How Steven Spielberg's Most Prolific Protégé Gets It Done

From Esquire

A long time ago, in the tony suburb of Brentwood, California, a chubby, bespectacled kid of middle-school age busied himself in his bedroom.

It was a large space by any standard, with big windows and exposed beams, packed to the high ceiling with the matériel of his many complementary interests, everything in its designated place.

There were orderly shelves of books about magic and movie makeup, a collection of soundtrack albums, stacks of magazines with titles like Famous Monsters, Super-8 Filmaker, andCinemagic. Figurines, board games, Aurora models, Star Wars paraphernalia. One side of his closet was his magic zone; there he kept all of his tricks-his favorites were Zombie-ball, Strat-O-Sphere, and Spooky the Spirit Silk, any kind of sleight of hand. The other side of the closet was his special-effects zone-makeup and homemade prosthetics and other instruments of cinematic illusion. (He had an ongoing correspondence with the legendary makeup special-effects wizard Dick Smith, known for his work on Altered States and Scanners. At one point, Smith gifted him one of the long prop tongues used for Linda Blair in The Exorcist.) On a crowded table were the props he was currently building, in various stages of completion, some of them jerry-rigged with ingenious mechanical parts for use in the Super 8 movies he was constantly filming. Another zone in the room served as his editing bay, usually the floor.

His sister remembers friends coming and going, working on various projects, sleeping overnight. She was four years younger and watched his every move. She, in turn, was his favorite subject. In countless gory films and shorts she was strangled, shot, pushed off a roof, attacked by zombies, taken away by aliens. Often, he would wake her up in the middle of the night. You've got to hear this...you've got to watch this ... you've got to see what I just did. And she was always like, Oh my God! Once, he made a six-foot-long pencil and took it to school. It looked exactly like a yellow Ticonderoga No. 2. When she asked him why he'd gone to such lengths, he looked at her. "I don't know," he said. "I just thought it would be funny."

He was never a great student. He didn't play sports. At recess he was sometimes seen looking through his fingers as if they were a camera lens and observing other kids. When he was in kindergarten or first grade, his teacher called his mom, concerned that he was refusing to participate in games of dodgeball with the rest of the class.

Are you aware, the teacher asked, that your son is bringing a red cape to school? He runs around the playground pretending to fly like Superman and making up stories.

Not so long ago, on the far edge of Santa Monica, Jeffrey Jacob Abrams, known since birth as J. J., bounds down a floating staircase into the waiting area of the National Typewriter Company, the fanciful name on the redbrick building that houses his movie and TV empire, Bad Robot.

Outside, a glowing sign over the doorbell asks ARE YOU READY? Inside, the reception desk showcases a vintage collection of toy robots. Carved out of the foyer space, with its high ceiling and exposed beams, its big windows in place of walls, is a waiting area surrounded on three sides by shelves loaded to capacity with toys, magic tricks, antique movie cameras. There areStar Trek, Star Wars, and Spy vs. Spy figurines, all carefully posed. Plastic Aurora models of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Godzilla; an original Planet of the Apes ape-head prosthesis in a plastic case;collector's-edition dolls of the pig-faced doctor and nurse from "Eye of the Beholder," a classic episode of The Twilight Zone. A stack of board games from Parker Brothers and Ideal, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Mission: Impossible. On a coffee table are bins of pens, markers, colored pencils, and drawing paper. A sign suggests: PLEASE CREATE.

Abrams is wearing his customary sneakers, blue jeans, and plaid shirt. At forty-nine, he is a father of three and no longer chubby; he has the paleo-diet, high-thread-count veneer of the Hollywood affluent. His dark shock of wavy hair has been likened to that of Zeppo Marx. Geeky black-framed glasses rest on a bulb of a nose that shadows a delighted smile. Like a character in one of his time-bending plots, he seems perpetually in awe of his surroundings. How did I end up here?

Leading a tour, Abrams points out the various zones in his work space-the editing bays, a recording studio, a prop workshop, a screening room, a new kitchen under construction. His sister, Tracy Rosen, now a screenwriter, calls the offices of Bad Robot "a glorified version of his bedroom." Damon Lindelof, showrunner of Lost-one of a slew of beloved TV series Abrams has produced-has called the refurbished building "a self-contained Death Star." From here Abrams has seemingly conquered the entertainment galaxy.

