J.J. Abrams is a cool guy.

J.J. Abrams is a cool guy.

by Nur Hussein, staff writer

Today, we wish a very happy birthday to prolific TV creator, movie maker, writer, director, musician, and custodian of two of the most legendary of nerd franchises: Jeffrey Jacob Abrams, or J.J. Abrams for short. After helming a number of high-profile and successful projects including the film reboot of Star Trek, Abrams is now hard at work creating a brand new Star Wars film for Disney.

Abrams was born in 1966 (incidentally the same year Star Trek made its debut). His professional career in movie making began at 16 when he wrote the music for the film Nightbeast. His first professional screenplay was for the 1990 comedy film Taking Care of Business, which he co-wrote with Jill Mazursky. He then went on to write the Harrison Ford movie Regarding Henry (1991), and the Mel Gibson movie Forever Young (1992), both of which met with mixed reviews from critics. In 1998 he shared writing credits for the Michael Bay asteroid movie, Armageddon.

Abrams’ film directorial debut was Mission:Impossible III in 2006, a film he also co-wrote. It received generally positive reviews from critics. He then produced the 2008 genre film Cloverfield, but what really capulted him into the genre-director limelight was his 2009 feature, the Star Trek reboot which brought new life into that franchise which had ended somewhat unceremoniously on the big and small screens. He followed that up with critically acclaimed Super 8 in 2011, which was an awesome tribute to the Spielberge-esque films of the ’80s. In 2013 he directed Star Trek Into Darkness (to somewhat mixed reviews), but it’s his 2015 directorial effort that has people on the edge of their seats in anticipation: a brand new Star Wars movie!

On the television front, Abrams has created a lot of TV shows. He started with Felicity in 1998, and then moved on to create the spy show Alias, and then the critically acclaimed sci-fi drama Lost. After Lost, he co-created Fringe and Undercovers, and served as executive producer on a number of genre shows: Person of Interest, Revolution, Almost Human and most recently, Believe.

Apart from writing, directing and creating shows, Abrams is also a talented musician and composer, writing the theme music to many of the shows he helms. He even appeared as a keyboard performer in a Lonely Island music video called “Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions” (it’s exactly what it sounds like).

We at SCIFI.radio would like to wish Abrams a very happy birthday, and we hope he has time off in his busy schedule to have a bit of fun today. We hope he has many productive days to come.

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Nur Hussein

Nur Hussein

Nur is a tinkerer of programmable things, an apprentice in an ancient order of technomages. He enjoys fantasy, sci-fi, comic books, and Lego in his spare time. His favourite authors are Asimov and Tolkien. He also loves Celtic and American folk music. You can follow him on twitter: @nurhussein