by Brian Grazer
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Notes
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Introduction: A Curious Mind and a Curious Book
1. Letter from Albert Einstein to his biographer Carl Seelig, March 11, 1952, cited in Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Chapter 1: There Is No Cure for Curiosity
1. This quote—perhaps the most razor-sharp take on curiosity’s power—is widely attributed to the writer and poet Dorothy Parker, but no scholarly or online source has a citation for when Parker might have written or said it. The quote is also occasionally attributed to someone named Ellen Parr, but also without attribution, or any identifying information about Parr. The pair of lines do have the particular interlocking snap that is characteristic of Parker’s turn of phrase.
2. For those younger than thirty, phone companies used to offer a remarkable service. If you needed a phone number, you simply dialed 4-1-1 on your telephone and an operator would look it up for you. The address too.
3. Forty years later, that is still the main phone number at Warner Bros., although now you also have to dial the area code: (818) 954-6000.
4. What kind of character was Sue Mengers? Pretty big, pretty fearsome. The 2013 Broadway play about Mengers’s life was called I’ll Eat You Last.
5. Google reports that the average number of searches per day in 2013 was 5,922,000,000. That’s 4,112,500 each minute. www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/, accessed October 10, 2014.
6. In the CBS TV series Dallas, the question of “Who shot J.R.?” became one of the most effective cliffhangers in modern storytelling—a masterful campaign in creating curiosity. The actor Larry Hagman, who played J.R. Ewing in the TV show, was shot in the concluding episode of the 1979–80 season, which aired March 21, 1980. The character who shot him was not revealed until an episode broadcast eight months later, on November 21, 1980.
Marketing—and curiosity—around the cliffhanger was so widespread that bookies laid odds and took bets on who the shooter would turn out to be, and “Who shot J.R.?” jokes even crept into the 1980 presidential campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The Republican campaign produced buttons reading, “The Democrats shot J.R.”; President Carter joked that he would have no trouble with fund-raising if he could find out who had shot J.R.
CBS filmed five scenes, each with a different character shooting J.R. On the November 21 episode, the shooter was revealed to be Kristen Shepard, J.R.’s mistress (content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924376,00.html#paid-wall, accessed October 10, 2014).
If you’re curious, the largest Powerball jackpot—the jackpot from the forty-five-state lottery in the U.S.—was $590.5 million, won on May 18, 2013, by a single-ticket holder, Gloria C. MacKenzie, eighty-four, with a ticket purchased at a Publix supermarket in Zephyrhills, Florida (www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/05/189018342/84-year-old-woman-claims-powerball-jackpot, accessed October 10, 2014).
7. Adults tend not to know the answer to “Why is the sky blue?” because although it’s a simple question, and a simple experience, the answer itself is complicated. The sky is blue because of how light itself is made up.
Blue wavelengths of light are more easily scattered by the particles in the air than other colors, and so as sunlight streams from the sun to the ground, the blue light passing through the atmosphere gets scattered around, and we see that scattering as the sky being blue.
The blue color fades as you get higher up in the atmosphere. In a passenger jet, flying at six miles up (32,000 feet), the blue is already a little watery and thin. If you look up as you fly higher, the sky starts to look black—the black of space.
And the sky doesn’t look blue when there is no light shining through it, of course. The blue goes away when the sun sets.
8. Genesis, 2:16–17. The citation is from the New International Version of the Bible, www.biblegateway.com, accessed October 18, 2014.
9. Genesis, 3:4–5. NIV.
10. Genesis, 3:6. NIV.
11. Genesis, 3:7. NIV.
12. It’s an astonishing output by a studio, in terms of lasting cultural impact and quality in a short time. The movies by year:
A Clockwork Orange, 1971 (four Academy Award nominations)
Dirty Harry, 1971
Deliverance, 1972 (three Academy Award nominations)
The Exorcist, 1973 (two Academy Awards, ten nominations)
Blazing Saddles, 1974 (three Academy Award nominations)
The Towering Inferno, 1974 (three Academy Awards, eight nominations)
Dog Day Afternoon, 1975 (one Academy Award, six nominations)
All the President’s Men, 1976 (four Academy Awards, eight nominations)
13. “A Strong Debut Helps, As a New Chief Tackles Sony’s Movie Problems,” Geraldine Fabrikant, New York Times, May 26, 1997.