As a writer, composer, director, and producer, Abrams may well be the most hyphenated mogul the film industry has ever seen; he is certainly among the most influential of his time. Abrams's particular storytelling sensibilities have become the prevailing recipe for popular entertainment. Tangled, deceptive serial plots that jump back and forth in time; a liberal pinch of magical realism; rich, stylish, and playful cinematography; eerie music that evokes early horror films (the one-note theme he composed for Lost on a Spectrasonics synthesizer won an ASCAP award)-all of it liberally buttered and salted with the kind of romance, mystery, swelling strings, and schmaltz that is the stuff of classic Hollywood, of classic drama. And the special effects are totally awesome.

"He's a seriously empathic storyteller, which means that he does not selfishly put stories out there that only mean a lot to him and may not mean much to anyone else," says Steven Spielberg, who has worked with Abrams since Abrams was a teenager. "He puts stories out there from a very large heart that are simpatico with a lot of other people's needs and desires. J.J. is the kind of director who can make an audience's dreams come true."

Over the past three decades, Abrams has had a hand in more than thirty movies and television series, the most significant of which has been Lost, the supernatural network megahit that helped turn small-screen programming away from the formulaic one-offs of the Dick Wolf/Law & Order era and toward the addictive serials we binge-watch today.

Perhaps even more significant has been Abrams's longtime collaboration with a group of close friends and mentors, all of whom he met by the time he was a freshman in high school. Including actor Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes, Heroes Reborn), cinematographer Larry Fong (Lost and the movies 300 and Watchmen),writer-director-producer Matt Reeves (Felicity, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), Kathleen Kennedy (the president of Lucasfilm), and Spielberg, the group forms a sort of Algonquin Round Table of the postmodern movie era. Instead of drinking heavily, this crowd favors magic and monsters. Many a blockbuster idea has been hatched on weekends, at family dinners, in the parking lots of the various Westside schools their children attended together.

More recently, Abrams has been handed the reins to a number of flagging big-screen franchises. He breathed life into Tom Cruise's tired Mission: Impossible series (directing M:I:III and producing its sequels, Ghost Protocol and this year's Rogue Nation)and overhauled Star Trek(directing the Star Trek relaunch in 2009 and Star Trek into Darkness in 2013), bringing a more human element to the Vulcan-dry techno-gasmic scripts of the past.

Now comes Star Wars: The Force Awakens, among the most widely anticipated movies in history, which Abrams has directed and produced. The spawn of a $4 billion megadeal in which the Walt Disney Company acquired the rights to the Star Wars juggernaut from George Lucas, the movie is the first of a new trilogy Abrams is slated to produce. The second is already in production.

We walk around the first floor; Abrams points out some of his trophies. Side by side on a wall are the shooting slates from the last scene of The Force Awakens and the last scene of High Voltage,a film he made when he was fifteen that eventually brought him to the attention of Spielberg's then-assistant, Kennedy. It was she, as head of Lucasfilm under the Disney umbrella, who hired him for the Star Wars gig.

Abrams pauses in front of an antique machine that looks like a huge glass jukebox with no records inside. A vintage Mold-A-Rama, like the ones manufactured for the 1964 New York World's Fair, it offers visitors the opportunity to make their own plastic replica of the Bad Robot logo, which appears at the beginning or end of all his movies and TV shows and which Abrams created at home one weekend with Adobe After Effects. (His two eldest kids supplied the voices that chirp "Bad Robot.")

"They used to have one of these at Universal Studios," he says, patting the antique machine fondly, as if it were a loyal old dog. "I remember the first time I went on the tour, I got the Frankenstein head. Now you can get a Bad Robot. You wanna try?"

Upstairs in his office, Abrams takes a seat on the sofa. Two plastic cups of raw nuts have been arranged before us, a small plastic spoon in each. To his immediate left is a life-sized rubber head in a glass case, a likeness of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. crafted by Abrams's childhood idol Dick Smith for the movie Ghost Story.

"I was always a little bit of the outsider," Abrams is saying of his caped youth. "I wasn't athletic. And I was never a particularly great student. You find yourself somewhere in between the schoolyard and the library. That's the gray area of no-man's-land. You have to find something that interests you, something to focus on."

