Director J.J. Abrams, Running With the Shows

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 5, 2006

NEW YORK -- Given his intensity, his love of gadgets and his talent for cunning, keep-'em-guessing plot twists, it's a good thing that J.J. Abrams merely wants to pin viewers to their seats. Because if the man were evil, there would be no stopping him. He would make a diabolical killer.

It's not that Abrams looks remotely like the murdering type. Minus the tortoiseshell glasses, which lend him film-school gravitas and which he dons whenever he'd like to appear smarter and older, Abrams could pass for a boyish midlevel executive on casual Friday. He's a father of three. He has good manners.

"Please, some fruit," he says, pushing a plate across the table at the Mercer Kitchen, a restaurant in SoHo, where he could be found Tuesday morning doing the required rounds of publicity for the latest "Mission: Impossible."

Do not be fooled. Disregard the trappings and focus instead on Abrams's output and work habits, which strongly suggest that he is hooked up funny. At 39, he's already created three TV series, starting in 1998 with "Felicity," an earnest, teen-targeted drama that reportedly caused a spike in college applications to New York University, the closest thing to the "University of New York," where the show was set. Then came "Alias," which made a star of Jennifer Garner, attracted a devoted fan base and ran for four years. And most recently, Abrams helped create "Lost," one of network television's certified phenomenons. About 15 million viewers tune in each week.

"A lot of people in Hollywood have one great idea, one great movie in them," says Steven McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, the money behind "Lost." "J.J. gives you four great ideas over lunch. Plus, he's talking about the soundtrack, the amusement park ride, the video game. He thinks about the whole world of entertainment."

The whole world of entertainment, it seems, has taken note. After years of Abrams chasing deals, the deals are now chasing him. Which brings us to the story of how a guy who never directed a full-length feature film wound up with the keys to the shiny star vehicle that is the "Mission: Impossible" series. It's January of '04. Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg have dropped by Abrams's office on the Disney lot in Burbank for a how-do-you-do, and after small talk and beverage service the pair try to recruit Abrams as screenwriter for a little project called "War of the Worlds." Abrams was flabbergasted -- not just by the offer, but by the howling weirdness of hosting Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg, who were just sitting there in his office.

"It was freaking me out," says Abrams. "I'd look at Spielberg, who is my idol, and think, 'I can't look at him anymore.' Then I'd look at Tom Cruise and think, 'I can't look at him at all.' It was a disaster."

The worst part was that Abrams, to his chagrin, had to pass, because he was in the middle of the first season of "Lost."

"I thought, I'm dead," he recalls. "They might actually have me killed."

When the meeting ended, Abrams's assistant handed Cruise the DVDs of the first two seasons of "Alias." Cruise later called to rave about the show and to ask if he could come by and just hang out. Like a play date or something. A few weeks later came the offer not just to direct "Mission: Impossible III," but to cast it, co-write it and edit it -- pretty much hand it over, something Cruise, as a producer of the film and its star, could do.

So while the rest of the world watched Cruise go berserk during sofa-pouncing, shrink-bashing tirades on "Oprah" and "Today" last year, Abrams had his own reasons to doubt the sanity of the box office prince.

"If he's crazy because he hired me," says Abrams, "well, I'm beholden."

* * *

Los Angeles, where Abrams has lived since he was 5, is a crab barrel of writers who would really love to direct. How did Abrams claw his way to the top?

His work is hard to categorize. If there is a unifying thread, it's his conviction that without richly drawn characters, nobody is going to care, no matter what hurdles you put in their way. Then Abrams dreams up compelling hurdles. An amateur magician, he's a maestro of misdirection, the art of getting the audience to look at your left hand while you get ready to bamboozle with your right.

Another Abrams rule: Never skimp on the intrigue, and pile on the cliffhangers. All the pages in this playbook are reflected in "Lost." It started as a one-line idea -- plane crashes on desert island, stuff happens -- that was pitched to Abrams by ABC. He and his partner on the show, Damon Lindelof, figured that the audience had to bond with the survivors, which meant lots of back story explaining how these people wound up in this mess. They also insisted on a monster, the identity of which would be a mystery, and they wove in a few dozen eerie-feeling plot strands, leaving them with material to embroider in years to come.

"When we started outlining it, we knew that there couldn't be one answer to this show. . . . Kind of like" -- and here his voice deepens grandiosely -- " 'and they're dead and that's why blah, blah, blah.' There needed to be a bunch of things happening at once. It's like hiking in the fog. The closer you get to the top, the more you realize: That's not the peak at all."

All of Abrams's work is unabashedly commercial. But ask him to name a film he's enjoyed in the past year and he'll rhapsodize over an art-house hit, "The Squid and the Whale," which is about as far from "Mission: Impossible III" as Minsk is from Manhattan. He'd like to make low-key, interior films some day. But that, as he might put it in a story meeting, is the second act.

