A Curious Mind

by Brian Grazer

  I never made those mistakes again.

  I’ve learned to rely on curiosity in two really important ways: first, I use curiosity to fight fear.

  I have a whole bunch of relatively ordinary fears.

  I have a fear of public speaking.

  I don’t really love big social settings where I might not have a good time, where I might end up kind of trapped, or where I might not be as entertaining as someone thinks I should be.

  Now, take a minute to consider this list. Given my fears, I sure have picked the wrong profession. Half my life—half my work life—requires me to go somewhere, give a talk, mingle in large social settings with important people who I kind of know, but not really.

  Throw in that I’m a little scared of powerful people, and a little intimidated by intellectuals—exactly the kind of people with whom I want to have curiosity conversations—and it can seem like I’ve created a life that’s perfectly designed to make me anxious from the moment I open my eyes in the morning.

  In addition to using curiosity to tackle my fears, I use curiosity to instill confidence—in my ideas, in my decisions, in my vision, in myself. Hollywood, as I’ve mentioned, is the land of “no.” Instead of spelling out the word H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in the famous sign in the Hollywood Hills, they could have spelled out: N-O-N-O-N-O-N-O!

  An aspiring filmmaker was in my office recently for a meeting, and he said to me, “Oh, you’re cool. No one ever says ‘no’ to you.”

  That’s silly. Everybody says “no” to me. Everybody still says “no” to me. It’s just the opposite of what it looks like.

  Sure, people like me. People say “yes” to meetings.

  People say, “Please come to dinner.” Sometimes they say, “Please come on this cool trip with me”—and that’s flattering.

  But if I want to do something creative, if I want to do something edgy—a TV series about a medieval executioner, for instance, that I helped push forward in 2014, or a movie about the impact of James Brown on the music business in the United States, which came out in the summer of 2014, people say “no.” These days, they just smile and put their arm around my shoulder when they do.

  You have to learn to beat the “no.”

  Everybody in Hollywood has to beat the “no”—and if you write code in Silicon Valley, or if you design cars in Detroit, if you manage hedge funds in Lower Manhattan, you also have to learn to beat the “no.”

  Some people here charm their way around the “no.”

  Some people cajole their way around it, some people reason their way around it, some people whine their way around it.

  If I need support on a project, I don’t want to cajole or charm or wheedle anyone into it. I want them to have the same enthusiasm and commitment I feel. I don’t want to pull someone in against his or her judgment. I want them to see the idea, the movie, the characters with the kind of excitement that carries them through the tough parts of any project.

  I use curiosity to beat the “no,” I use curiosity to figure out how to get to “yes.” But not quite in the way you would imagine.

  • • •

  I DIDN’T TURN INTO a full-fledged producer with the first movie Ron Howard and I made—Night Shift. That movie was clever, sexy, and easy to explain. It had a quick hook. You could instantly see the comic possibilities. In fact, Night Shift is based on a real story I read in the back pages of the New York Times in the summer of 1976.4

  It was the second movie Ron and I made together, Splash, that taught me what producers actually did in Hollywood. Their job is to come up with the vision of the story, and to find the financing and cast to make the movie, to protect the quality of the movie as it moves along. But first and foremost, the job of the producer is to get the movie made.

  The kernel of Splash, what I call the “ignition point” for the story, is simple: what happens when a mermaid comes out of the ocean onto dry land?

  What would her impressions be, what would her life be like? What would happen if I got to meet that mermaid? What would it take to win her love—what would she have to give up? What would a man wooing her have to give up?

  I wrote the first script for Splash myself (I called it Wet to start with).

  The mermaid idea came to me before the idea for Night Shift, while I was working as a producer of TV movies and miniseries (like Zuma Beach and the Ten Commandments series of TV movies). I was following the advice that Lew Wasserman gave me, to come up with ideas, something I could own, putting the pencil to the yellow legal pad. I was like any other twenty-eight-year-old man in the movie business in LA in the 1970s: I was enthralled with California women. I was always trying to understand them. It’s not too far a leap from these bikini-clad women on the beach to a mermaid on the beach.

