Tradition of Excellence Awards Ceremony Honors
Four Distinguished Alumni
On Thursday, May 19, the District honored four distinguished alumni—Jim Abrahams,
Jerry Harrison, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker—with Shorewood Tradition of
Excellence Awards for their achievements in film and music. Three of the honorees
(excluding Jim) were able to fly back to Shorewood to receive their awards in person and
spent the day participating in various activities around campus.
The day included a Shorewood High School assembly to preview the spring musical
South Pacific and to watch a short video on the honorees' achievements, a talkback
session where students could ask the honorees personalized questions, a meet-and-greet
and dinner at Hubbard Park Lodge (hosted by the Shorewood High School Alumni
Association), and an awards ceremony for the honorees at intermission during opening
night of the musical.
It was an amazing experience for all involved.
View the Tradition of Excellence Awards photo album here.
To learn more about each honoree & view general information regarding the Tradition of
Excellence Awards, read below.
Tradition of Excellence Awards
Established in the year 2000, the 100th anniversary of the Village of Shorewood, the
Tradition of Excellence Awards are bestowed upon Shorewood High School graduates or
faculty who have distinguished themselves in a diverse range of areas, including
community and public service; science, engineering, and technology; medicine and
public health; the arts and humanities; business; government and political service;
education; military service; philanthropy; and other professions committed to serving
others. Previous honorees include Chief Justice William Rehnquist and U.S.
Congressman and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, among others.
The 2016 Shorewood Tradition of Excellence honorees were nominated by peers, staff,
and students, and selected by a small committee comprised of Shorewood graduates,
former administrators, and current staff.
About the 2016 Shorewood Tradition of Excellence Inductees
Jim Abrahams
With films like Airplane! (1980), The Naked
Gun series and Hot Shots! (1991), director, producer
and writer Jim Abrahams has created some of the most
successful comedies of all time. Mr. Abrahams was
born in Milwaukee on May 10, 1944. He graduated
from Shorewood High School in 1962 and attended the
University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1962-1966. He
began his career when he and his friends David and
Jerry Zucker formed a partnership known as ZAZ. The
three created the Kentucky Fried Theater sketch
comedy show in Madison, Wisconsin, but moved the
show in 1972 to Los Angeles, where it gained immense
popularity.
Based on the success of their sketch show, Mr.
Abrahams and his partners wrote and produced the cult
classic Kentucky Fried Movie (1977). The ZAZ team
wrote and directed the iconic disaster-movie
spoof Airplane!. They wrote and directed the secretagent spoof Top Secret! (1984) and directed the hit
film Ruthless People (1986), starring Bette Midler and
Danny DeVito. They created the critically acclaimed TV series Police Squad!, and they
wrote and produced The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), directed by
David Zucker. Mr. Abrahams reunited with the ZAZ team to produce The Naked Gun 2
1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991) and The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994).
He made his solo directorial debut in 1988 with the comedy Big Business, starring Bette
Midler and Lily Tomlin. He also directed Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990),
starring Winona Ryder and Jeff Daniels, and he produced Cry-Baby (1990), directed by
John Waters and starring Johnny Depp. Returning to the genre of parody films, he
directed and co-wrote the very successful action-movie spoof Hot Shots! and its
sequel Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), both of which starred Charlie Sheen. He directed
and co-wrote Jane Austen's Mafia! (1998), a parody of mafia films, and he co-wrote the
horror spoof Scary Movie 4 (2006).
Mr. Abrahams directed and produced the TV movie ...First Do No Harm (1997), which
received Golden Globe, Emmy, and Humanitas Award nominations. Starring Meryl
Streep, ...First Do No Harm tells the story of a mother who struggles to find treatment for
her epileptic son. In 1994, Jim and his wife Nancy founded The Charlie Foundation To
Help Cure Pediatric Epilepsy, and he serves as the foundation's director. Since 1997, he
has been on the Board of Directors of CURE (Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy).
He is currently co-chair of The Wellness Institute in collaboration with the National
Epilepsy Foundation. He has also served on the Board of Visitors of the Department of
Hebrew.
Jerry Harrison
Born in Milwaukee in 1949, Jerry Harrison grew
up in an artistic family. His mother studied art and
went on to teach at the Chicago Art Institute and
the Layton School of Art, and his father was a
musician and an executive at an advertising firm.
At Shorewood High School, he studied music and
played in rock bands. He went on to attend Harvard
College where he graduated Magna Plus Cum
Laude in Visual and Environmental Studies in
1972. While at Harvard, Mr. Harrison joined The
Modern Lovers, a seminal band in the development
of Punk Rock music. He later met David Byrne,
Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, who invited him
to join the Talking Heads in January 1977.
