A Curious Mind (14 page)

I loved that. I really liked getting that extreme range of reactions from people. The hair inspired curiosity about me. Right after I started wearing my hair up, I would sometimes hear people talking about it when they thought I couldn't hear them.

“Hey, what's with Grazer? What's he doing with his hair?”

Michael Ovitz, the famous superagent and Hollywood power broker, grew up in the business right alongside me. He lobbied me. “Don't do the hair,” Michael said. “Business people won't take you seriously.”

Some people thought I was arrogant because of the hair.

The truth is that it had occurred to me that the world of Hollywood is divided into two categories—business folks and artists. I thought this hairstyle tipped me over into the artist category, where I was more comfortable.

After having my hair straight up for a few months, I did think about stopping. So many people seemed to be talking about it.

But then I realized something: yes, the hair was inspiring curiosity about me, but what was really interesting was that
people's reactions to the hair said more about what they thought of me than they revealed about me, or my hair.

I came to see my hair as a test to the world. I felt like I was eliciting the truth about how people felt about me much more quickly than having to wait for it to come out. So I left it up.

In a way, the hair does something else for me. It lets people know that this guy isn't quite what he seems. He's a little unpredictable. I'm not a prepackaged, shrink-wrapped guy. I'm a little different.

Here's why my hair is important.

Hollywood and show business really are a small town, and as in any industry, there is a pretty defined system of rules and practices and traditions. To get things done, you have to follow the rules.

Mind you, all I did was gel my hair straight up, just as a gambit, and some people went completely crazy about it. Not just some people—one out of four people.

My hair doesn't have the slightest impact on any script or director or talent, it doesn't change the marketing of a movie or the opening weekend grosses. But it made a lot of people—some of them important people—really uncomfortable.

Now imagine the reaction, the resistance, when you do something different in a category where it really matters.

But I don't want to do the same kind of work everyone's doing. I don't even want to do the same kind of work I was doing ten years ago or five years ago.

I want variety. I want to tell new stories—or classic stories
in new ways—both because that makes my life interesting, and because it makes going to the movie theater or turning on the TV interesting.

I want the opportunity to be different.

Where do I get the confidence to be different?

A lot of it comes from curiosity. I spent years as a young man trying to understand the business I'm in. I have spent decades staying connected to how the rest of the world works.

The curiosity conversations give me a reservoir of experience and insight that goes well beyond my own firsthand experience.

But the conversations also give me a lot of firsthand experience in exposing my own lack of knowledge, my own naïveté. I actually practice being a little ignorant. I'm willing to admit what I don't know, because I know that's how I get smarter. Asking questions may seem to expose your ignorance, but what it really does is just the opposite. People who ask questions, in fact, are rarely thought of as stupid.

The epigram that opens this chapter—“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will”—comes from a book by the Irish poet James Stephens. The quote goes on a little longer and makes a central point:

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.

That's what curiosity has done for me, and what I think it can do for almost anyone. It can give you the courage to be adventurous and ambitious. It does that by getting you comfortable with being a little uncomfortable. The start of any journey is always a little nerve-racking.

I have learned to surf as an adult. I have learned to paint as an adult. I learned to surf much better after producing
Blue Crush
, a female-empowerment movie that we shot on the north shore of Oahu. Some of the people working on the movie were surfing there—surfing some of the biggest waves in the world—and I became fascinated with how waves work and what it was like to ride them. I love surfing—it requires so much concentration, it wipes away completely the concerns of the moment. It's also totally thrilling.

I love painting in much the same way. I find it utterly relaxing. I'm not a great painter, I'm not even a particularly good painter in technical terms. But I figured out that a lot of what matters in painting is what you're trying to say, not whether you say it perfectly. I don't need to have great painting technique to find real originality in it, and to be energized by it. I learned to paint after meeting Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

In both cases, my curiosity conquered my fear. I was inspired to do both those things by some of the people who did them best in the world. I wasn't trying to be a world-class surfer or a world-class painter. I was just curious to taste the joy, the thrill, the satisfaction that those people got from mastering something that is both hard and rewarding.

Curiosity gives you power. It's not the kind of power that comes from yelling and being aggressive. It's a quiet kind of power. It's a cumulative power. Curiosity is power for real people, it's power for people who don't have superpowers.