  Except for this: no one wanted a movie about a mermaid.

  No studio was interested, no director was interested.

  Everybody said no.

  Even Ron Howard didn’t want to direct a movie about a mermaid. He said no more than once.

  Hollywood is fundamentally a risk-averse town—we’re always looking for the sure thing. That’s why we have movies with four sequels, even six sequels.

  No one seemed to understand a movie about a mermaid. Where was the previously successful mermaid movie, anyway?

  Eventually two things happened.

  First, I listened to the “no.” There was information in the resistance that I had to be curious about.

  I would say, “It’s a movie about a mermaid, coming onto land. She meets a boy. It’s funny!” That didn’t work.

  I would say, “It’s a movie about a mermaid, coming onto land. She meets a boy. It’s kind of a fantasy, you know?” They weren’t buying it.

  I needed to understand what people were saying no to. Were they saying no to a comedy? Were they saying no to a mermaid fantasy? Were they saying no to me—to Brian Grazer?

  It turned out that I first wrote and pitched Splash too much from the perspective of the mermaid.

  I thought mermaids were really intriguing, really alluring (and I’m in good company—see, for instance, Hans Christian Andersen’s legendary The Little Mermaid). Hollywood studio executives just seemed puzzled. They were saying no to the mermaid.

  So I thought, Okay, this isn’t a mermaid movie—it’s a love story! It’s a romantic comedy with a mermaid as the girl. I recontextualized the movie. Same idea, different framework. I started pitching a movie that was a love story, between a man and a mermaid, with a little comedy thrown in.

  The answer was still no, but a little less emphatic. You could see that at least executives were tickled by the idea of a love story involving a mermaid.

  Anthea Sylbert, whose job was to buy movies for United Artists, was one of the people to whom I pitched Splash, more than once.

  “I throw you out the door, you come back in the window,” she told me with exasperation one day. “I throw you out the window, you come back down the chimney. The answer is no! I don’t want this mermaid movie!”

  I made a pest of myself. But as Anthea Sylbert recently told me, “You were a pest, but not like a mosquito. More like an overactive five-year-old. Impish. I kind of wanted to tell you to go sit in a corner and be quiet.”

  Despite saying no, Anthea was intrigued by the mermaid. “I’ve always been a sucker for mythology, for fables, for a fairy-tale kind of thing,” she said. In fact, it wasn’t too hard to make the mermaid movie into a mermaid-man love story, and from that into a mermaid-man-love-story-fairy-tale.

  Anthea got me some money for a more polished script, and helped hire novelist and screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman to rework my original version.

  And I worked a little curiosity on Anthea too. She wanted rules for the mermaid.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. “Why do we need rules?” I asked.

  She wanted it clear how the mermaid behaved in the ocean, and how she behaved on land (what happened to the tail, for instance?). She wanted the audience to
be in on the rules.

  “Why?” I asked again.

  She thought it would add to both the fun and the fairy-tale element.

  Then, out of nowhere, a second mermaid movie popped up—this one to be written by the legendary screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown, Shampoo), directed by Herbert Ross (Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Turning Point), and it was going to star Warren Beatty and Jessica Lange.

  One mermaid movie was totally uninteresting to Hollywood.

  Two mermaid movies was one mermaid movie too many—and Hollywood was going with the one with the Oscar-winning writer and Oscar-nominated director. Especially over the partnership of Grazer and Howard—we had exactly one movie together to our credit.

  I look laid-back, I dress laid-back, I try to act laid-back. But I’m not laid-back. I’m the guy who heard people talking about a job through an open window, and twenty-four hours later, I had that job. I can tick off several people whom I worked for six months to a year in order to arrange curiosity conversations: Lew Wasserman, Daryl Gates, Carl Sagan, Edward Teller, Jonas Salk.

  So what happens first is that a dozen people tell me no one is interested in mermaids, no one is making a mermaid movie. Then people say, “Aww, I’m so sorry, we’d love to make your mermaid movie, but there’s already a mermaid movie in the works—they’ve got Jessica Lange as the mermaid! Cool, huh? We wouldn’t want to go head-to-head against that. Thanks for stopping by.”