* * *

Abrams has been married for 10 years to Katie McGrath, a public-relations executive he met at a New York dinner party in 1994. Abrams had brought a date, but at the end of the evening, he did what he does best -- he made up a story. In this case, it was that he needed to head downtown, the opposite direction of his date, the same direction as McGrath. Abrams quickly had a reason to fly to New York as often as possible.

"He was from a different planet," McGrath says. "I'd come home from work and he'd be in his pajamas, having apparently written all day."

McGrath became one of Abrams's favorite script editors, especially adept at spotting false notes in female-female relationships. She also became his favorite audience for the magic tricks, show-and-tell arts projects and geek-toy demonstrations that consume Abrams's every spare moment. Or she was until the couple's three children, ranging in age from 8 years to 3 months, arrived.

Lately, Abrams and his eldest have been making board games and birthday cards with some enormous laser device. There are Play-Doh busts of geek icons, like Batman and King Kong, all over the house. There's also a home studio where Abrams composes songs with guitars and synthesizers, including the theme music to "Lost" and "Alias." And to ensure more home time, he installed an editing bay in the house. One night McGrath found him editing a scene while holding their baby on one arm, a phone jammed between a shoulder and ear.

"He sort of thrives on that level of -- I don't want to say chaos, but that level of intensity," she says. "I'm sure there's some deep, dark psychological root, but all that craziness, all the compulsion is somehow manifested in a healthy way."

The root, if you ask Abrams, is a tour of Universal Studios he took at age 8. This was its pre-amusement-park days, when the highlight was a visit to Lucille Ball's dressing room and leftover special effects from "Airport." It blew Abrams's mind. He knew then, this is what I want to do.

By a fortunate coincidence, Abrams's father had just left his job selling commercial time for CBS to try his hand at made-for-TV film production.

"It was like deciding to be an astronaut right when your dad joins NASA," Abrams says. Gerry Abrams would eventually produce about 60 movies for television, and for a while his office was on the Paramount lot. After school, his son had the run of the place, as shows including "Mork & Mindy" and "Laverne & Shirley" were being filmed.

By age 9 he was dreaming up his own scripts, and casting grade-school buddy Greg Grunberg as the star in Super-8 short films. One of the first, "The Attic," finds Grunberg waking up, walking to the sink and getting stabbed in the back -- by Abrams, of course, who began his life of multitasking by filming and stabbing at the same time.

"There was this other one," says Grunberg, on the phone from Los Angeles, "where this doll levitates and floats across the room and starts biting my neck. Even now, I ask him, 'How did you do that?' He was always just super-creative. It was always fun to be around him. I loved going to his house."

Grunberg is still a close friend and still one of Abrams's favorite actors. He's had parts on "Felicity" (as the entrepreneurial student), in "Alias" and "Lost" and a speaking-part cameo in "Mission: Impossible III."

By the time Abrams was 13, he was entering film festivals for kids and wound up sharing a top prize in one, which led to a newspaper article. Soon after that he heard from a young director who was looking for someone to edit a film he'd made as a student. It was Steven Spielberg, already famous for "Jaws" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

"I think he paid J.J. $100 to do it," Gerry Abrams recalls. "I remember my wife came home and she saw all these bits of film on the floor and she just had a cow: 'Steven Spielberg is going to sue us for all we're worth!' "

Abrams attended Sarah Lawrence, where he wrote nine screenplays, none of which he says was very good. But writing is the one part of show business that doesn't require anyone's permission. So he didn't stop. Soon after graduating, he wrote "Regarding Henry," released in 1991 with Harrison Ford in the lead.

"It was shocking at first, when he told me about it," says Grunberg, who shared a Hollywood apartment with Abrams at the time. "I mean, Harrison Ford was the biggest movie star in the world at the time. But a moment later, I was thinking, 'Of course! He would be an idiot not to be in J.J.'s movie.' "

* * *

Abrams says that throughout the filming of "Mission: Impossible III" he never got past the idea that he was in charge. But he brought the movie in under budget and two days before the end of its 100-day shooting schedule.

In his annoyingly modest way, Abrams deflects lots of credit to Cruise, who he says could have easily slowed the process or poisoned the on-set atmosphere had he demonstrated any this-is-my-show attitude. It's a little hard to square the public image of Cruise -- the fist-pumping, strenuously smiling loon-doggie -- with the utterly decent, charming character that Abrams swears he is.

"Success in Hollywood just magnifies whoever you were at the beginning," he says, "and everyone who's known Tom for years will tell you that he's always been unbelievably passionate about whatever he's doing. He's got enough energy for an army. Some people go, 'Whoa, that's way too much.' But if passion is his big crime, I'll take that any day over the alternative, which is being mean, manipulative, destructive, and which is far more common."

Next up for Abrams is a "Star Trek" movie, now in pre-production, which will unleash his inner geek as never before. He'll also be working on "Lost," trying to ensure the show doesn't splinter into so many directions that it chokes on itself or stops moving. There's not a lot of talk from him about downtime. Asked if he has any plans for his money, he seems confused.

"What money?"

You know, the money you get paid for all this incredibly lucrative work.

He thinks for a moment, then tilts his head and points to his locks.

"Hair care," he says.