I Am

Tom Shadyac's Film as seen on the Oprah Winfrey show

I AM is an utterly engaging and entertaining non-fiction film of the story of a successful Hollywood director, Tom Shadyac (Liar Liar, Nutty Professor,  Ace Ventura:Pet Detective, Bruce Almighty, Dragonfly), who experienced a life threatening head injury, and his ensuing journey to try and answer two very basic questions:    What's wrong with our world? and,  What can we do about it?

Shadyac reveals how his near-fatal cycling accident forever altered his perception of the Hollywood rat race, and inspired him to make some profound personal changes in a bid to create a better world.  At first, doctors told Shadyac he might never walk again. Incredibly, just a few years later, the man behind some of Hollywood's biggest comedies was back on his feet.  But his outlook on the world had been inexorably altered, and shortly thereafter, Shadyac relocated from his posh L.A. home to a modest mobile home community.  Confronting his own mortality, he asked himself, “If this is it for me –  if I really am going to die  –  what do I want to say before I go?  What will be my last testament?”  It was Shadyac’s modern day dark night of soul and out of it, I AM was born.

In this film, we follow the filmmaker as he discusses his life-altering experience while attempting to gain a stronger grasp on the human condition,   Tom visits some of today's great minds, including authors, poets, teachers, religious leaders, and scientists (Howard Zinn, Lynn McTaggart, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, David Suzuki, Thom Harmann, Marc Ian Barasch, Noam Chomsky, John Francis, Coleman Barks) searching for the fundamental endemic problem that causes all of the other problems, while simultaneously reflecting on this own life choices of excess, greed and eventual healing.

We started by asking what's wrong with the world, and ended up discovering what's right with it.

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About the director:
Tom Shadyac is an American comedian, director, screenwriter, and producer.  Shadyac, who was the youngest joke-writer ever for comedian Bob Hope, is widely known for writing and directing the films Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Jim Carrey), Liar Liar (Jim Carrey), The Nutty Professor (Eddie Murphie), Bruce Almighty, Dragonfly (Kevin Costner), Patch Adams (Robin Williams) and I Am.  He is an adjunct professor of communication and teaches screenwriting at Pepperdine University's Seaver College. Shadyac married actress Jennifer Barker in June 1997; they subsequently divorced.   In 2007 Shadyac suffered post-concussion syndrome after a bicycle accident in Virginia, experiencing months of acute headaches and hyper-sensitivity to light and noise. The injury followed the cumulative effects of previous mild head injuries Shadyac had suffered surfing, mountain biking and playing basketball. He subsequently gave away his excess fortune (e.g., opening a homeless shelter in Charlottesville, Virginia and making a key donation to Telluride, Colorado's effort to set aside a natural area at the town's entrance), reoriented and simplified his life, sold his 17,000-square-foot Los Angeles mansion and moved into a trailer park.

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