Abrams was born on Long Island; his family moved to Los Angeles when he was five. The firstborn grandchild and only son in a Jewish family, Abrams was always the "nexus of the house," according to his sister. Their father is Gerald W. Abrams, a Mad Men–era ad salesman for CBS who quit his high-paying job in the early seventies to take a shot at movie producing. Over the past four decades, he has produced something like seventy films for television, many of them Movies of the Week. Still active in Hollywood, he recently produced Houdini, with Adrien Brody, for the History channel. It was television's top-rated miniseries of 2014.

Abrams's mother, the former Carol Kelvin, was herself a dynamo. When the kids were young, she sold real estate. At age thirty-nine, she enrolled at Whittier College School of Law and graduated first in her class. Eventually she became a professor at Whittier, teaching for five years before embarking on her own career as a movie producer. Later she would coauthor two books. She died of cancer in 2012 at sixty-nine.

By far Abrams's biggest influence as a child was his maternal grandfather-Abrams fans can find references to Harry Kelvin buried in much of his work. There is a U.S.S. Kelvin in the Star Trekreboot. On Lost, Kelvin is the guy who occupied the Swan Hatch before Desmond. In M:I:III,there's a postcard addressed to H. Kelvin; on the series Fringe, a character works on a project called "Kelvin Genetics"; in Super 8, the service station where the alien first appears sells Kelvin brand gas-the large sign from the movie is sitting against a wall downstairs at Bad Robot, waiting to be hung.

Harry Kelvin owned an electronics business, first in TriBeCa in Lower Manhattan, later in Farming-dale on Long Island. Starting when Abrams was very young, the pair would frequently visit Tannen's Magic Shop, the oldest operating magic store in Manhattan. To get to the bathroom in Abrams's private office at Bad Robot, you go to the bookshelf beside his desk and tug on a copy of a book entitled Louis Tannen's Catalog of Magic. The wall opens; the privy is revealed.

At his electronics shop, Abrams remembers, his grandfather "would take apart radios and telephones, all kinds of electronics, and explain why and how they worked. In a way, when I was a little kid, he was more of a father figure than my father; like most dads of that era, mine was always busy working."

"J.J. was the son Grandpa never had," says Tracy. "They would go on adventure walks together, just walk around the neighborhood and make up stories. My grandfather was really influential for J. J. When you think about it, storytelling is a lot like electronics-it's all about how you take things apart and why each piece is necessary and where it fits in. The same is true of magic and illusion. That's what filmmaking is all about."

Kelvin also took Abrams on the Universal Studios tour. Abrams was seven or eight years old. "It was this aha moment for me," he says. "I saw how movies used illusion in this grand way. They talked about technology in a way that was fascinating. The use of cameras and special effects and different techniques-it just felt like the answer to a question I didn't even know I was asking. Suddenly I realized: This is the thing I want to do."

Abrams borrowed his dad's Super 8 camera and began to experiment. Ten years earlier, Kodak's introduction of the Super 8 format had revolutionized the consumer film industry. Unlike in the past, when movie equipment was large, complicated, and expensive, the Super 8 line of cameras, projectors, and editing machines were small and affordable. The film came preloaded into cartridges, making the process virtually foolproof, opening up the opportunity for home movies.

Actor Greg Grunberg met Abrams "in the sandbox" when they were both about five. (Abrams jokes that the age Grunberg claims becomes younger each year.) The boys were in the same troop of Indian Guides and went to the same elementary school. "I was into sports, but there was a side of me that wanted to be creative, and J.J. was incredibly creative," Grunberg says. "We'd walk to his house from school and J.J. would be splicing film or we'd shoot stuff. He'd be like, 'We've gotta get that shot of you driving your bike down the street.' There were always all kinds of things we had to shoot. I was the actor. It was more like I was helping him out."

One movie they made together was called The Attic, in which two kids find a hatch in the ceiling and unleash a monster-and then they have to hide it from the mom when she gets home. Grunberg's mom played the mom. Later, in postproduction, Abrams would add the monster to the movie by scratching its image on the film itself, one frame at a time.

By then, Abrams's father was producing movies. Grunberg remembers Abrams bringing him along to the Paramount Studios lot, where the boys got to go on the sets of the television showsMork & Mindy and Happy Days. Perhaps making up for lost time, Gerald Abrams sometimes brought his son along on trips to film sets around the world-together they went to Budapest, to Rome, to Germany for the filming of Berlin Tunnel 21. In London, Abrams met Michael Caine on the set of Jekyll & Hyde.

