A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

But at Warner Bros., I discovered the value of curiosity—and I began what I consider my curiosity journey, following it in a systematic way.

  Calley and I never talked about curiosity. But being given the big office and watching Calley in action gave me another idea, a more evolved version of my meetings with the people to whom I was delivering contracts. I realized I didn’t have to meet only the people Warner Bros. happened to be doing business with that day. I could see anyone in the business I wanted to see. I could see the people who sparked my curiosity simply by calling their offices and asking for an appointment.

  I developed a brief introduction for the secretaries and assistants who answered the phone: “Hi, my name is Brian Grazer. I work for Warner Bros. Business Affairs. This is not associated with studio business, and I do not want a job, but I would like to meet Mr. So-and-so for five minutes to talk to him. . . .” And I always offered a specific reason I wanted to talk to everyone.

  My message was clear: I worked at a real place, I only wanted five minutes on the schedule, I did not want a job. And I was polite.

  Just like insisting on handing over the legal documents in person, the speech worked like a charm.

  I talked to producer David Picker, who was at Columbia Pictures.

  Then I thought maybe I could see producer Frank Yablans, and I did.

  Once I’d met Yablans, I thought, Maybe I can meet Lew Wasserman, the head of MCA. And I did.

  I worked myself up the ladder. Talking to one person in the movie business suggested a half dozen more people I could talk to. Each success gave me the confidence to try for the next person. It turned out I really could talk to almost anyone in the business.

  That was the start of something that changed—and continues to change—my life and my career, and which ultimately inspired this book.

  I started having what I called curiosity conversations. At first, they were just inside the business. For a long time, I had a rule for myself: I had to meet one new person in the entertainment business every day.16 But pretty quickly I realized that I could actually reach out and talk to anyone, in any business that I was curious about. It’s not just showbiz people who are willing to talk about themselves and their work—everyone is.

  For thirty-five years, I’ve been tracking down people about whom I was curious and asking if I could sit down with them for an hour. I’ve had as few as a dozen curiosity conversations in a year, but sometimes I’ve done them as often as once a week. My goal was always at least one every two weeks. Once I started doing the curiosity conversations as a practice, my only rule for myself was that the people had to be from outside the world of movies and TV.

  The idea wasn’t to spend more time with the kinds of people I worked with every day. I had quickly discovered that the entertainment business is incredibly insular—we tend to talk only to ourselves. It’s easy to think that movies and TV are a miniature version of the world. That’s not just wrong, it’s a perspective that leads to mediocre movies, and also to being boring.

  I was so serious about the curiosity conversations that I often spent a year or more trying to arrange a meeting with particular people. I would spend hours calling, writing letters, cajoling, befriending assistants. As I got more successful and busier, I assigned one of my staff to arrange the conversations—the New Yorker did a little piece on the job, which came to be known as “cultural attaché.” For a while, I had someone whose only job was to arrange the conversations.17

  The point was to follow my curiosity, and I ranged as widely as I could. I sat down with two CIA directors. With both Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. I met with the man who invented the most powerful weapon in history and the richest man in the world. I met with people I was scared of; I met people that I really didn’t want to meet.

  I never meet anyone with a movie in mind (although in recent years, it’s clear that some people met with me because they thought that maybe I would do a movie about them or their work). The goal for me is to learn something.

  The results have always been surprising, and the connections I’ve made from the curiosity conversations have cascaded through my life—and the movies we make—in the most unexpected ways. My conversation with the astronaut Jim Lovell certainly started me on the path to telling the story of Apollo 13. But how do we convey, in a movie, the psychology of being trapped on a crippled spaceship? It was Veronica de Negri, a Chilean activist who was tortured for months by her own government, who taught me what it’s like to be forced to rely completely on oneself to survive. Veronica de Negri helped us to get Apollo 13 right as surely as Jim Lovell did.

  Over time, I discovered that I’m curious in a particular sort of way. My strongest sense of curiosity is what I call emotional curiosity: I want to understand what makes people tick; I want to see if I can connect a person’s attitude and personality with their work, with their challenges and accomplishments.

  I met with Jonas Salk, the scientist and physician who cured polio, a man who was a childhood hero of mine. It took me more than a year to get an audience with him. I wasn’t interested in the scientific method Salk used to figure out how to develop the polio vaccine. I wanted to know what it was like to help millions of people avoid a crippling disease that shadowed the childhoods of everyone when I was growing up. And he worked in a different era. He was renowned, admired, successful—but he received no financial windfall. He cured what was then the worst disease afflicting the world, and he never made a dime from that. Can you imagine that happening today? I wanted to understand the mind-set that turns a cure like that loose in the world.

  I met with Edward Teller, who created the hydrogen bomb. He was an old man when I met him, working on the anti-missile “Star Wars” program for President Reagan. He was another person I had to lobby for a year in order to get an hour with him. I wanted to understand the intellect of a man who creates something like the hydrogen bomb and what his sense of morality is like.

  I met with Carlos Slim, the Mexican businessman who is the richest man in the world.18 How does the richest man in the world live every day? I wanted to know what it takes to be that kind of businessman, to be so driven and determined that you win bigger than anyone else.

