JJ Abrams 'Are You Ready?'

A clip from Frank Bruni's 7-page story on JJ Abrams:

During his 20s Abrams churned out and sold script after script, with his credits including “Gone Fishin’,” a throwaway buddy comedy, and “Armageddon,” a formulaic disaster behemoth. He did some rewrites for “Casper,” impressing one of its producers, Spielberg, who remembered his name. There wasn’t a genre in which he didn’t show fluency. But there also wasn’t a project that he simultaneously felt a deep connection to and had real control over.

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The Santa Monica building that houses Abrams’s production company, Bad Robot, is a literal, physical reflection of his sensibility. The big sign on the outside doesn’t say Bad Robot but instead National Typewriter Co., and that’s not because the building used to house such an enterprise. It’s because Abrams likes typewriters — and misdirection. Near the doorbell, which is a glowing green light, a smaller sign asks, “Are you ready?”

Abrams’s personal suite of offices is on the second floor, and the befuddlements persist there. A green phone with no dial face or digits to press connects him directly to his wife’s BlackBerry. To get to his bathroom, you have to walk up to a wall of bookshelves beside his desk and tug on a copy of “Louis Tannen’s Catalog of Magic” (named for the same Manhattan magic shop, still around today, where he got his childhood mystery box). Abracadabra: the wall opens. The toilet is revealed.

Pretty nice write up.