"I think he was fascinated that you could get to work with famous writers, producers, directors, actors, and actresses," Gerald Abrams says. "They fly you first class, put you up in first-class accommodations. And then the most unbelievable part was that after you did all this, they actually paid you. So he understood that concept from me. He saw that I was looking forward to getting up in the morning because work was exciting for me."

When Abrams was twelve or thirteen, he went outside one day to find two older kids making a movie of their own. Larry Fong was already in high school. He lived some distance away in Rolling Hills Estates; as it happened, he was visiting a friend whose parents were divorced-the dad lived across the street from the Abrams family.

Fong was another self-professed "nerd" and "Star Wars fanboy" who had also appropriated his family's Super 8 camera. Back then, in the early 1980s, before the Internet, a kid had to work much harder to pursue interests that were off the beaten path. There was a lot of looking in the phone book, making calls, searching out the right specialty bookstores and magazines. "I had a lot of reference books for someone my age," Fong says. "Mostly about monsters and magic and film. When I went over to J.J.'s house the first time, I couldn't believe it. He had all the same books and magazines as I did. It was totally weird."

In those dying days of the analog world, Abrams says, the young filmmakers were left to wing it. "Nothing was ever easy. If you wanted to do a visual effect where you split the screen, for example, and wanted to have two versions of your sister at the same time, you would have to film something, then rewind the film, then figure out where you were, then block out the lens with a piece of tape and film it again. We made up the tricks and techniques as we went along-like if you wanted to manually backwind the film, you could put a piece of Scotch tape over the capstan on the cartridge. It was almost like what hacking became, like an analog version of hacking. You'd go see something in the movies, some effect, and it would have an impact on people. You'd want to know how they did it. Invariably, six months later in Super-8 Filmaker magazine, they'd have an article. That was our YouTube."

Though Fong would go on to become a cinematographer (includingon the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), his area of interest at the time was special effects. When Abrams was fifteen, he started working on High Voltage. He enlisted Fong's help.

"J.J. wanted to do this effect like in Altered States where the skin rippled," Fong says on the phone from Hawaii, where he is scouting locations for the King Kong reboot Kong: Skull Island. "I'd read about Dick Smith doing air bladders and whatnot to create his effects, so I got balloons and put them under a stocking and put them on the actor's arm. And then a bunch of us had tubes and were blowing air into these balloons that were wrapped around his arm, and it made this kind of weird ripple effect."

About this time, Abrams learned of a public-access show called Word of Mouth, hosted by a thirty-five-year-old named Gerard Ravel, who would interview musicians, actors, filmmakers-anyone interesting he could get. At the end of each show, Ravel would solicit calls from future prospective guests.

Abrams called. Inexplicably, Ravel humored him and drove out to Brentwood to see his stuff. "He put the films on his Super 8 projector, and I knew this kid was going to make it," Ravel toldFilmmaker magazine a few years ago. He ended up doing two shows with Abrams. A week later Ravel got a call from another fifteen-year-old, Matt Reeves. He put the two kids in touch.

"I actually remember the first night I was talking to Matt on the phone. We talked for like four hours because it was literally like we had both found a twin," Abrams says. "We were both working on movies that were about-without any shock or surprise at all-losers in high school. His was a much more sophisticated, dark comedy that was a better story and a better movie. Mine was a special-effects-filled ridiculous comedy." Eventually their friendship and collaboration would lead to Abrams's first television show, Felicity.

Meeting all these film-mad teenagers, Ravel had an idea. What resulted was "The Best Teen Super 8mm Films of '81," held at L.A.'s Nuart Theatre in March 1982. Abrams submitted High Voltage, his special-effects loser comedy. Reeves screened a Hitchcockian thriller called Stiletto.Fong's film was a spoof called Toast Encounters of the Burnt Kind. Future producer Lawrence Trilling (Parenthood) and screenwriter Mark Sanderson (I'll Remember April)also had films in the lineup.

The Los Angeles Times published a story about the festival, "Beardless Wonders of Film Making," so titled because their filmmaking idols-Spielberg, Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese-all had beards at the time ... and these kids weren't even old enough to drive. Much of the piece was given over to Abrams, who told of making his first film, a work of claymation, at age seven. "I see stuff by Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter and I want to do it, too," he was quoted as saying.

