by Brian Grazer
What I think is amazing is that, despite my struggle with reading, two vital things survived: the joy I find in learning, and my passion for stories. I was the kid who wanted nothing more than to avoid questions in the classroom, and now I relish the chance to be an eager student, to ask questions of people who are themselves discovering the answers.
I was the kid who didn’t have the pleasure of losing himself in all those great growing-up classics—James and the Giant Peach, Charlotte’s Web, Dune, A Wrinkle in Time, The Catcher in the Rye—but now I spend my life helping create exactly those kinds of completely absorbing stories, just on screen.
I love good stories, I just like them best the way they were originally discovered—told out loud. That’s why the curiosity conversations have been so important to me, and also so much fun. I’ve described some of the dramatic ones, but most of the conversations have taken place in my office. Some of them have been like reading a story from the front page of the Wall Street Journal, perfectly crystallizing something in a way I’ll never forget.
I’ve always been interested in manners and etiquette: What’s the right way to behave, what’s the right way to treat people? Why does it matter who opens the door and where the silverware sits on the table?
I invited Letitia Baldrige in to talk—the legendary expert on protocol of every kind who first became famous as social secretary for Jacqueline Kennedy, helping turn the Kennedy White House into a center of culture and the arts. Baldrige had left Tiffany & Co. to go to work at the White House, and she went on to write a newspaper column and many books on modern manners. She was tall—much taller than I am—and already silver-haired when she came to talk. She entered my office with elegant authority.
Letitia Baldrige gave me an understanding of the difference between “manners” and “etiquette”—something I had never quite grasped before.
Manners are really the basis for how we treat other people—manners are born out of compassion, empathy, the “golden rule.” Manners are, quite simply, making people feel welcome, comfortable, and respected.
Etiquette is the set of techniques you use to have great manners. Etiquette is the by-product. The way you invite someone to an event makes a difference. The way you greet people, the way you introduce them to people already present, the way you pull a chair out for someone.
Manners are the way you want to behave, and the way you want to make people feel. Etiquette is the granularization of that desire to treat people with grace and warmth.
I love that distinction. For me, it illuminates both manners and etiquette, making them more understandable and more practical. I use a little bit of what Letitia Baldrige taught me every day. You open the car door for your partner not because she can’t open the door herself, but because you love her. You arrange the silverware on the table a certain way because that gives your guests comfort and predictability so they can be more relaxed at dinner.
And as Letitia told me, the feeling you’re trying to convey—the hospitality, the warmth—is much more important than following any particular rule. You can follow the rules, but if you do it with a disdainful attitude, you’re being rude, despite having “perfect” etiquette.
Not every conversation was so practically useful. One of my favorites was with someone who, at first glance, would seem to be the exact opposite of etiquette expert Letitia Baldrige: Sheldon Glashow, the Harvard physicist who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979 when he was forty-six years old, for research he did when he was twenty-eight.
We flew Glashow out to Los Angeles from Cambridge. He came to the office one morning, and he seemed as delighted at the novelty of meeting someone with influence in the movie business as I was to meet someone of his stature from the world of science.
When he came to visit, in 2004, he was seventy-two, one of the wise men of modern particle physics. Glashow’s pioneering work in physics involved figuring out that what physicists thought were the four basic forces of nature might actually be three forces—he helped “unify” the weak force and the electromagnetic force. (The other two are the strong force and gravity.)
I enjoy trying to wrap my brain around particle physics. I like it the same way some people like to understand the complexities of geology or currency trading or poker. It’s an arcane world all its own, with a distinct language and cast of characters—particle physics can literally seem like a different universe. And yet, it’s the universe we live in. We’re all made up of quarks and hadrons and electroweak forces.
Walking into my office, Glashow couldn’t have been more enthusiastic or open. I’m a layman, but he was happy to talk me through the science of where particle physics is today. He has the demeanor of your favorite, patient professor. If you don’t quite understand something, he’ll try explaining it in a different way.
He’s a teacher as well as a scientist. The morning Glashow won the Nobel Prize, he had to cancel his 10 a.m. class—which was on particle physics—for Harvard undergraduates.
Glashow was curious about the movie business. He clearly likes movies. He’d helped Matt Damon and Ben Affleck get the math right for Good Will Hunting (he’s thanked in the credits).
Glashow was the opposite of Edward Teller. He welcomed the chance to talk—he did give up two days to make time to visit—and he was interested in just about everything. We typically put the conversations on the day’s schedule for an hour or two. Shelly Glashow and I talked for four hours, and it just flew by. The main feeling I had when I walked Dr. Glashow out of the office was, I’d like to talk to this man again.
A newspaper or magazine story, in the hands of a talented reporter, could have captured much of what I got from Letitia Baldrige and Sheldon Glashow. But I would have been working so hard at the reading, I think I would have missed the fun.
