A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

  The richness and variety of four decades of movies and TV shows have depended on the curiosity conversations, but these meetings don’t create the movies and TV shows in the first place. Curiosity spurs me to chase my passions. It also keeps me plugged in to what’s going on in science, in music, in popular culture. It’s not just what’s happening that’s important; it’s the attitude, the mood that surrounds what’s happening.

  In 2002, when I produced the movie 8 Mile, about hip-hop music in Detroit, I was fifty-one years old. The movie had its spark when I saw Eminem perform one night on the Video Music Awards (the VMAs). I’d been paying attention to hip-hop musicians for two decades—I’d wanted to do a movie about the hip-hop world since the 1980s, when I met Chuck D from Public Enemy, Slick Rick, the Beastie Boys, and Russell Simmons, who founded the hip-hop label Def Jam. The idea for 8 Mile crystallized when music producer Jimmy Iovine brought Eminem to the office, and the three of us sat down to talk about what a hip-hop movie might look like. Eminem actually spent the first forty minutes not talking. Finally I said to him, “C’mon! Talk! Animate!” And he gave me one final glare, and then he told his life story, the harrowing tale of his upbringing in Detroit. That became the spine of the movie.

  About the farthest thing you can get from the tumultuous, energetic, angry, antiestablishment perspective of rap music is the buttoned-down, perfectly compartmentalized, analytical world of covert intelligence. Just as 8 Mile was being filmed, we were also launching the TV series 24, with Kiefer Sutherland playing counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer, whose job is to foil terrorist attacks against the United States. The first season of 24 was already in production when the real terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, hit the United States. (The premiere of the first episode was delayed a month out of sensitivity in the aftermath of the attacks.) I loved the idea of 24, and I connected with the sense of immediacy and urgency we tried to create in the show by unfurling it each week in real time, with an hour of the show being an hour in Jack Bauer’s life.

  I was ready for a show like 24—I’ve been absolutely captured by the world of intelligence and covert operations for decades. I’ve had curiosity conversations with two CIA directors (William Colby and Bill Casey), with agents from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6, and with a guy named Michael Scheuer, a former CIA operative who in 1996 helped set up and ran Alec Station, the secret CIA unit charged with tracking down Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks.6

  I’m amazed at the amount of information that people in intelligence—people at the top like Colby and Casey, and also people on the front lines like Scheuer—can accumulate and keep in their brains. They know a huge amount about how the world really works, and theirs is a hidden world. They know about events and relationships that are secret from the rest of us, they make decisions based on those secrets, often life-and-death decisions.

  So I had years of being curious about the intelligence world, and trying to understand the motivations of those involved, and their psychology, when the TV show 24 came along. I knew a lot about the world, and I knew it could be the setting for a compelling story.

  That’s the long-term benefit of the conversations: the things I’m curious about create a network of information and contacts and relationships for me (not unlike the networks of information intelligence officers map out). Then when the right story comes along, it resonates with me immediately. Curiosity meant I was open to Jack Bauer in 24, and also to the antithesis of Jack Bauer, Eminem’s character in 8 Mile, the young rapper Jimmy “B-Rabbitt” Smith.

  And after that conversation I had with Daryl Gates on April 30, 1992, as our city started to riot and burn—I recognized that personality again immediately when I got the chance to produce J. Edgar, the movie directed by Clint Eastwood about the career of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Leonardo DiCaprio played Hoover. Had I not spent time trying to understand Gates twenty years earlier, I’m not sure I would have fully grasped the reality of Hoover’s controlling paranoia, which Eastwood and DiCaprio infused so well into the mood, the acting, even the lighting of J. Edgar.

  It was, in fact, one of my earliest conversations that taught me in unforgettable terms that I needed to bring ideas to the table in order to make movies—a conversation from back at Warner Bros., when I was trying to meet at least one new person each day inside show business.

  I had been at Warner Bros. about a year as a legal clerk when I managed to talk my way into that meeting with Lew Wasserman. In terms of meetings, that was a stunning accomplishment—as big a deal for me at twenty-three as Jonas Salk and Edward Teller would be decades later, maybe bigger. Wasserman was the head of MCA, and he was critical in creating the modern movie business, including the idea of what we now think of as the event movie, the blockbuster. When I went to talk to him, in 1975, he had been at MCA since 1936. While he ran MCA, Wasserman had under contract movie greats like Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Judy Garland, Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jack Benny.7 MCA’s Universal Pictures had produced Jaws and would go on to produce E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park.

  On the day I went to see him, Lew Wasserman was undoubtedly the most powerful person in the movie business. I was undoubtedly the least powerful person. It had taken me months of patient cultivation to get onto Wasserman’s calendar, even for just ten minutes. I talked to his assistant Melody on a regular basis. At one point I said to her, “How about if I just come by and meet you?” And I did—just to put my face and personality with my voice.

  When I finally got to see Wasserman, I wasn’t nervous or particularly intimidated. I was excited. For me, it was an opportunity to get some wisdom from a man who, in fact, started out in the movie business one notch lower than me—as an usher in a movie theater. He had practically invented the movie business. Surely I could learn something from him.