14. When John Calley died in 2011, the Los Angeles Times used a picture of him sitting on a couch, one foot propped up on a coffee table (www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-me-2011notables-calley,0,403960.photo#axzz2qUMEKSCu, accessed October 10, 2014).
15. My office at Imagine Entertainment does have a desk, but I don’t sit there very often. I have two couches, and that’s where I work, notes spread out on the couch cushions or the coffee table, a console phone sitting on the cushion next to me.
16. Stop and think about yourself for a minute. Regardless of what work you do—whether you work in movies or software, insurance or health care or advertising—imagine if you decided today that for the next six months you would meet a new person every single day in your industry. Not to have an hour-long conversation, just to meet them and talk for five minutes. Six months from now, you’d know one hundred fifty people in your own line of work you don’t know right now. If even 10 percent of those people had something to offer—insight, connections, support for a project—that’s fifteen new allies.
17. The piece ran in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section: “Want Ad: Beautiful Minds,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, March 20, 2008.
18. According to the Forbes magazine list of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim was number one when I met him, and as of the end of 2014, he was also number one. But the top three—Slim, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett—shift around depending on the movement of the stock market.
Chapter 2: The Police Chief, the Movie Mogul, and the Father of the H-Bomb: Thinking Like Other People
1. The full line from Vladimir Nabokov is: “Curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form.” It comes from the 1947 novel Bend Sinister (New York: Vintage Classic Paperback, 2012), 46.
2. President Bush used the speech to denounce the rioting, which he said “is not about civil rights” and “not a message of protest” but “the brutality of a mob, pure and simple.” But he also said of the beating of Rodney King: “What you saw and what I saw on the TV video was revolting. I felt anger. I felt pain. How can I explain this to my grandchildren?” The text of Bush’s May 1, 1992, speech is here: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=20910, accessed October 10, 2014.
3. In the wake of the Rodney King beating—before the officers were tried—there was an investigative commission into the practices of the Los Angeles Police Department, and into Gates’s leadership, and Gates announced in the summer of 1991 that he would resign. He then postponed his retirement several times—and even threatened to postpone leaving after his successor, Willie Williams, the chief in Philadelphia, was hired.
Here are several accounts of Gates’s reluctant departure:
Robert Reinhold, “Head of Police in Philadelphia Chosen for Chief in Los An
geles,” New York Times, April 16, 1992, www.nytimes.com/1992/04/16/us/head-of-police-in-philadelphia-chosen-for-chief-in-los-angeles.html, accessed October 10, 2014.
Richard A. Serrano and James Rainey, “Gates Says He Bluffed Staying, Lashes Critics,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1992, articles.latimes.com/1992-06-09/news/mn-188_1_police-department, accessed October 10, 2014.
Richard A. Serrano, “Williams Takes Oath as New Police Chief,” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1992, articles.latimes.com/1992-06-27/news/mn-828_1_police-commission, accessed October 10, 2014.
4. Daryl Gates was a protégé of William H. Parker, the man for whom the old LAPD headquarters, Parker Center, was named. Early in his career, as a young patrol officer, Gates was assigned to be Chief Parker’s driver, a job in which Gates got to see up close the everyday acquisition and use of authority. Later, Gates was Parker’s executive officer. Parker was the longest-serving LAPD chief, at sixteen years (1950 to 1966); Gates is the second-longest-serving chief, at fourteen years.
5. Novelists and painters can rework the same topics, characters, and themes over and over again—many popular book series involve the same characters in very similar plots. Actors, directors, and others in Hollywood are supposed to avoid doing that, for fear of being typecast, or “falling into a rut.”
