A Curious Mind (12 page)

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 Mermai
d
). 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 simplest questions are the best.