Jim Jacobs

Jim Jacobs (born October 7, 1942) is an American actor, composer, lyricist, and writer for the theatre, long associated with the Chicago theater scene.

Jacobs is best known for creating the book, storyline, characters, and lyrics for the 1971 musical Grease with Warren Casey. Grease was adapted into the film Grease in 1978, which would become one of the most successful film adaptations of a musical in history in terms of gross revenue adjusted for inflation.

Biography

Career Jacobs was born on October 7, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, to Harold, a factory foreman, and Norma (Mathison) Jacobs. Jacobs attended Taft High School, during which time he played guitar and sang with a band called DDT & the Dynamiters. When he was 11, his idol was Bill Haley, but when he was fourteen it was Elvis Presley. He also cites Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis as influences, while noting he despised later rock bands such as The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin.

For the next five years he appeared in more than fifty theatrical productions in the Chicago area, working with such people as The Second City founder Paul Sills, while earning a living as an advertising copywriter. He also landed a small role in the 1969 film Medium Cool.

Jacobs' Broadway acting debut was in a 1970 revival of the play No Place to be Somebody, followed by the national tour.

Grease In the second half of the 1960s, Jacobs found himself at a party surrounded by stoners, disgusted by the state of rock music at the time and longing for the sounds of 1950s rock and roll, and was inspired to write a production based upon life in the early rock and roll era. He began working with Warren Casey on the musical; entitled Grease, it was based largely on Jacobs's high school experiences and even used the names of some of Jacobs's acquaintances, with Jacobs inserting himself into the musical as two of the characters, the innocent Doody and the more confident Roger.

Producers Ken Waissman and Maxine Fox saw the show and suggested to the playwrights that it might work better as a musical, and told them if the creative partners were willing to rework it and they liked the result, they would produce it off-Broadway. The team headed to New York City to collaborate on what would become Grease, Casey earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical. The show went on to become a West End hit and a hugely successful film.

Later career Grease would be the only musical from Jacobs and Casey to make it to Broadway or achieve widespread success. The two would collaborate on one other show, Island of Lost Coeds: a spoof on 1940s and 1950s B movies: a captain and crew crash on a deserted island inhabited by beautiful women with ratted hair, tiger-skin swimsuits and rubber spears. In 1980, he appeared in the film Love in a Taxi, directed by Robert Sickinger.

Jacobs served as a judge on the NBC reality series Grease: You're the One that I Want! in 2006, designed to cast the lead roles in an August 2007 Broadway revival of Grease via viewer votes. Jacobs stated that he agreed to take part in the show only after NBC offered him too much money for him to refuse.

As of May 2022, Jacobs resides in Los Angeles.