  The truth is that when I was meeting someone like Salk or Teller or Slim, what I hoped for was an insight, a revelation. I wanted to grasp who they were. Of course, you don’t usually get that with strangers in an hour.

  Salk was gracious and friendly. Teller was crabby. And Carlos Slim was unlike what I expected, not brisk or businesslike or ruthless in any way. He was very warm. Very Latino. At lunch, he ordered a lot of courses, he drank wine, it seemed like he had nowhere else he wanted to be—our lunch lasted three hours.

  I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of curiosity meetings. It’s the thing I look forward to, and often the thing I end up enjoying the most. For me, when I’m learning from someone who is right in front of me, it’s better than sex. It’s better than success.

  I had my first real curiosity conversation outside the entertainment business when I was twenty-three years old. I had been fired from the law clerk’s job at Warner Bros. (after fifteen months, they thought I was having too much fun, and delivering too few documents), and I was working for the producer Edgar Scherick (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Stepford Wives), trying to become a producer myself.

  I went to see F. Lee Bailey. Bailey was the most famous criminal trial attorney in the country at that point, having been the lawyer for Sam Sheppard and Patty Hearst.

  I had an idea for a TV series, what I was calling F. Lee Bailey’s Casebook of American Crimes—kind of a judicial version of Walt Disney Presents, using an expert to narrate the stories of these great cases.

  I really wanted to talk to Bailey. He was winning a lot of important cases. How did he pick them? Does he have a moral compass? How does he communicate in the courtroom—with facts? With legal points? With the morality of the case?

  I wanted to understand the distinction between a lawyer�
�s belief system and what he or she was good at. What was Bailey’s purpose in life, and how did that mesh with his talents?

  When I tracked him down, he was preparing for trial in a case in Las Cruces, New Mexico. For some reason he agreed to see me, so I flew out there.

  It was kind of crazy. He was staying in this tiny town, at this Western-themed road motel, a little run-down, with a kidney-shaped swimming pool. I had no idea what was going to happen. I knocked on the door, he let me in—he was alone, no assistants—and he told me to come in while he practiced his arguments.

  It was ungodly hot. I hung out on the couch in his room. He seemed to be creating his case right in front of me. After a little while, he sent me to the liquor store across the street to buy him a bottle of Johnny Walker Black.

  He had a drink. He was pacing back and forth in the room, getting more confident, ramping up his argument, sounding really smart. He had tons of information. I didn’t really understand it, but he was testing it out on me.

  Right there in the motel room, I could see that the guy was a force. Spellbinding.

  I flew home thinking he would be great at hosting this TV show. In those days, before reality TV and Nancy Grace and Greta Van Susteren, we were thinking of it as a miniseries. We did a deal with Bailey, we hired a writer, but in the end it never got made.

  Still, sitting there on the couch in that sticky motel room, in that small town in New Mexico, listening to Bailey build his case, I realized that there’s a huge distance between the noble reasons he probably went to law school—which were still there, deeply embedded in him—and what things were like at that moment.

  It was a whole new way to look at lawyers and their work.

  I never made a movie about F. Lee Bailey, of course, although his life is certainly rich enough for one. I didn’t even make a movie about lawyers until twenty years later, when I did Liar Liar, with Jim Carrey, about what happens to a lawyer who is forced to tell nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours straight.

  For me, the curiosity conversations are just the most obvious, the most visible example of my own curiosity. They are a kind of discipline, like the exercise routine, because you don’t get to talk to busy, interesting people unless you put steady effort into persuading them to see you.

  But the curiosity conversations are different from the workouts in this way: I hate exercising, I just like the results. I love the curiosity conversations, while they are happening. The results—a month or a decade later—are something I count on, but they are a bonus.

  In fact, of course, all I do is talk—I talk for a living. Actually, I try to listen for a living. Being a movie and TV producer means I live a version of the life John Calley showed me forty years ago. I have meetings and phone calls and conversations all day long. For me, every one of those is in fact a curiosity conversation. I don’t just use curiosity to get to meet famous people, or to find good scripts. I use curiosity to make sure movies get made—on budget, on time, and with the most powerful storytelling possible. I’ve discovered that even when you’re in charge, you are often much more effective asking questions than giving orders.

  • • •

  MY FIRST REAL, FULL-FLEDGED producing job was at Paramount Studios. I had an office on the backlot in what was called the Director’s Building. I was twenty-eight years old, and I had produced a couple of successful TV movies (including the first episodes of a twenty-hour miniseries on the Ten Commandments) and Paramount gave me a deal to find and produce movies.

  My office was in a corner on the third floor, with views of the walkways crisscrossing the lot. I would open the window (yes, in the 1970s and 1980s, office windows still opened) and I’d watch the powerful, famous, and glamorous walking by.

  I was curious about who was on the lot and who was working with whom. This was during the time when I made myself meet someone new in show business every single day. I liked to shout down from my window at the people walking by—Howard Koch, who cowrote Casablanca; Michael Eisner, who would become CEO of Disney; and Barry Diller, who was CEO of Paramount and Michael Eisner’s boss.

