WASHINGTON — There’s more than one way to skin a cinematic cat.
While Hollywood pitch rooms may reference Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat” for screenplay structure, producer Brian Grazer knows the real secret is to kill the cat — with curiosity.
As co-founder of Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, Grazer has lent his curious mind and golden touch to a string of acclaimed projects, amassing 43 Oscar nominations from “Apollo 13” to “A Beautiful Mind,” and 133 Emmy nominations from “24” to “Arrested Development.”
Now, he’s sharing his carefully-acquired wisdom in the new book “A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life,” chronicling his “Curiosity Conversations” with influential figures since the 1970s.
“It’s just more of an empowerment tool for people,” Grazer tells WTOP. “They’ll find juicy stories about people they always wanted to read about or know about, but ultimately I think their takeaway will be that, ‘I can do this too,’ because they can. … You just never know how the dots connect or when they connect, and how they’ll propel your life going forward professionally or personally.”
It was this sense of curiosity — and the symbiotic art of asking questions — that got Grazer’s foot into the showbiz door. Right after college, he got a job as a law clerk at Warner Bros. and would use his office downtime to invite famous figures in for meetings. Sure, he came up with professional reasons to meet them, but all along, he was picking their brains, everyone from Mel Brooks to Warren Beatty.
In 1984, he got his own time to shine, hatching the original screenplay idea for “Splash,” which gave Tom Hanks his first leading role and director Ron Howard his first Top 10 box office grosser.
“That came essentially by mining my own curiosity. … I basically said to myself: What would be the perfect girl? Could I meet the perfect girl? And I continued to assault the question of is it possible to meet the perfect girl, and what would she look like, and how would I define her?” Grazer says. “And then I just thought to myself, what would help punctuate the fantasy of all of this, and I thought a mermaid would! So I just superimposed the symbolic creature, a mermaid, on top of what would be a perfect girl to me and that became the beginnings of ‘Splash.'”
As Grazer’s career took off, unexpected encounters became unlikely inspiration for major successes, such as “Apollo 13” (1995), which earned Grazer his first Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
“Jim Lovell, the astronaut that Tom Hanks played, wrote a little 12-page outline and I read it, and I didn’t know much about space travel or aviation,” Grazer says. “But I had met a woman in my Curiosity Conversations that got me very focused on understanding survival and what people have to do to survive, and that was my bridge into ‘Apollo 13.'”
That woman was Veronica Denegra, who was tortured for a year and a half in Chile. She explained that her secret to survival was to create an alternative reality in her mind. This inspired Grazer to explore schizophrenia in “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), which won him the Oscar for Best Picture.
If lesser-known figures like Denegra can inspire Best Picture winners, imagine the inspiration that can come from sitting down with celebrities like Andy Warhol, Princess Diana or Michael Jackson.
With the King of Pop, it was all about “taking the gloves off” — literally and figuratively.
“He came to my office and he wore those gloves. I asked if he would take them off, and he looked at me kind of like no one’s ever asked him a question at all or made a request of him like that,” Grazer says. “When he took them off, it was kind of a threshold, and he just became very professorial and a completely different personality and was describing music the way Mozart might describe music.”
Another time, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped Grazer decide not to make a movie.
“I was gonna make a movie about the Mexican drug cartel. We were told that we could make it. We were told that everyone would be safe and we had full security,” Grazer says. “I had lunch with Condoleezza Rice right around that time, and she said, ‘Come on, your common sense says not to do it, and I’m telling you given my level of experience, this isn’t a wise, safe thing to do.’ And I thought, look, if I have access to someone like that … I’m gonna take her advice.”
These conversations eventually crossed paths with a future President of the United States.
“I met with President Obama when he was a senator in Office #99 in the Senate, which was not a nice office. But he himself was a gracious, generous host and had me there for an hour,” Grazer says. “As I left, I see this young kid and he says, ‘I’m the speech writer,’ and I thought, wow this kid is extraordinary! He wrote those speeches. So I went to Jon Favreau and I said, well listen, if you ever think of retiring from D.C. politics, I’d love you to come work for me. He stayed with Obama.”
Favreau — not to be confused with the “Iron Man” director of the same name — wound up making his way to the White House, but Grazer did just fine without the young speechwriter. The year President Obama was inaugurated, Grazer earned another Best Picture nomination for “Frost/Nixon” (2009).
Like a mermaid swimming through a Watergate, Grazer just keeps swimming, braving the currents of an ever-flowing business using his own eternal curiosity as his most reliable nautical guide.
Thankfully, he’s left behind a series of navigational beacons endorsed by the ultimate curiosity explorer of our time, author Malcom Gladwell, who’s made a career turning unique societal data into self-help inspiration in books like “The Tipping Point” (2000), “Blink” (2005), “Outliers” (2008) and “What the Dog Saw” (2009). Gladwell called Grazer’s book “a captivating account of how the simple act of asking questions can change your life,” and the two recently shared their experience on stage:
If Gladwell knows what the dog saw, Grazer knows that curiosity doesn’t merely kill the cat, it morphs it into a roaring lion worthy of a Hollywood logo — in this case, a cool cat with a wild, spiky mane after a career of petting his projects against the grain.