  That day, Wasserman listened without much patience to me talk about my determination to become a movie producer. He cut me short.

  “Look buddy,” Wasserman said, “you somehow found your way into this office. You’re basically full of it. I can see that. If there are a dozen ways to become a producer—having money, knowing people who have money, having connections, having friends in the business, representing movie stars or writers—if there are a dozen ways to become a producer, you don’t have any of them.

  “You can’t buy anything—you can’t buy a script treatment. You can’t buy a book. You don’t know anybody. You certainly don’t represent anybody. You have no leverage. You really have nothing.

  “But the only way you can be anything in this business is if you own the material. You have to own it.”

  Then Wasserman reached over and grabbed a legal pad and a pencil from his desk. He slapped the pencil on the pad and handed them to me.

  “Here’s a yellow legal pad,” he said. “Here’s a number-two pencil. Put the pencil to the pad. Go write something. You have to bring the idea. Because you’ve got nothing else.”

  I was stunned, but also amazed. Wasserman was the first person to cut through the swirl of the movie business for me and say, Here’s what you, Brian Grazer, can do to become a movie producer, to rise above legal clerk.

  Write.

  Otherwise you’re all talk.

  I was with Wasserman no more than ten minutes, but it felt like an hour. That time with him changed my whole perspective on the movie business—it disrupted my very youthful point of view.

  What Wasserman was telling me was that since ideas were the currency in Hollywood, I had to get myself some ideas. And he was saying that since I didn’t have any influence or money, I had to rely on my own curiosity and imagination as the source of those ideas. My curiosity was worth more than money—because I didn’t have any money.

  I didn’t walk off with Wasserman’s yellow legal pad and pencil. I’m pretty sure I got nervous and set them back down in his office. But I
did just what he suggested: I got busy using my curiosity to create ideas.

  • • •

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be a great supermodel like Kate Moss, and how is that different from what it takes to be a great attorney like Gloria Allred?

  If we’re going to make movies that feel authentic, we have to be able to understand many corners of the world—places that operate much differently than Hollywood. As I’ve tried to show, I consciously use curiosity to disrupt my own point of view. I seek out people from other industries and other communities—physics, medicine, modeling, business, literature, law—and then I try to learn something about the skill and the personality it takes to perform in those worlds.

  But if disrupting the point of view of someone like me—a moviemaker, a storyteller—is useful, consider how powerful it is for people doing other kinds of work.

  You certainly want your doctor to be able to look at the world through your eyes—you want her to understand your symptoms, so she can give you what you need to feel better. You also want a doctor to be curious about new approaches to disease, and to care and healing. You want someone who is willing to listen to colleagues and researchers with views that may disrupt her comfortable, routine ways of taking care of patients. Medicine is full of disruptions that changed the typical ways doctors practiced it, starting with hand-washing and sanitation and coming all the way forward to laparoscopic and robotic surgery, saving or dramatically improving the lives of millions of people. Medicine is one of those arenas that steadily, sometimes radically, advances precisely because of curiosity, but you need a doctor willing to step outside her comfortable point of view in order to benefit from those improvements yourself.

  Being able to imagine the perspective of others is also a critical strategic tool for managing reality in a whole range of professions. We want our police detectives to be able to imagine what criminals will do next, we want our military commanders to be able to think five moves ahead of opposing armies, we want our basketball coaches to discern the game plans of their rivals and counter them. You can’t negotiate an international trade agreement without being able to understand what other nations need.

  In fact, the very best doctors, detectives, generals, coaches, and diplomats all share the skill of being able to think about the world from the perspective of their rivals. You can’t simply design your own strategy, then execute it and wait to see what happens so you can respond. You have to anticipate what’s going to happen—by first disrupting your own point of view.

  The same skill, in a completely different context, is what creates products that delight us. The specific genius of Steve Jobs lay in designing a computer operating system, and a music player, and a phone that anticipate how we’ll want to compute, and listen to music, and communicate—and providing what we want before we know it. The same is true of an easy-to-use dishwasher or TV remote control.

  You can always tell when you settle into the driver’s seat of a car you haven’t driven before whether the people who designed the dashboard and controls were the least bit curious about how their customers use their cars. The indispensable cup holder wasn’t created by the engineers of great Eurocars—BMW, Mercedes, Audi. The first car cup holders debuted when Dodge launched its Caravan in 1983.8

  With the iPhone, the cup holder, the easy-to-use dishwasher, the engineer has done something simple but often overlooked: he or she has asked questions. Who is going to use this product? What’s going to be happening while they are using it? How is that person different from me?

  Successful business people imagine themselves in their customers’ shoes. Like coaches or generals, they also imagine what their rivals are up to, so they can be ready for the competition.

  Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on instinct. Steve Jobs was famously disdainful of focus groups and consumer testing, preferring to refine products based on his own judgment.

  Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on routine. During all the decades he ran Wal-Mart—the largest company in the world—founder Sam Walton convened his top five hundred managers in a meeting every Saturday morning. The “Saturday Morning Meeting,” as it was called, had just two purposes: to review in detail the week’s sales, aisle-by-aisle through the store; and to ask the question: what is the competition doing that we should be paying attention to—or imitating? At every Saturday morning meeting, Walton asked his employees to stand up and talk about their visits, during the workweek, to competitors’ stores—to K-mart, Zayre, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Sears.

  Walton had strict rules for this part of the meeting: participants were only allowed to talk about what competitors were doing right. They were only allowed to discuss things they’d seen that were smart and well executed. Walton was basically curious about why customers would want to shop anywhere besides Wal-Mart. He didn’t care what his competitors were doing wrong—that couldn’t hurt him. But he didn’t want them to get more than a week’s advantage on doing something innovative—and he knew he wasn’t smart enough, alone, to imagine every possible way of running a store. Why try to guess your way into your competitors’ heads when you could simply walk into their stores?

  Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on systematic analysis that evolves into elaborate corporate research and development programs. It took H. J. Heinz almost three years to create the upside-down ketchup bottle—but the project got started when Heinz researchers followed consumers home and discovered they were storing their tall, thin, glass ketchup bottles precariously, upside down in their refrigerator doors, in an effort to get out the last servings of ketchup. The inverted ketchup bottle that Heinz invented as a result relies on an innovative silicone valve that seals the ketchup in, releases instantly when the bottle is squeezed, then closes immediately again when the squeezing stops. The man who invented that valve is a Michigan engineer named Paul Brown, who told a reporter, “I would pretend I was silicone and, if I was injected into a mold, what I would do.” H. J. Heinz was so determined to understand its customers, it followed them home from the grocery store. Engineer Paul Brown was so determined to solve a problem, he imagined himself as liquid silicone.9

  Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company behind Tide, Bounty, Pampers, CoverGirl, Charmin, and Crest, spends more than $1 million a day just on consumer research. P&G is so determined to understand how we clean our clothes, our kitchens, our hair, and our teeth that company researchers do 20,000 studies a year, of 5 million consumers, where the goal is principally to understand our behavior and habits. That’s why Tide laundry detergent now comes in little premeasured capsules—no pouring, no measuring, no muss. That’s why you can buy a Tide pen that will remove stains from your pants or your skirt, while you’re wearing them.10

  My approach to curiosity is a blend of the approaches we see in Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, and Procter & Gamble. I am, in fact, curious by instinct—I’m curious all the time. If someone walks into my office to talk about the music for a movie or about the revisions to a TV script, and that person is wearing really cool shoes, we’ll start out talking about shoes.

  I know that not everyone feels like they are naturally curious—or bold enough to ask about someone’s shoes. But here’s the secret: that doesn’t matter. You can use curiosity even if you don’t think of yourself as instinctively curious.

  As soon as I realized the power of curiosity to make my work life better, I consciously worked on making curiosity part of my routine. I turned it into a discipline. And then I made it a habit.

  But here’s an important distinction between me and even the hyper-analytical folks at Procter & Gamble. I actually use the word “curiosity” to talk about what I do, to describe it, and understand it. The rest of the world, though, almost never talks about this kind of inquiry using the word “curiosity.”

  Even when we’re being intently curious, in an organized, purposeful fashion, we don’t call it “curiosity.” The coach and his assistants who spend five days watching film to prepare for a g
ame aren’t considered “curious” about their opponent, even as they immerse themselves in the thinking, personality, and strategy of that team. Sports teams simply call it “watching film.” Political campaigns call their form of curiosity “opposition research.” Companies that spend enormous sums of money and expend enormous effort to understand their customers’ behavior and satisfy their needs aren’t “curious” about their customers. They use phrases like “consumer research” or say they’ve developed an “innovation process.” (If they’ve hired expensive consultants to help them be curious, they say they’ve developed a “strategic innovation process roadmap.”)

  In 2011, Harvard Business Review published a nine-page case study of Procter & Gamble’s innovation and creativity efforts. The story is coauthored by P&G’s chief technology officer, and it is literally as long as this chapter, to this point—5,000 words. The authors say they want to describe P&G’s effort to “systematize the serendipity that so often sparks new-business creation.” In Hollywood, we call that “lunch.” But “systematizing serendipity”—finding ways to uncover great ideas—is exactly what any smart organization tries to do. Sam Walton was “systematizing serendipity” in the Saturday morning meetings. I have “systematized serendipity” with my curiosity conversations.

  In the Harvard Business Review story on P&G, the word “innovation” appears sixty-five times. The word curiosity: not once.11

  That’s crazy. We simply don’t credit curiosity. We don’t even credit curiosity when we’re using it, describing it, and extolling it.

  The way we talk about this is revealing and important. You can’t understand, appreciate, and cultivate something if you don’t even acknowledge that it exists. How can we teach kids to be curious if we don’t use the word curiosity? How can we encourage curiosity at work if we don’t tell people to be curious?