I understand every time that my curiosity conversations are a remarkable privilege—most people don’t have a life that allows them to call people and invite them in to talk. But I get something special out of this kind of curiosity that isn’t unique to me, or to this particular setting: meeting people in person is totally different from seeing them on TV, or reading about them. That’s not just true for me. The vividness of someone’s personality and energy really only comes alive when you shake hands and look them in the eye. When you hear them tell a story. That has a real emotional power for me, and a real staying power. It’s learning without being taught, it’s learning through storytelling.
That kind of direct, in-person curiosity allows you to be surprised. Both Baldrige and Glashow were surprising—much different than I might have imagined in advance.
Baldrige was focused on manners, not etiquette. For all her experience at the highest levels of what you might call precision protocol—from Tiffany to state dinners at the White House—she really just wanted people to treat each other well. She was the legendary arbiter of the rules, but for her, manners weren’t about the rules, they were about grace and hospitality.
Glashow works in an area of science that is so arcane, it requires as many years of school after high school graduation as before, just to get to the point where you can start making fresh progress. And yet he was the opposite of inaccessible and insular. It was refreshing to meet a brilliant theoretical physicist who wasn’t at all the cliché of the distracted scientist. He was completely engaged in the wider world.
My point is that you don’t actually need to be sitting down, by appointment, with the social secretary of the White House or the Nobel Prize–winning physicist to have that kind of experience. When someone new joins your company, when you’re standing on the sidelines at your son’s soccer game alongside the other parents, when you’re on an airplane seated next to a stranger, or attending a big industry conference, all these people around you have tales to tell. It’s worth giving yourself the chance to be surprised.
• • •
I MET CONDOLEEZZA RICE at a dinner party in Hollywood. I’d always been intrigued by her. She’s a classical pianist. She w
as a professor of political science at Stanford University, and then the university’s provost—the chief academic officer. And of course she was President George W. Bush’s national security advisor for four years and secretary of state for four years. She has remarkable presence—given her level of responsibility, she always appears composed, even calm. She also conveys a sense of being in the know. To me, she almost seemed to have superpowers.
The dinner where I met her was in 2009, not long after she had stepped down as secretary of state. She was sitting just across from me.
Condi still had security shadowing her, but she was very easy to talk to. One thing you see up close that you never saw when she was speaking on TV is the sparkle in her eyes. As the dinner was breaking up, I said to her, “Can I call you? Maybe you’ll have lunch with me?”
She smiled and said, “Sure.”
Not long after, we had lunch at E Baldi, on Cañon Drive, a well-known Hollywood restaurant. She arrived in a car with her security detail, and we sat in the only booth in the small restaurant.
Condi was relaxed and gracious, but I think I was more curious about her than she was about me.
I told her about a movie we were getting ready to make. It was called Cartel, about a man bent on revenge against the Mexican drug cartels after they brutally murder his wife. The movie was set in Mexico, the seat of so much cartel violence, and we were going to film it in Mexico, just a couple of months away. We originally had Sean Penn set to star; when he couldn’t do it, we got Josh Brolin for the lead. I was worried about filming a movie sharply critical of the cartels, in the country where they were beheading judges.
Condi listened. I told her that studio security had assessed the areas where we wanted to film in Mexico and told us it was fine. She looked at me skeptically. “I don’t think it’s safe to do that,” she said.
Cartel was at a crossroads. We had spent money. The studio thought it was safe. But what I read in the newspapers every day suggested something different. The issue of safety nagged at me. I thought, Would I personally travel to the set of a cartel movie in Mexico? Answering honestly, I thought I wouldn’t. And if I wouldn’t go, how could I be comfortable sending anyone else? I really needed another informed point of view.
Condi followed up after our lunch. She had done some checking and she said, “No. It’s not safe to do what you’re planning.”
That was the final straw, for me and the studio. We shut the movie down. We never took it to Mexico, it never got made. Looking back, I worry someone might have gotten killed. I’ve learned to pay attention to those instincts, to those occasional nagging doubts, and I’ve learned to make sure we’re curious enough to find really expert opinion when there’s a big risk. I think making a movie about drug cartels, in the nation where they were operating, could have been a disaster.
I wouldn’t be very good at my job without curiosity. It’s infused into every step of the process now. But think about the number of people who should also say that, in professions we don’t typically think of as requiring inquisitiveness—at least as the primary skill—the way we expect it in a doctor or a detective.
A good financial planner needs to know the markets and the way to arrange money for retirement, but he also should be curious.
A good real estate agent needs to know the market, the houses available, the houses that might become available, but should also be curious about her clients.
A city planner needs to be curious, and an advertising executive, a housekeeper, a fitness trainer, a car mechanic, a good hairstylist all need to be curious as well.
And in every case, the curiosity is all about the story. What’s the story of your life, and how are you hoping that money or a new house or a new hairstyle will help you shape that story, and help you tell it?
This kind of curiosity seems so routine that we shouldn’t even need to talk about it. I think it used to be. But in a world where so many of our basic interactions are structured and scripted—we’re talking to “customer service” on an 800 number, we’re trying to be heard over the speaker in the drive-through lane, we’re checking into a hotel where the hospitality is “trained”—curiosity has been strangled.