The Talking Heads' ten albums are considered
among the most important oeuvres in rock and roll
history. In addition to their first album Talking
Heads '77, they include: More Songs About Buildings and Food; Fear of Music; Remain
in Light; The Name of this Band is Talking Heads; Speaking in Tongues; Little
Creatures; True Stories, Naked; and the album and film Stop Making Sense. The
influence of the Talking Heads and their albums on music and musicians continues to this
day. As a member of the Talking Heads, Mr. Harrison was inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, won "Best Group Video" at the MTV Video Music Awards in
1987 and with engineer E.T. Thorngren, won five awards at the 2005 Surround Awards
for the 5.1 remixes of the Talking Heads' albums. He also received a Grammy
nomination for the album design of Fear of Music in 1980. He has three solo albums to
his credit and has also been a successful music producer since 1981, among the more
notable artists he has produced are: Violent Femmes; Bodeans; Crash Test Dummies;
Live; Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band; No Doubt; and Foo Fighters. He was a producer of
the album and film: Take Me to the River, which chronicles the assassination of Dr.
Martin Luther King and the rebirth of the Memphis music scene, which was the winner of
the 2013 South By Southwest Festival "Audience Award" and the 2013 London
Raindance Film Festival's "Feature Film of the Festival Award."
Over the course of his career, Mr. Harrison had the good fortune to be in the center of
two defining moments in culture: popular music in the 1960s through the 1990s and the
personal computer revolution, which began in the late 1970s. Building on his knowledge
of computers from Harvard, he became involved in the burgeoning intersection between
music, technology and social media after he and his family moved to San Francisco in
1994. In 1999, he co-founded Garageband, one of the inventors of crowdsourcing. It used
a sophisticated rating system to generate popularity rankings for each artist, allowing
music fans and record labels to discover new, independent artists. Renamed iLike, it
became the predominant music app on Facebook and grew to 60 million users.
Mr. Harrison has served on the Boards of the Independent Online Distribution Alliance,
MicroUnity Systems Engineering, Carbon Gold, Inc. and Anthroterra, Inc., and was also
a founding partner in the Venearth Group LLC, a venture capital group devoted to
climate mitigation with a particular focus on sustainable agriculture and solar
technologies. His latest technology venture is Ophirex, Inc., a company that has
pioneered a new approach to the treatment of snakebites. In May 2015, he received an
Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Rhodes Island School of Design.
David Zucker
With worldwide box office hits such as Airplane!,
Ruthless People, three Naked Guns, Phone Booth,
A Walk In the Clouds, and the record-breaking
Scary Movie 3 and 4 all to his credit,
director/producer/writer David Zucker, a 1966
graduate of Shorewood High School, has become
one of Hollywood's most successful comedy
filmmakers.
Starting out after college with a borrowed video
tape deck and camera, he, brother Jerry, and friend
Jim Abrahams created The Kentucky Fried Theater
in the back of a bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin.
Moving their hit show to Los Angeles in 1972,
they became, in five years, the most successful
small theater group in Los Angeles history.
In 1977, ZAZ scored their first movie hit with their
independent feature, Kentucky Fried Movie. But it was in 1980 that David, Jerry, and Jim
hit on an idea that would create a whole new film genre. Airplane! broke all conventions
by featuring dramatic actors like Robert Stack and Peter Graves performing zany
dialogue with straight-laced sincerity. The spoof became the surprise hit of 1980, and
spawned a streak of hit movies: Top Secret!, Ruthless People, and The Naked Gun.
David Zucker created two more Naked Guns, before going on to produce A Walk in The
Clouds and Phone Booth. After directing the comedy classic, BASEketball, David Zucker
was tapped by Dimension Pictures to revitalize the Scary Movie comedy franchise. The
result was two blockbusters. Scary Movie 3 remains to this day the biggest October
comedy opening ever.
Since 1991, David has served on the board of TreePeople, an L.A.-based organization
committed to promoting community-based tree planting and ecological solutions. Since
that time, David has worked closely with founder Andy Lipkis, taking a major role in
charting the direction of the organization, and while doing so, receiving numerous
honors, including the annual Evergreen Award.
Currently, David is writing a spoof of film noir, The Star of Malta, which he intends to
direct this Fall.
Jerry Zucker
A 1968 graduate of Shorewood High School, Jerry
Zucker began his career in collaboration with his
brother, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams when
they formed their production company, known as
ZAZ. The team wrote and
directed, Airplane! and Top Secret. They also
directed Ruthless People starring Bette Midler and
Danny De Vito and wrote and produced Kentucky
Fried Movie. They created the popular feature The
Naked Gun starring Leslie Nielsen, based on their
television series Police Squad!.
Jerry Zucker also directed Ghost, starring Demi
Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, and Patrick
Swayze; First Knight starring Sean Connery,
Richard Gere, and Julia Ormond; and the
comedy Rat Race with Rowan Atkinson, John
Cleese, Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jr. and
Jon Lovitz. As a producer, Mr. Zucker's work includes A Walk In The Clouds, starring
Keanu Reeves; My Life starring Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman; My Best Friend's
Wedding, starring Julia Roberts; Fair Game starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, Friends
With Benefits starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, Mental, starring Toni Collette
and Anthony LaPaglia, and Dear Dumb Diary, based on the popular children's book
series by Jim Benton.
In 2008, Jerry Zucker and his wife Janet launched the "Science and Entertainment
Exchange" in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
The goal of The Exchange is to use the vehicle of popular entertainment media to deliver
powerful and positive messages about the importance of science.