There are two movies that come to mind for Jeremiah Abraham, film producer, CEO, and founder of Tremendous Communications, as being influential in initially shaping his love of movies: the Christopher Reeve-led Superman II and 1997’s Contact.
“I remember, after watching [Contact] on the ride back home, just staring out the window of the car, looking up at the sky, and just feeling such wonder,” he says in our Zoom interview. “And I carried that into my career. I love film, I love entertainment, I love TV — I love the way that it makes me feel; I love the way that it empowers people, changes minds.”
Abraham emigrated from the Philippines with his family when he was five, and grew up in Los Angeles. Of course, like many Filipino families in North America, he had access to a lot of Filipino media as well, namely TFC (The Filipino Channel), whose programming ranged from news and documentaries to soap operas and live variety shows. (I personally remember when my own mom purchased her satellite just so she could watch shows from back home.)
While it would be easy to imagine how natural it would have been for Abraham — growing up in Hollywood and being surrounded by all kinds of movies and TV shows — to have embarked on a career in entertainment, he reveals that it actually wasn’t the case at first. Other than cinema, in fact, Abraham demonstrated an early affinity for the sciences, attending the California Academy of Math and Sciences before enrolling at UC Irvine for an electrical and computer engineering track.
“I’m proud to say I got an A in three-dimensional multivariable physics,” he says.
In describing how he jumped from engineering to entertainment, Abraham is deliberate in not calling it a coincidence, but rather a “situationship.” Shortly after graduating from UC Irvine, he found himself working at The Aerospace Corporation, a government-funded aerospace research center in El Segundo, California. Though it wasn’t to his liking, the technical skills he learned here essentially landed him at Disney as a technical producer for disney.com. “It was a mix between technical and creative [work],” Abraham says, listing Hannah Montana, Cars, and Meet the Robinsons as some of the major titles he worked on.
Working at Disney would, in effect, be the beginning of the stars aligning, where his career was concerned, as he was eventually accepted into a Masters program at the University of Southern California in communication management. Talking about this moment, Abraham says, “It really helped me hone in on what I wanted to do, in terms of [utilizing] that skill set from being a technical person to now really diving into my creative [side].”
“If I hadn’t landed that job at Disney at that time, I don’t know where I’d be right now. I’d probably still be coding somewhere in aerospace.”
That said, working in the entertainment industry full-time at the turn of the 2010s was, to put it mildly, an interesting time where representation was concerned. In fact, Abraham recalls a moment when he looked around the room and noticed he was the only non-white person present and, on top of that, being asked to comment on a certain marketing strategy that targeted a particular racialized community — almost as if BIPOC people are interchangeable.
“Knowing that there were folks who were not part of these communities making decisions on behalf of us — these people who are greenlighting, redirecting money, redirecting value, and how they would represent certain people — that sparked something in me.”
Before representation discourse became a mainstream talking point, Abraham was working diligently behind the scenes, slowly carving away at pockets of spaces for equitable opportunities. Needless to say, it wasn’t always the easiest job, especially with regards to Asian representation. “Back then, studios didn’t quite know how to interact and engage with our community yet. We often talk [about] different diasporas, different backgrounds, that we don’t even share a common language, for example — so it was definitely a different approach.”
Here, Abraham reveals feeling a lot of pressure most days to carry the responsibility — oftentimes on his own — of championing the Asian community: “If I was the only Asian in the room, if I was the only Filipino in the room, there was at least some sort of voice in the back of my head that said, ‘Yes, you’re doing this for your career, but [also] more than this.’”
“I want to make sure that whatever we’re doing is as inclusive as possible, is as thoughtful and authentic and respectful as possible because, in Hollywood, we’ve not always been afforded the level of respect and credibility and value that we deserve — that we’re getting now. And it’s still a work in progress.”
After working for big Hollywood studios for over a decade — in addition to running marketing campaigns, he has also co-produced films like Yellow Rose and Lingua Franca — Abraham finally made the decision in 2019 to step out on his own, founding and incorporating Tremendous Communications. He initially leaned on the connections he had made through his work with Warner Bros. and the like, and while Tremendous was on the right track, everything shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even still, there was no derailing Abraham and his team. Though film and TV projects were scarce, Tremendous became a loud voice in the Stop AAPI Hate movement. It may not have been the plan Abraham had set for his new company, but, to him, “when we see our community in need, we use our superpowers to try to address it.”
Certainly, once Hollywood went back to work, Tremendous hit the ground running, leading campaigns for major projects like Blockbuster, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and The School for Good and Evil for Netflix, and Expats and Cattleya Killer for Prime Video. They also worked on awards-worthy films like Nope and Everything Everywhere All at Once. What’s more, Tremendous won the Davey Awards Gold Award — think: Oscars for marketing — for their campaign for 2023’s Joy Ride titled “AAPIs Go on a Joy Ride.”
Now, Abraham and Tremendous have plans to expand their scope to go beyond just screen entertainment, most recently dipping their feet in literary waters with a promotion campaign for author Justinian Huang’s debut novel, The Emperor and the Endless Palace.
“We identified a need. We identified a niche — a very important one — and honed in and set our vision, and here we are today.”