6. I talked to Michael Scheuer just after he left the CIA in 2004, when his book Imperial Hubris, about being a front-line operative, came out. For an account of Scheuer’s increasingly extreme views since then, read David Frum, in the Daily Beast, January 3, 2014: “Michael Scheuer’s Meltdown,” www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/03/michael-scheuer-s-meltdown.html, accessed October 10, 2014.
7. This list comes from the New York Times obituary of Lew Wasserman, who died June 3, 2002. “Lew Wasserman, 89, is Dead; Last of Hollywood’s Moguls,” by Jonathan Kandell, New York Times, June 4, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/business/lew-wasserman-89-is-dead-last-of-hollywood-s-moguls.html, accessed October 10, 2014.
8. People have been trying to eat and drink in cars since roads were smoothed out, but the search for a way of securing drinks inside cars really took off during the 1950s, with the invention of the drive-in hamburger stand. For a brief, charming history of the cup holder, see Sam Dean, “The History of the Car Cup Holder,” Bon Appétit, February 18, 2013, www.bonappetit.com/trends/article/the-history-of-the-car-cup-holder, accessed October 10, 2014.
9. “Turning an Icon on Its Head,” Chief Executive, July 2003, chiefexecutive.net/turning-an-icon-on-its-head, accessed October 10, 2014. The story of Paul Brown imagining himself as liquid silicone is found in this second account of the invention of the upside-down bottle—the valve was first used in shampoo bottles: Frank Greve, “Ketchup Squeezes Competition with Upside-Down, Bigger Bottle,” McClatchey Newspapers, June 25, 2007, www.mcclatchydc.com/2007/06/28/17335/ketchup-is-better-with-upside.html, accessed October 10, 2014.
10. Bruce Brown and Scott D. Anthony, “How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate,” Harvard Business Review, June 2011 (PDF file), www.hbsclubwdc.net/images.html?file_id=xtypsHwtheU%3D, accessed October 10, 2014.
11. Sam Walton tells the story of creating Wal-Mart, and refining his business practices and his curiosity, in his autobiography, Made in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1993, with John Huey). Walton’s curiosity was legendary. One fellow retail executive recalls meeting Walton and said, “He proceed[ed] to extract every piece of information in your possession” (p. 105).
The word “curiosity” appears twice in Walton’s 346-page book, most notably in a quote from Sam Walton’s wife, Helen, describing her distaste at having become a public figure: “What I hate is being the object of curiosity. People are so curious about everything, and so we are just public conversation. The whole thing just makes me mad when I think about it. I mean, I hate it” (p. 98). The other use of curiosity is Walton’s surprise at being welcomed in the headquarters of his retail competitors early on, while he was trying to learn how other people ran their stores. “As often as not, they’d let me in, maybe out of curiosity” (p. 104). Walton, too, didn’t use the word to credit his own curiosity.
12. The frequency of the words “creativity,” “innovation,” and “curiosity” in the U.S. media comes from Nexis database searches of the category “US Newspapers and Wires” starting January 1, 1980. As the words appeared more and more frequently, the Nexis searches were done week by week for January and June of each year, to get representative counts.
Chapter 3: The Curiosity Inside the Story
1. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 3.
2. You can Google the phrase “billion-dollar film franchises,” and you get a list from the folks at Nash Information Services, who produce movie-industry news and data focused on the financial performance of movies in a publication called The Numbers. Nash’s list of movie “franchises” shows that at the U.S. box office, fourteen series of U.S. movies have made $1 billion or more. If you include international sales, the numbers are much larger. In all, forty-seven movie series have grossed more than $1 billion in box office sales. The up-to-date list is here: www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchises/, accessed October 18, 2014. Nash’s The Numbers website also says that the movies I have produced in the last thirty-five years have gross sales of $5,647,276,060. Details here: www.the-numbers.com/person/208890401-Brian-Grazer#tab=summary, accessed October 18, 2014.
3. What parts of the movie Apollo 13 take liberties with what actually happened? If you’re curious, here are a handful of websites that answer the question, including a long interview with T. K. Mattingly, the astronaut who was bumped from the flight at the last minute because he was exposed to German measles:
Ken Mattingly on the movie Apollo 13: www.universetoday.com/101531/ken-mattingly-explains-how-the-apollo-13-movie-differed-from-real-life/, accessed October 18, 2014.