Spielberg's then-assistant, Kathleen Kennedy, read the article in the Times. As it happened, sitting near her desk was a dusty cardboard box full of 8mm movies (the predecessor to Super 8) that Spielberg had made, starting when he was a middle-school kid. They'd only recently been retrieved from the basement of a house on the top of Lookout Mountain in the Hollywood Hills.

"A man called me saying, 'Hey, I found this box of movies and I think they belong to Steven Spielberg,'" Kennedy remembers. "At first I thought, 'Okay, there is no way, this is just some crackpot.' But it turned out to be absolutely true. The man lived in a house that Steven had lived in years ago. He'd left behind this box."

Kennedy laughs at the memory. "I have no idea why, but I read that article and I suddenly had this idea to say to Steven, 'Hey, why don't we hire these two young kids to clean up the film?' "

For Abrams, it was like receiving a call from on high. The films of Lucas and Spielberg had been "transformative and incredibly exciting," he recalls. "Star Wars and Close Encounters came out the same year. It was hard not to be a fanatic about those stories."

The Spielberg archive was in rough condition. Over the years, the tape or glue used for editing had broken down. Every single edit on every film needed to be respliced.

Spielberg says he took a hands-on role. "I was entrusting my entire collection of 8mm movies that I had made as a kid to these two up-and-coming Hollywood hopefuls. And they were fifteen years old. Absolutely I was very concerned. I wanted to make sure that they weren't going to try to reinvent the wheel."

For their work, Abrams and Reeves were paid $150 each.

Sometime around 2010, as Lost was coming to the thunderous, befuddling conclusion of its award-winning six-year run, Larry Fong got a call from Abrams. "There's a movie you have to do," Abrams said.

After graduating from high school, Abrams had gone off to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. During Christmas break in his senior year he ran into his friend Jill Mazursky, the daughter of Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Down and Out in Beverly Hills). The two became writing partners; upon graduation they sold their first screenplay, Taking Care of Business, a 1990 comedy starring Jim Belushi. Next Abrams wrote Regarding Henry, starring Harrison Ford. A number of other films followed, including the 1998 megahit Armageddon. That same year, Abrams and Reeves created Felicity, a fan favorite that introduced Keri Russell and followed her adorably confused character through her four years at the fictional University of New York.

In 2004, following the success of Alias, featuring Jennifer Garner as a grad-student superundercover double agent, ABC tapped Abrams to produce a prime-time drama that would capitalize on the success of the tropical reality show Survivor, something like Robinson Crusoemeets Lord of the Flies. Abrams came up with Lost.

To shoot the supernatural prime-time soap-about the survivors of a plane crash who find themselves on a magical, mystical, metaphysical island-Abrams tapped his old friend Fong. Of course, Lost became the most-talked-about show in television history. Meanwhile, Abrams and Bad Robot began churning out television series (What About Brian, Fringe, Undercovers, Person of Interest) and big-screen action blockbusters.

One day, while working on Star Trek, Abrams says, he got the idea to do a movie called Super 8,about a group of film-mad middle-school-age kids. Abrams called up Spielberg and asked him to produce. He signed on immediately. Next Abrams called Fong.

"J.J. wanted me to read this script," Fong says. "He had me come to the set of one of his TV shows-they were shooting on location. And he said, 'You can't take the script, you have to read it right here'-you know how top secret he always is. And I'm like, 'Right here? Standing in a park?'

"So I'm starting to read and it's all about these kids. And slowly I find out the kids are making a movie to put in a film festival, and then all these fantastical things happen to them. Talk about personal. That was us. I don't know how much more personal a movie could get, although we never saw an alien or had a military conspiracy in our lives. When we were decorating the kid's bedroom for the film, J.J. was like, 'We gotta put magic tricks in his room and Famous Monsters comics.' We had all of our old magic books in the shot. It's those little things that no one else cares about that were huge for us, you know?"

The idea of Super 8, Abrams says, was to make a movie like the ones he'd grown up with, "sort of a lost Amblin movie," he says, referring to Spielberg's early production company, Amblin Entertainment, which produced E.T. and Gremlins. "There's something about that era that I have a fondness for. There's a sweetness and an innocence to that time and those characters. What's interesting is when I was writing the movie, my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer. In the script, one of the kids has just lost his mom. So it ended up I was writing a movie about losing your mom while I was losing my mom."

