film studies course, but then, Shadyac is not a typical professor. His experience has led him to some very strong opinions, and those are the opinions that have driven not just his movies, but his teaching style as well.
“There is no question that I have no problem saying, ‘This is what I am seeing.’ The difference for me, [is that] I don’t think anyone is wrong,” he says. “I want to listen to that and respect that. That doesn’t keep me from saying, ‘Wanna hear what I’m seeing? Because it’s pretty cool for me.’ Then we have a dialogue.”
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