From the official NASA oral history website: www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/MattinglyTK/MattinglyTK_11-6-01.htm, accessed October 18, 2014.
From Space.com, “Apollo 13: Facts About NASA’s Near Disaster”: www.space.com/17250-apollo-13-facts.html, accessed October 18, 2014.
4. “How Biblically Accurate is Noah?” Miriam Krule, Slate, March 28, 2014, www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/28/noah_movie_biblical_accuracy_how_the_darren_aronofsky_movie_departs_from.html, accessed October 18, 2014.
5. How did NPR discover its listeners were having “driveway moments”? A former senior news executive for NPR told me the network receives letters (and now emails) from listeners saying they did not go into the house when they got home—they sat in their cars until the story to which they were listening was over.
6. If you’re not a regular listener to National Public Radio, and don’t know what it feels like to be so bewitched by a radio story that you can’t leave your car, here’s a collection of dozens of NPR stories that are considered “driveway moments.” Listen to one or two. You’ll see: www.npr.org/series/700000/driveway-moments, accessed October 18, 2014.
Chapter 4: Curiosity as a Superhero Power
1. James Stephens (1880–1950) was a popular Irish poet and novelist in the early twentieth century. This line is from The Crock of Gold (London: Macmillan, 1912), 9 (viewable via books.google.com).
The full sentence, discussed later in the chapter, is: “Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will; indeed, it has led many people into dangers which mere physical courage would shudder away from, for hunger and love and curiosity are the great impelling forces of life.”
Stephens’s death merited a seven-paragraph obituary in the New York Times: query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9905E3DC103EEF3BBC4F51DFB467838B649EDE, accessed October 18, 2014.
2. Isaac Asmiov’s productivity as an author was so impressive that the New York Times obituary of him details the number of books he wrote decade by decade—in the obituary’s fourth paragraph. Mervyn Rothstein, “Isaac Asimov, Whose Thoughts and Books Traveled
the Universe, Is Dead at 72,” New York Times, April 7, 1992, www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-obit.html, accessed October 18, 2014.
There is a catalog of every book Asimov wrote online, compiled by Ed Seiler, with the apparent assistance of Asimov: www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html, accessed October 18, 2014.
3. In reconstructing this meeting, we exchanged emails with Janet Jeppson Asimov about my brief visit twenty-eight years ago. She has no memory of it, and she apologized for any rudeness. She also said that, although it wasn’t publicly known at the time, Isaac Asimov was already infected with the HIV virus that would kill him six years later, and he was already often ill. Janet Asimov said her impatience may well have been a result of—entirely understandable—protectiveness of her husband.
4. The New York Times story of the prostitution ring run out of New York’s morgue is just as fun as I remember it—and is practically the outline for a movie script. It ran on August 28, 1976, opposite the obituaries in the “Metro” section. The opening sentence reports that the men running the call-girl ring often “chauffer[ed] prostitutes to clients in the Medical Examiner’s official car.” The Times never did report what became of the charges against those men—nor did any other media outlet. Here is the original story (PDF): query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F20617FC3B5E16738DDDA10A94D0405B868BF1D3, accessed October 18, 2014.
5. The movie executive and journalist Beverly Gray gives a detailed account of the creation of Night Shift and Splash in her biography of Ron Howard, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 2003).
6. Newsweek did a story on the selling of the rights to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!: “The Grinch’s Gatekeeper,” November 12, 2000, www.newsweek.com/grinchs-gatekeeper-156985, accessed October 18, 2014.
Audrey’s “GRINCH” license plate was noted in an Associated Press profile from 2004, the year that Theodor Geisel would have turned 100: “A Seussian Pair of Shoulders,” by Michelle Morgante, Associated Press, February 28, 2004, published in the Los Angeles Times, articles.latimes.com/2004/feb/28/entertainment/et-morgante28, accessed October 18, 2014.