  One day Brandon Tartikoff was walking by. He was the president of NBC television, in the process of reviving the network with shows like Hill Street Blues and Cheers and Miami Vice. At thirty-two, he was already one of the most powerful people in show business.

  “Hey Brandon!” I yelled. “Up here!”

  He looked up at me and smiled. “Wow,” he said, “you must be in charge of the world from up there.”

  A few minutes later, my phone rang. It was my boss, Gary Nardino, the head of TV at Paramount. “Brian, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, screaming out your window at the president of NBC?”

  “I’m just connecting,” I said. “We’re just having fun.”

  “I don’t think we’re having that much fun,” Nardino said. “Cut it out.”

  Okay, not everyone was equally charmed by my style in those days. I was a little scared of Nardino, but not scared enough to stop shouting out the window.

  One day I saw Ron Howard walking by. Ron was already famous and successful from his years acting on The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, but he was trying to make the leap to directing. As he was walking by, I thought, I’m going to meet Ron Howard tomorrow.

  I didn’t shout out the window at him. I waited until he got back to his office and called him up. “Ron, it’s Brian Grazer,” I said. “I see you on the lot. I’m a producer here too. I think we have similar goals. Let’s meet and talk about it.”

  Ron was kind of shy, and he seemed surprised by my phone call. I don’t think he really wanted to meet me. I said, “It’ll be fun, it’ll be relaxed, let’s just do it.”

  A few days later, he did come by to talk. He was trying to become a mainstream movie director, and I was trying to become a mainstream movie producer. We were two guys trying to do something we’d never done before.

  The moment he walked into my office, he had this aura about him—a glow. After talking to him, I could tell my choices in life weren’t as thoughtful as his. He gave this sense of having a strong moral conscience. I know that sounds silly after just a single meeting, but it was my immediate impression. And it’s true. It’s the way Ron is today—and it’s the way he was thirty-five years ago.

  When he walked in, I asked him, “What do you want to be?”

  Ron not only wanted to direct, he wanted to direct an R-rated movie. He wanted to change the way people saw him. I had no idea if he could direct. But I immediately decided I was going to bet on him, and try to persuade him to work with me. I started pitching my movie ideas—Splash and Night Shift. He definitely didn’t want to do a movie about a man falling in love with a mermaid. But he liked the irreverence of Night Shift, an R-rated comedy about two guys who run a call-girl ring out of the New York City morgue. Not the movie you’d ever predict from the star of Happy Days.

  In fact, we made two movies together—Night Shift, and then, despite Ron’s initial reluctance, Splash, which became a huge hit. After working so well together on those two movies, we formed our company, Imagine Entertainment, and we’ve been artistic and business partners for the last thirty years. Not only could Ron direct, he’s become a master filmmaker. The movies we’ve done together include Parenthood, Backdraft, The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13, and the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind.

  My relationship with Ron has been the most important in my life, outside of my family. He’s my closest work colleague, and my best friend. I decided to meet Ron after seeing him from my window, and it was my emotional curiosity—my puzzling over what makes Ron Howard Ron Howard—that connected me to him. Again, at one of the most important moments of my life, following my curiosity opened the door.

  Ron and I are different in many ways—especially our temperaments. But we share a sense of standards, including how to tell a story, and most important, we agree on what makes a great story. In fact, if there’s anyone I know who is as genuinely curious as
I am, it’s Ron Howard. When we’re in meetings together, he asks as many questions as I do, and his questions are different, and they elicit different information.

  My curiosity conversations are something I’ve done with consistency and purpose for thirty-five years. You’ll see many examples of them throughout this book. These conversations are events or occasions when curiosity itself is the motivation.

  But in my everyday work and life, curiosity itself is not an “occasion.” It’s the opposite. Curiosity is something I use all the time. I’m always asking questions. For me, it’s an instinct. It’s also, very distinctly, a technique.

  I’m a boss—Ron Howard and I run Imagine together—but I’m not much of an order giver. My management style is to ask questions. If someone’s doing something I don’t understand, or don’t like, if someone who works for me is doing something unexpected, I start out asking questions. Being curious.

  I’m constantly meeting new people—sometimes at events, but often the new people are sitting on the couch in my office during the workday. I’m not particularly outgoing, but I have to act outgoing all the time. So how do I handle all these new people—sometimes a dozen in a single day—often sitting eagerly right in front of me, expecting me to run the conversation? I ask questions, of course. I let them do the talking. Being interested in someone isn’t that hard if you know even a little about them—and as I’ve discovered, people love talking about their work, what they know about, their journey.

  The entertainment business requires a huge amount of confidence. You have to believe in your own ideas for movies and TV shows, and you quickly discover that the safest answer for any studio or investor or executive to give is “no.” I’m often amazed that we get any movies made at all. But you can’t succeed in Hollywood if you’re discouraged by being told “no,” because regardless of the actual quality of your ideas, or even the quality of your track record, you’ll get told “no” all the time. You have to have the confidence to push forward. That’s true in all corners of the world—you have to have confidence if you work at a Silicon Valley tech company or treat patients at an inner-city hospital. My confidence comes from curiosity. Yes, asking questions builds confidence in your own ideas.