A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

  Obama. McCain. Bush. One-on-one, within the same four hours. That’s about as amazing a lineup as one guy from outside Washington can have in a single afternoon inside the Beltway.

  It happened because President Bush invited us to screen the movie Cinderella Man at the White House just as it opened in theaters. Cinderella Man, directed by Ron Howard, was inspired by the true-life story of Depression-era boxer James J. Braddock, who was played by Russell Crowe, with Renée Zellweger starring as his wife and Paul Giamatti as his manager.

  I thought if I was going to go spend a couple days in Washington, it would be fun to see some people I was curious about.

  For me, McCain was an obvious choice. His appeal is elemental: John McCain is a real American hero. He was a pilot in Vietnam, he was shot down, captured, and tortured; he survived and went on to become an important political figure. Even in the North Vietnam prison camps where he was held, McCain’s fellow American prisoners regarded him as a leader. In the Senate and across the country in 2005, McCain had a reputation for smarts, independence, and determination.

  The psychology and the character of heroes fascinate me—almost every movie we’ve made is about what it means to be a hero in some way or another.

  But my meeting with McCain was oddly anti-climatic. We ended up talking not about substance but about oddly generic things—we talked about baseball, which I know very little about. We talked about the elderly.

  McCain’s presence was as impressive as his office. He was clearly in charge. He was polite to me, but I got the sense in the end that he wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. I was just a relatively well-known person on his schedule for an hour. One thing was clear: John McCain didn’t have to worry about time, because everybody around him was paying attention to the time.

  At one point in our conversation, his chief assistant came in and she said, “One minute, sir!” And I’m not kidding, sixty seconds later, that woman came back in and said, “You’re up!”

  Senator McCain rose. His jacket was already on, of course. He buttoned it as he stood, he shook my hand, and he was gone. A moment later, one of the aides pointed to the television in McCain’s office—and there he was, striding onto the Senate floor.

  • • •

  IN CONTRAST TO MY previous conversation, meeting with Barack Obama couldn’t have been more complete. Senator McCain had been in the Senate eighteen years, and just the last November he had been re-elected to his fourth term representing Arizona, with a stunning 77 percent of the vote. He was at the top of his influence, and rising.

  Barack Obama had been in the United States Senate five months. Just a year earlier, Obama was still an Illinois State Senator.

  But it was at the Democratic National Convention the previous summer—at the convention that nominated Senator John Kerry as the Democrat to challenge George W. Bush—that Barack Obama first came to the nation’s attention, and mine as well. That’s where Obama gave the galvanizing keynote address, with optimistic lines like “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s the United States of America.”

  That day I met him for the first time, he was the only black United States Senator. He was also way down on the seniority list—like in the nineties. His office was number ninety-nine—the second least desirable. To get to Obama’s office, we walked a long way, took the Capitol tram, then walked another long way.

  When I arrived at his office, I was struck first by the number of people coming and going. It was in a basement, the light wasn’t great. It was like some cross between a Saturday swap meet and the DMV. Obama’s office was totally open, people were just coming and going, taking advantage of the chance to visit their senator.

  There were a lot of fascinating people in the Senate I could have seen that afternoon, a lot of important people in Washington. Why had I asked for an appointment to see Obama, who was not even a significant senator, let alone a force on the national stage?

  When I had seen Obama speak on television, like everybody who watched him, I was captivated and intrigued. To me, his communication skills were in another category. His communication skills were like Muhammad Ali’s boxing skills. It seemed as if he were performing magic, rhetorical magic.

  I’m in the communication business. My job is to make words into images, and have those images ignite emotions in the audience, emotions that are more forceful than the original words.

  Obama, when I saw him speak, in the same way one might have seen Ali punch, was doing something beyond any other speaker I’d seen. He was igniting emotions with words—the same way an image could.

  Obama’s office was very humble, but he was very welcoming—and he was totally present. None of the distraction you often find with busy, important people who are with you, yet constantly checking the clock or their email, their minds in four other places at once. He’s tall and wiry, and we sat on couches that were catty-corner—he greeted me, then he folded himself onto the couch with acrobatic fluidity, like an athlete would. He seemed completely relaxed, and totally comfortable with himself.

  We talked about our families, we talked about work—it was more of a personal conversation than a policy conversation. While we talked, energetic young people—his staff—were constantly coming and going from the office, but he was undistracted.

  Obama conveyed a real sense of confidence. He was in office number ninety-nine, but he was completely self-assured. Obama was just a year out of the Illinois State House, and five months into the Senate, and not even four years later he would be President of the United States.

  As I was leaving Senate office number ninety-nine, I bumped into Jon Favreau, the talented writer who was working for Obama as a speechwriter. They had met at the Democratic National Convention, where Obama gave the keynote.

  “If you ever decide to get out of politics,” I said to Favreau half-jokingly, “and you want to work in Hollywood, give me a call. You’re awesome.”

  “Thanks so much,” said Favreau, smiling. “But I think he’s going to want me.”

  • • •

  I HADN’T TOLD Senator McCain and Senator Obama that I was going to see the other one. But I had told them both I was going to the White House that evening to screen Cinderella Man for President George W. Bush.