  Sorry; I wasn’t going to let Herbert Ross and Robert Towne do my mermaid movie.

  Ron and I ended up striking a deal with Disney for Splash to be the first movie from their new division, Touchstone, which had been created specifically to give Disney the freedom to do grown-up movies. Ron not only signed up, he told Touchstone he would do the movie on a tight budget, and vowed to beat Herbert Ross’s mermaid to theaters.

  Splash was a huge hit. It was number one at the box office its first two weeks, it was in the top ten for eleven weeks, and it was at the time the fastest money-making movie in Disney film history. Splash was also the first Disney movie that wasn’t rated G. We gave Disney a big PG-rated hit—the very first time.

  We didn’t just beat the other mermaid movie, it never got made. And Splash not only made money, it helped make the careers of Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah. People in Hollywood went from being a little skeptical of Ron Howard as a director to elbowing each other out of the way to hire him.

  And, in perhaps the sweetest moment, given how many times I heard the word “no” while trying to get it made, the script for Splash was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. That year, Places in the Heart, the movie about the Great Depression starring Sally Field, won. But Ron and I went to our first Academy Awards celebration.

  The night Splash opened, March 9, 1984, Ron Howard and I hired a limousine and drove around with our wives, looking at the lines at LA movie theaters. That was a tradition we started with Night Shift, but those lines were a little disappointing. Splash was a different story.5

  In Westwood, there was a theater called the Westwood Avco, right on Wilshire Boulevard. For the opening of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., in 1983, we had seen the lines at the Avco wrapped around the block. When we drove up the night Splash debuted, the lines were also around the block. Not as long as E.T., but still incredible. People were standing in line to see our mermaid movie. It was thrilling. We jumped out of the car, and we walked from the front of the line to the back, talking to people and hugging each other.

  Then we jumped back in the car and started another tradition: we drove to In-N-Out Burger, the famous Southern California drive-in, and ate burgers with a really good bottle of French Bordeaux I had been optimistic enough to tuck into the limo.

  • • •

  IT TOOK SEVEN YEARS to get Splash from ignition point to the Westwood Avco theater. I didn’t just need an idea I felt passionately about—a good idea. I needed persistence. Determination.

  Just like curiosity and storytelling reinforce each other, so do curiosity and persistence. Curiosity leads to storytelling, and storytelling inspires curiosity. The exact same dynamic works with curiosity and persistence.

  Curiosity rewards persistence. If you get discouraged when you can’t find the answer to a question immediately, if you give up with the first “no,” then your curiosity isn’t serving you very well. For me, that is one of the lessons of working with Anthea Sylbert—my persistence helped me stay the course, my curiosity helped me figure out how to change the mermaid movie just a little bit so other people understood it and appreciated it. There’s nothing more fruitless and unhelpful than idle curiosity. Persistence is what carries curiosity to some worthwhile resolution.

  Likewise, persistence without curiosity may mean you chase a goal that isn’t worthy of the effort—or you chase a goal without adjusting as you learn new information. You end up way off course. Persistence is the drive moving you forward. Curiosity provides the navigation.

  Curiosity can help spark a great idea, and help you refine it.

  Determination can help you push the idea forward in the face of skepticism from others.

  Together, they can give you confidence that you’re onto something smart. And that confidence is the foundation of your ambition.

  Asking questions is the key—to helping yourself, refining your ideas, persuading others. And that’s true even if you think you know what you’re doing and where you’re heading.

  I got the chance to turn one of the great Dr. Seuss books into a movie. I won the rights to How the Grinch Stole Christmas! from Dr. Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, in a two-year process competing with other great filmmakers who wanted the chance, including John Hughes (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone), Tom Shadyac (who directed our movie Liar Liar), and the Farrelly brothers (There’s Something About Mary).

  In fact, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! would be the first Seuss book Audrey allowed to be turned into a full-length movie. Audrey Geisel was a little like Isaac Asimov’s wife, in fact: she was a fierce protector of the legacy of her husband, who died in 1991. The California license plate on her car when we were working with her was a single word: “GRINCH.” (Theodor Geisel also had the “GRINCH” license plate during the later years of his life.)6

  I persuaded Jim Carrey to play the Grinch and persuaded Ron Howard to direct. Audrey Geisel insisted on meeting and talking to both of them in advance.

