Hollywood director Tom Shadyac presents film at Stuart HS

Tom Shadyac (right) with Morgan Freeman and Steve Carrell.

The public, as well as students, parents, faculty, and alumni of JEB Stuart High School, are invited to the school March 23, 7:30 p.m., for a discussion with film director Tom Shadyac, a former Stuart student, and a screening of his new documentary, “I AM.”

Shadyac is best known for directing “Patch Adams,” “Bruce Almighty,” “The Nutty Professor,” “Liar, Liar,” “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “Accepted,” and “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.” He received four People’s Choice Awards, and “Patch Adams” was nominated for a Golden Globe.

Shadyac graduated in 1976. Susan O’Reilly, a former classmate, recalls that he was really into basketball. “Also, he and his friend, Harold Mintz, who now works for him in California, would do the morning announcements. They were quite hilarious!,” she says.

Other notable Stuart alumni from that era include Hollywood producer Bruce Cohen, who produced this year’s Academy Awards, she says, and actress Julianna Moore, who was then known as Julie Smith.

For “I AM,” Shadyac took a small crew around the world to ask some of today’s most profound thinkers two questions: What is wrong with our world? and what can we do about it? Shadyac says he made the film “to start a conversation, to move from symptoms to solutions, to empower the individual, and in the end, to help birth a better world.”

“I AM” won the Audience Choice Award and the Student Choice Award at the Mountain Film Festival in Telluride Colo.

There is no charge for the event, but the Stuart Educational Foundation will be collecting donations.