Abrams says he and Spielberg labored over the film cut by cut. As Spielberg sees it, "We consciously were trying to recapture the spirit of the Amblin films, not necessarily trying to pay homage."

"It was an homage with a capital H," Abrams says. "It was like going back to my childhood with the person who helped narrate my childhood."

In his office, Abrams is talking about an homage of a different sort-his work on The Force Awakens. The challenge, he says, is to find the right balance, borrowing some from the classics while moving the story along. In that way, he says, the undertaking is not unlike a television series. "It just happens to be a series that George Lucas created that ended up being one of the most culturally impactful things of all time."

Abrams insists the decision to take on the Star Wars franchise-as director of The Force Awakens and executive producer of two sequels-was not easy. He knew that one reason Lucas had decided to sell was the personal attacks he'd suffered over the years from overzealous fans who had their own ideas on how to run a movie dynasty; it just wasn't fun anymore. Kennedy says she had to do a lot of convincing to bring Abrams aboard. "The interesting thing is that our kids-Steven's kids, J.J.'s kids, and mine-all went to the same school. We used to all see one another as we would drop off and pick up the kids or go to school events and things like that. There was a very short list of potential candidates to step into Star Wars, and J.J. was way at the top of the list. It's already been talked about that he at first turned it down. I remember having endless conversations with J.J. when he was trying to make the decision. A lot of it happened while we were standing around at school."

When he committed, Abrams went in deep. He persuaded Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill to reprise their original roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker for the first time in thirty years. (He's also added fresh faces like Adam Driver and Lupita Nyong'o to the mix.) Details about plot and characters have been kept obsessively secret, of course-according to many accounts, the screenplay was still being reworked as shooting began in the spring of 2014-but Abrams has frequently said, as he repeats now, that he's made only sparing use of computer-generated effects. It is as analog as he can make it, shooting on 35mm film (rather than digitally, as almost all movies are shot now) and indulging his longtime fascination with monster makeup and model building.

"When I first saw Star Wars, I remember being touched by the tangibility of it. The actuality of it. It just felt real," Abrams says. "I didn't know that the Tatooine shots were done in Tunisia-I just knew I was in a real fucking place, on an actual desert planet. There was an actual sunbaked sandscape, and it was great because it was 100 percent real. It helped me believe that these two droids were really in the middle of the desert arguing and separating, or that this kid from a moisture farm would happen upon this droid in the sandcrawler."

Abrams says his quest for a more tactile, analog film has been well served by the technological advances that have been made with small servos and motors and skin materials. "When you look at creatures on the set-I have scenes where we might have used a little bit of CG, but it was more likely to remove something, not to add something, like to remove the puppeteer. There are a couple scenes in this movie where you might think, 'Oh, I bet that's CG,' which is fine, but you're never gonna look at it and go, 'That doesn't look real.'"

It may be a unique feature of our feedback culture that a chubby middle-school Star Wars nerd grows up to become the instrument of Star Wars' rebirth. It feels freaky even to him.

"I would be disingenuous if I said there weren't hundreds of times during this process of working on this movie where I didn't have a kind of Oh my God, I'm meeting the Beatles feeling. It's like, suddenly you're here, finding yourself on the set of the Millennium Falcon. It's hard not to feel a reverence toward that, a sense of awe. Every day there would be a moment or two or three where I would find myself stunned by what was actually happening."

He shakes his head. "It makes no sense that Kathy Kennedy would see an article and that she and Steven Spielberg would decide to trust these priceless original copies of his childhood films, the only copies, to a couple of kids. That makes no sense. Trusting a fifteen-year-old with that stuff? You don't do that. And then the idea that Kathy would become a friend, that Steven would become so close to me. None of it really makes any sense. It doesn't quite feel real. It's like something you make up. I don't know how it ever happened."

Twenty years or so after J.J. Abrams's teacher called his mom to make her aware that he was spending his recess periods flying around the playground in a Superman cape, Carol Abrams ran into the teacher.

"Carol is in a supermarket here in Brentwood and she feels a tap on her shoulder," recalls Gerald Abrams. "She turns around and it's Mrs. Newman. They talk awhile about this and that, and finally Mrs. Newman says, 'Tell me, what ever happened with J.J.?'

"Carol looks at her. 'You're not going to believe it,' she says."

This article originally appears in the December 2015/January 2016 issue.