Last month, Voices Online offered fans of movie director Tom Shadyac (pictured) a list of five reasons to buy tickets to the 2019 Distinguished Achievement Award for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Dean Anne Hogan and the University of Memphis’ College of Communication and Fine Arts are honoring Shadyac at the April 2 event at the Fogelman Executive Conference Center. Tickets are $30 and available at www.memphis.edu/ccfa/award.

Here’s a sixth reason why you should attend the Distinguished Achievement Award gala: Shadyac’s story, told here (“How a Hollywood Director Built a Wall That Brings People Together“) by writer Jeremy Markovich last month in Politico magazine, is Hollywood-worthy.

Markovich writes:

After successes with Liar, Liar and The Nutty Professor, he started to command seven-figure deals and moved into a 17,000-square-foot mansion in Pasadena. He zipped around the country on a private jet. Then, in 2007, a head injury from a mountain biking accident led him to re-evaluate his life. He got rid of the jet, sold his mansion and moved into a high-end 1,000-square-foot trailer in Malibu. Around this time, he started teaching storytelling to college students in Memphis, where his family had roots. In 1962, his father, D.C. lawyer Richard Shadyac, had helped actor Danny Thomas open St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which offers free care to sick children. “Nothing has been more powerful in my life than watching a free hospital get built,” Shadyac says. “There’s a power there that doesn’t exist in other places.”

— Phillip Tutor, CCFA media coordinator, potutor@memphis.edu