  When I take on a project like turning How the Grinch Stole Christmas! into a movie, I feel a real sense of responsibility. The book was first published in 1957, and it has been a part of the childhood of essentially every American child born since then.

  I was as familiar with the story, the characters, the art of Grinch as any other fifty-year-old adult in the United States. It was read to me as a child, and I’d read it to my own children.

  But as we embarked on writing a script, on creating Whoville, and transferring the mood of the book to the screen, I kept a set of questions in mind—questions I asked myself, questions I asked Ron and Jim and the writers Jeff Price and Peter Seaman, over and over as we were making the movie.

  We had won the rights; now the most important questions were: What, exactly, is this story? What kind of story is it?

  Is it a verbal comedy?

  Is it a physical comedy?

  Is it an action picture?

  Is it a myth?

  The answer to each of these questions is “yes.” That’s what made it a challenge and a responsibility. When you were working on the physical comedy, you couldn’t forget that you were also the keeper of a myth. When you were working on the action, you couldn’t forget that the joy and the playfulness of the story come from Dr. Seuss’s original language, as much as from anything he drew, or we designed.

  Asking questions allows you to understand how other people are thinking about your idea. If Ron Howard thinks Grinch is an action picture and I think it’s a verbal comedy, we’ve got a problem. The way to find out is to ask. Often the simples
t questions are the best.

  What kind of movie is Grinch?

  What story are we telling?

  What feeling are we trying to convey, especially when the audience is going to arrive with their own set of feelings about the story?

  That too is at the heart of what good movie producers do. You always want to create a movie that is original, that has passion. With a story as iconic as Grinch, you also need to keep the audience’s expectations in mind. Everyone walking into a movie theater to see How the Grinch Stole Christmas! would already have a feeling about what they thought the story was.

  And no one more vividly or more firmly than Audrey Geisel. She was our most challenging audience—our audience of one. We showed her the movie in the Hitchcock Theater on the Universal Studios lot. There were just five people in the room. Audrey sat very near the front. I sat thirty rows back from her, near the back, because I was so nervous about her reaction. A couple of editors and sound guys sat in the rows between us.

  As the credits rolled, Audrey started clapping. She was beaming. She loved it. Sitting there in the screening room, I was so happy to have made her happy that I had tears streaming down my face.

  Even a classic story, one that is totally familiar, can’t succeed without the kind of elemental curiosity we brought to Grinch, so everyone agrees on the story you’re trying to tell and the way you’re trying to tell it.7

  It seems so obvious. But how often have you been involved in a project where you get halfway along and discover that the people involved had slightly different understandings of what you were up to—differences that turned out to make it impossible to work effectively together, because everyone didn’t actually agree on the goal?

  It happens every day—in movies, in marketing, in architecture and advertising, in journalism and politics, and in the whole rest of the world. It even happens in sports. Nothing says miscommunication like a busted pass play in an NFL game.

  It’s a little counterintuitive, but rather than derailing or distracting you, questions can keep you on course.

  Being determined in the face of obstacles is vital. Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, is a great example of that himself. Many of his forty-four books remain wild bestsellers. In 2013, Green Eggs and Ham sold more than 700,000 copies in the United States (more than Goodnight Moon); The Cat in the Hat sold more than 500,000 copies, as did Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. And five more Dr. Seuss books each sold more than 250,000 copies. That’s eight books, with total sales of more than 3.5 million copies, in one year (another eight Seuss titles sold 100,000 copies or more). Theodor Geisel is selling 11,000 Dr. Seuss books every day of the year, in the United States alone, twenty-four years after he died. He has sold 600 million books worldwide since his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was published in 1937. And as inevitable as Dr. Seuss’s appeal seems now, Mulberry Street was rejected by twenty-seven publishers before being accepted by Vanguard Press. What if Geisel had decided that twenty rejections were enough for him? Or twenty-five?