  I’d met President Bill Clinton several times, and I was very intrigued by President Bush, and curious to see his style. President Bush’s body language that evening was very different. When he’s talking to you, it isn’t face-to-face, or at least it wasn’t when he spoke to me.

  President Bush approached me, and we were introduced; he was very warm, very unpretentious. Then, as we started to talk, he sort of moved to my side, he put his arm around me—that’s how he likes to talk, like two buddies, shoulder-to-shoulder. I liked that.

  He did another thing that caught my attention. As the pre-movie food was being served, President Bush got a tray for himself, put his food on it, and then sat down at a table all alone. He didn’t seem to need his folks around him. That table filled up, of course. But I thought that was pretty impressive. President Bush stayed for the whole movie.

  The only disappointing part of the evening had to do with a small gift I had for President Bush. I brought him a ball cap from the TV show Friday Night Lights. President Bush grew up in Odessa, Texas, of course, and I thought he would get a kick out of it.

  So I was standing in line to go through security at the White House gate, and I was so excited about the hat, so I showed it to the security officers. “The president is from Odessa, Texas, and I brought him this hat from Friday Night Lights as a gift,” I said, “I’m going to give it to him.”

  I thought that would make everyone smile.

  Boy was I wrong. They looked at me. They looked at the hat. They took the hat from me. They put it through a couple of different machines. A couple more people examined it, inside and out.

  Then someone nodded and said to me, “You won’t be handing the hat to the president. We’
ll give the hat to the president for you.”

  I would have been better off not saying anything, and just wearing the hat into the White House on my own head.

  I never saw the hat again. I did tell President Bush about it—and I hope at some point someone handed it to him.

  The Gloved One

  In the early 1990s, I routinely tried to sit down with Michael Jackson. We would call his office a couple of times a year and ask for a meeting, invite him over. He wasn’t interested.

  Then, all of a sudden, he said yes. It wasn’t clear why, although this was the period we were doing movies like Parenthood and Kindergarten Cop and My Girl, which were family-friendly, and I had heard that Jackson was interested in doing movies like that himself.

  When the day arrived, his advance people came up to the office first. There was a lot of excitement—as you might imagine—and then Jackson appeared.

  Jackson was already known at that point for those shy, slightly unusual gestures of his. But there was none of that. He seemed like a totally normal person—although he was wearing the gloves, the white gloves.

  I was a Michael Jackson fan, of course—you couldn’t follow music in America in the 1970s and 1980s and not be a fan of Michael Jackson. But I wasn’t a crazed fan—so I wasn’t particularly nervous. I respected Jackson, I thought he was an amazing talent.

  He was about five feet nine inches tall—he was thin, but you could tell he was strong. He stepped into my office and sat down.

  “What a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “This is great.”

  He was acting normally, so I decided to treat him normally. I had the thought: I’m going to ask him to take off his gloves. Anyone normal coming in from outside would take off their gloves, right?

  It could have been the end of the conversation right there.

  But I didn’t hesitate. I said, “Would you mind taking off your gloves?”

  And he did. Simple as that. I thought, He took off the gloves—we’re going to be okay.

  Michael Jackson was clearly not much of a small-talk person. And to be honest, I didn’t know exactly what to talk to him about. I certainly didn’t want to bore him.

  I asked, “How do you create music?”

  And he immediately started to talk about how he creates music—how he composes it, how he performs it, all in a way that was almost scientific.

  In fact, his whole manner transformed. When we first started talking, he had that high, slightly childish voice people know. But as soon as he started to talk about making music, even his voice changed, and he became another person—it was like a master class, like a professor from Julliard was talking. Melody, lyrics, what the mixing engineer does. It blew my mind.

  We did talk a little bit about movies—Jackson had already done amazing videos, including the video for Thriller, which was directed by John Landis. It was a curiosity conversation with a touch of business about it.

  Although I never met him again, there was nothing odd or uncomfortable about the hour we spent together. I came away with a very different impression of Michael Jackson. It made me feel like he wasn’t so much a weird guy, or a collection of weird affectations—he was just someone who struggled with fame. The behavior was somehow environmental. I was so struck by the fact that I could talk to him like an adult, and he talked back like an adult.

  I could ask him to take off the gloves, and he’d take off the gloves.

  The Missed Opportunity

  In some interesting ways, Andy Warhol had a lot in common with Michael Jackson. They both had a distinctive physical presence, a physical presence that each had consciously crafted for himself. They both did such impressive, influential work that simply saying either name conjures a whole style, a whole era. And they were both considered mysterious, enigmatic, almost impenetrable.

  I went to meet Andy Warhol in the early 1980s, when I was visiting New York City, during a period when I had gotten the chance to meet a lot of artists, including David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Salvador Dalí, and Roy Lichtenstein. By then, Andy Warhol had become an institution—he did the famous Campbell’s soup can silk screens in 1962. I met him at his studio, The Factory. He was wearing his classic black turtleneck.

  Two things were interesting to me about Warhol. The first is that he wasn’t a brilliant technical artist—he didn’t have the skills of, say, Roy Lichtenstein, and he wasn’t trying to gain them. For him, the message of the art, the statement, was the most important thing.