It’s considered a wild card.
But that’s exactly wrong. If you think about a good hairstylist, the job itself requires skill at understanding hair, at understanding the shapes of people’s heads, the quality of their hair; and it has a spritz of creativity and individualism. But it’s also got an important human element. As a customer, you want a stylist who is interested in you, who asks what your hair means to you, and who pays attention to how you want to look and feel when you stand up from the chair. You also want a stylist who talks to you, who asks the kinds of questions that keep both of you engaged and entertained while your hair is being washed and cut and dried. (Or a stylist who is perceptive enough to realize you don’t want to talk at all.)
The great thing is that this perfectly routine sort of curiosity works for both the stylist and the customer. The customer gets the haircut she’s hoping for, she gets hair that helps her present her best self, that helps her tell her story, and she also gets a fun, relaxing experience. The stylist avoids falling into a rut. She learns something about her customer, and also about how the world works—every customer in the styling chair is a chance for a miniature curiosity conversation. She’s giving the best haircuts she can give while creating happy and loyal customers and having an entertaining work life.
Going to the hair salon is not like sitting down with an architect to plan the redesign of office space at your company, or to plan the addition to your house. But curiosity and storytelling add just a little bit of fun and distinctiveness—and occasionally learning and insight—to what can otherwise become routine.
If manners are the lubricant that lets us all get along, curiosity is the shot of Tabasco that adds some spice, wakes us up, creates connection, and puts meaning into almost any encounter.
CHAPTER FOUR
Curiosity as a Superhero Power
* * *
“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”
—James Stephens1
I WAS SITTING IN THE bar at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City, facing Central Park, with a man with the best muttonchop sideburns since President Martin Van Buren. I was having drinks with Isaac Asimov, the author who helped bring science and science fiction alive for a whole generation of Americans.
It was 1986, the movie Splash had come out and broken through, and I was using that success to make the curiosity conversations as ambitious as possible.
Isaac Asimov was a legend, of course. At the time we met, he had written more than 300 books. By the time he died, in 1992, that number had grown to 477. Asimov’s writing is so clear and accessible—rendering all kinds of complicated topics understandable—that it’s easy to overlook how smart he was. Although no one ever called him “Dr. Asimov,” he had a PhD in chemistry from Columbia, and before he was able to support himself by writing, he was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University’s medical school.
Most people know Asimov as a storyteller and a visionary, a man who was able to look at how science and human beings interacted and imagine the future, the author of I, Robot and The Foundation Trilogy. But Asimov actually wrote more nonfiction books than fiction. He wrote seven books about mathematics, he wrote sixty-eight books on astronomy, he wrote a biochemistry textbook, he wrote books titled Photosynthesis and The Neutrino: Ghost Particle of the Atom. He wrote literary guides to the Bible (two volumes), Shakespeare, and Paradise Lost. He had a boy’s mischievous love of jokes and wrote eight books or collections of humor, including Lecherous Limericks, More Lecherous Limericks, and Still More Lecherous Limericks. In the last decade of his life, Asimov wrote fifteen or more books a year. He was writing books faster than most people can read them—including me.2
Asimov was a polymath, an autodidact, and a genius. And he was an instinctive storyteller. Who wouldn’t
want to sit down with him for an hour?
Isaac Asimov met me at the Ritz-Carlton with his second wife, Janet Jeppson Asimov, a psychiatrist with degrees from Stanford and NYU. I found her more intimidating than I found him—Isaac was relaxed, his wife was more on guard. She was clearly the boss, or at least his protector.
Both Isaac and Janet ordered ginger ale.
We started to chat. Apparently, it wasn’t going that well, although I didn’t quite realize how poorly it was going. After only ten minutes—the Asimovs hadn’t even finished their ginger ales—Janet Asimov abruptly interrupted.
“You clearly don’t know my husband’s work well enough to have this conversation,” she said, rising from the table. “This is a waste of his time. We’re leaving. C’mon, Isaac.”
And that was it. They got up and left me sitting alone at the table, mouth half-open in astonishment.
I had arranged a meeting with one of the most interesting, inventive, and prolific storytellers of our time, and I had managed to bore him (or, at least, bore his watchful wife) so thoroughly in just ten minutes that they couldn’t bear it and had to flee the black hole of my dullness.3
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much like I had been slapped—without actually having been touched—in my life.
Here’s the thing: Janet Asimov was right.
It took me a few months to get over the sting of them walking out. But she had caught me, and she had called me on it. I wasn’t prepared well enough to talk to Isaac Asimov. He had agreed to take an hour to sit down with me—for him, that was a sacrifice of a whole book chapter—but I hadn’t respected him in turn. I hadn’t taken the time to learn enough about him, or to read, say, I, Robot from start to finish.
Going into that meeting, I was scared of Isaac Asimov. I was worried about exactly what ended up happening: I was afraid of not knowing enough to have a good conversation with Asimov. But I hadn’t been smart enough to harness that fear to curiosity.
