Interview with Writer/Director Jim Abrahams about The Charlie Foundation
Please enjoy my talk with Jim Abrahams, best known as a writer and director (along with his friends Jerry Zucker and David Zucker) of the movies, Airplane, Kentucky Fried Movie, The Naked Gun, Top Secret and the TV show Police Squad. Jim is also the co-author of the new book:
Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!
While we touch a bit on Jim's wonderful movie and TV career, the focus of this talk is the story of Jim's son Charlie, Charlie's diagnosis with severe epilepsy at age 1, and the amazing journey that Jim and his wife Nancy embarked on to find an ultimately successful cure for their son.
Find out more about their incredible work at The Charlie Foundation:
https://charliefoundation.org/
An excerpt from Jim Abrahams in his new book "Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!" by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker
After Airplane!, I married Nancy, the woman whose fingers I had nervously smooshed together while sitting through an early Airplane! screening, and we started a family.
Joseph, Jamie, and Charlie have brought incredible pride, light, and joy—and a few sleepless nights—into my life. Once David and Jerry and I decided to work independently, I directed Big Business (1988), co-wrote The Naked Gun, directed Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990), and co-wrote and directed Hot Shots! (1991) and Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993).
By then I had spent the first forty-nine years of my life trying to find things to laugh about.
Then in March 1993, everything changed. My one-year-old son, Charlie, had his first seizure. There’s absolutely nothing funny about being the parent of a child with uncontrolled epilepsy. Nothing. After a year of daily seizures, drugs, and a brain surgery, I learned that the cure for Charlie’s epilepsy, the ketogenic diet—a high fat, no sugar, limited protein diet—had been hiding in plain sight for, by then, over seventy years.
And despite the diet’s being well documented in medical texts, none of the half-dozen pediatric neurologists we had taken Charlie to see had mentioned a word about it. I found out on my own at a medical library. It was life altering—not just for Charlie and my family, but for tens of thousands like us.
Turns out there are powerful forces at work within our health care system that don’t necessarily prioritize good health. For decades, physicians have barely been taught diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school. The pharmaceutical, medical device, and sugar industries make hundreds of billions every year on anti-epileptic drugs and processed foods—but not a nickel if we change what we eat.
The cardiology community and American Heart Association demonize fat based on flawed science. Hospitals profit from tests and procedures, but again no money from diet therapy. There is a world epilepsy population of over sixty million people. Most of those people begin having their seizures as children, and only a minuscule percentage ever find out about ketogenic diet therapies. When I realized that 99 percent of what had happened to Charlie and my family was unnecessary, and that there were millions of families worldwide in the same situation, I needed to try to do something.
Nancy and I began the Charlie Foundation (charliefoundation.org) in 1994 in order to facilitate research and get the word directly to those who would benefit. Among the high points were countless articles, a couple appearances of Charlie’s story on Dateline NBC, and a movie I produced and directed about another family whose child’s epilepsy had been cured by the ketogenic diet starring Meryl Streep titled First Do No Harm (1997).
Today, of course, the diet permeates social media. When we started, there was one hospital in the world offering ketogenic diet therapy. Today, there are 250. Equally important, word about the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy spread within the scientific community.
In 1995, we hosted the first of many scientific global symposia focused on the diet. As research into its mechanisms and applications has spiked, incredibly the professional communities have found the same metabolic pathway that is triggered by the ketogenic diet to reduce seizures has also been found to benefit Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, severe psychiatric disorders, traumatic brain injury, and even some cancers.
I did dip back into the movie business co-writing and directing Jane Austen’s: Mafia (1998) and co-writing Scary Movie 4 (2004). Although I tried my hardest, my heart was no longer in it. I was painting by numbers. I had another passion. There is no way I would have embraced the concept or had the ability to take on this oversight made by American medicine were it not for the confidence and skills I learned with David and Jerry during our Airplane! adventure. It is one more reason I will always love them—and that silly movie.”
A note from Chris Joseph:
I am currently raising $$$ to fund the publication of my new book "The Kitchen Sink Approach to Cancer (and Why You Shouldn't Always Listen to Your Doctor)". If my mission resonates with you, please check out the Kickstarter campaign at:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kitchensink/changing-the-standard-of-care-one-reader-at-a-time
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Chris Joseph is a dad, environmental consultant, cancer patient advocate, best selling author, thought leader, public speaker, and founder of two music record companies and a complementary 501(c)(3) non-profit helping New Orleans artists and musicians. He's also a television producer, hobbyist songwriter, podcaster, and a lover of all things outdoors. Over the decades, Chris has served as a board of director for numerous non-profit organizations, and is currently a national board member of NatureBridge.
Chris’s first book was the best seller “Life is a Ride: My Unconventional Journey of Cancer Recovery” (2020). He then co-authored "The Epiphanies Project" and is currently finalizing his third book, “The Kitchen Sink Approach to Cancer (And Why You SHOULDN'T Always Listen to Your Doctor)”.
For more information about Chris Joseph, please see the following websites:
https://my.terrain.network/profile/member/841?tab=overview-tab
and at chrisjoseph AT mac DOT com