  And the second thing that was so striking when I met him in person was his absolute refusal to intellectualize his work. He almost didn’t want to talk about it. He wasn’t just understated. Every question brought the absolute simplest answer.

  “Why did you do the portraits of Marilyn Monroe?” I asked.

  “I like her,” Warhol said.

  We were strolling through The Factory, and there were silk screens everywhere, both finished and in progress.

  “Why would you do your art on silk screens?” I asked.

  “So we can make many of them,” he said. Just like that—never an elaborate explanation.

  Warhol had a reputation for being detached. During that visit to his studio, he was totally with me. He was a little trippy, in that sixties way. “Hey man, let’s go over here,” he would say.

  And he was a little hard to talk to. But he was easy to hang out with.

  I was back in New York City just a few weeks later, and I returned for a second visit.

  He told me, “I’m going to go out to Los Angeles and do a Love Boat episode.” I thought to myself, What’s he talking about? Andy Warhol on The Love Boat—with Captain Stubing and Julie McCoy? I couldn’t picture it. I thought he was kidding.

  “I’m going to act in an episode of The Love Boat,” Warhol said. I didn’t realize he’d done those kinds of pop culture appearances before. He liked to surprise people. And he did it: He was on a Love Boat episode broadcast October 12, 1985, along with Milton Berle and Andy Griffith.

  At that second meeting, Warhol said to me, “I didn’t realize your partner is Ron Howard. He’s Richie Cunningham!”

  Warhol had an idea.

  “I would love to take a picture of Ron Howard, and do two paintings—a before and an after. I want to take a picture of Ron Howard now, with his handlebar mustache, then I want to shave off the mustache, and I’ll do another picture.

  “Two of them. One with the mustache. One with no mustache. Before and after.”

  I thought immediately of Warhol’s dual portraits of Elvis. But I didn’t mention that. I told Warhol I would talk to Ron about it.

  I got back to LA and I said to Ron, “Andy Warhol wants to do this thing with you. He wants to do portraits of Ron Howard, before and after. He wants to shave off your mustache.” I was pretty excited.

  Ron wasn’t excited, he was more baffled than anything. “You know, Brian, I don’t really want to shave off my mustache,” he said. “It’s part of my identity now. I’m trying to get out of that ‘American boy’ identity.”

  Okay. I could understand that. Kind of. Not everybody has Andy Warhol asking to do portraits of them, of course. But I also knew how important Ron Howard’s grown-up identity was to him—how important it’s been to all of us, in fact.

  So that was the end of Ron Howard, Before and After. Or so I thought.

  Many years later, our movie Cry-Baby opened. As had become our habit, Ron Howard and I went to the Westwood Avco theater in Los Angeles on opening night to gauge the popularity of Cry-Baby firsthand. The Avco was the theater where there had been lines around the block for Splash. That Friday, to see Cry-Baby, there were seven people in a theater for five hundred.

  Ron and I went home, had a couple of bottles of red wine, and watched Drugstore Cowboy to soften the disappointment. Ron had to catch a red-eye flight from LAX back east, so around 10 p.m. he headed out to the airport.

  Before he flew out, he called me. He was a little buzzy. He said, “Brian, I want you to know, I just
went in the men’s room here at the airport and shaved off my mustache.”

  And without thinking about it, I said, “Oh my God, you could have done that for Andy Warhol! Then we could have had two portraits of Ron Howard each worth fifty million.”

  These days, of course, Ron’s mustache—in fact his full beard—is back. Ron is an icon without a Warhol silk screen.

  Curiosity as Art

  You probably know Jeff Koons’s art. It’s fun, it’s outsized. He’s done huge stainless steel sculptures in the shape of the balloon dogs that clowns make. He rendered an inflatable toy rabbit in the same vivid stainless steel, and it became so well-known that it was reproduced as a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  To me, Koons’s work is both exuberant and playful. It seems simple, too. But underneath is his rich understanding of history, of art theory.

  I first met Jeff Koons twenty years ago, in the early 1990s. As with Warhol, I went to Koons’s studio in New York. When you walk into his studio, knowing about the rabbit and the balloon dog, you think, I could do this. When you walk out after having spent a couple hours with Koons, you think, No one could duplicate what he’s doing.

  Although he worked on Wall Street as a commodities broker as a young man, Koons always wanted to be an artist. But he’s not the kind of artist who bangs around his studio in blue jeans. He’s more apt to dress like one of the great directors of the forties or fifties—like George Cukor or Cecil B. DeMille. In slacks and a nice shirt, fashionable and elegant.

  He’s a study in contrasts. Vocally, he’s not loud. But his art and his actions are loud. For instance, in 1991, he married for the first time—to the famous Italian porn actress La Cicciolina. Then they did art together—including pictures in which they both appear naked, or mostly naked.

  Koons is an unpretentious man, but he’s willing to do risky, even shocking things on behalf of his art. And unlike Warhol, Koons is happy to talk to you about the sources of his art as well as its intellectual principles and historical perspective translated into visual form.