So I protect that part of myself—the part that's not afraid to seem briefly ignorant. Not knowing the answer opens up the world, as long as you don't try to hide what you don't know. I try never to be self-conscious about not knowing.

As it turns out, the people who hated my hair back in the beginning were right. It is a little bit of a challenge. The hair looks like just a matter of personal style—but for me, it is a way of reminding myself every day that I am trying to be a little different, that it's okay to be a little different, that being different requires courage, just like gelling your hair straight up requires courage, but you can be different in ways that make most people smile.

I gel my hair every morning first thing when I wake up. It takes about ten seconds. I never skip the gel. And twenty years after I started doing it, it has become my signature—and my approach to work matches my hair. It's also still a great way of starting a conversation and standing out.

In February 2001, I got to spend four days in Cuba with a group of seven friends who are also media executives. The group included Graydon Carter, the editor of
Vanity Fai
r
; Tom Freston, then CEO of MTV; Bill Roedy, then president of MTV; producer Brad Grey; Jim Wiatt, then chief of the talent agency William Morris; and Les Moonves, who is president of CBS.
¹⁰

As part of the visit, we had a long lunch with Fidel Castro. Castro was wearing his usual green army fatigues, and he talked to us through a translator for three and a half hours—I think without even taking a breath. It was the usual Castro speech, mostly about why Cuba is amazing and the United States is doomed.

When he stopped talking, he looked at me—I wasn't necessarily the most prominent person in the group—and through the translator he asked just one question: “How do you get your hair to stand up that way?” Everybody laughed.

Even Castro loved the hair.

“Connection gives meaning to our lives. Connection is why we're here.”

—Brené Brow
n
¹

IN THE SPRING OF 1995,
we at Imagine Entertainment got a new boss. Like anyone, I wanted to make a good impression. I just wasn't quite sure how to do that.

In fact, I haven't had a boss in the conventional sense in thirty years, someone who could call me up and tell me what to do, someone I had to check in with every few days. Ron Howard
and I had been running Imagine together—along with a lot of other people—since 1986.

During that time, we've had our longest partnership with Universal Studios—they finance and distribute many of the movies we produce. So I consider whoever is running Universal my “boss” in the sense that we need to work well with that person, we need to develop and sustain a strong personal and professional relationship so we can agree on the kinds of movies we're making together. Tens of millions of dollars are always hanging in the balance.

By the mid-1990s, we'd done a run of movies with Universal that were both great and successful:
Parenthood
(1989),
Kindergarten Cop
(1990),
Backdraft
(1991), and
The Paper
(1994).

When Lew Wasserman was running Universal, I wanted to know Lew—beyond my youthful encounter where he gave me the pencil and the legal pad.

When the Japanese electronics company Matsushita bought Universal, I got to know Matsushita executive Tsuzo Murase.

And when Matsushita sold Universal to the Seagram Company in 1995—yes, Universal Studios went from being independent, to being owned by a Japanese electronics company, to being owned by a Canadian liquor company—I wanted to know Seagram's CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

I didn't hear from Bronfman during the first few weeks after the deal was announced. I did hear that Bronfman had called Steven Spielberg and director and producer Ivan Reitman. So I wondered what to do.

I was a movie producer, producing lots of movies with what had suddenly become Bronfman's company.

Edgar Bronfman was the CEO of a company then doing $6.4 billion in business a year. I wasn't quite sure how to reach out.

Should I call his office?

Should I send an email?

Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, is a close friend who once gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me. In the right circumstances, he said, “Doing nothing can be a very powerful action unto itself.”

Iger has years of experience in high-risk, high-pressure situations. These days, in the space of seventy-two hours, he can be in Moscow with Vladimir Putin, then in London on the set of the new
Star Wars
movie, then in China working at Shanghai Disney, and then back home in Los Angeles at one of his kids' basketball games. That same weekend, he can return eager to talk about the eighteen-hundred-page biography of Winston Churchill that he finished reading during all his travels. Bob's insistence on excellence, and his own wide-ranging curiosity, are tireless.

As I was thinking about how to approach Bronfman, Bob's advice occurred to me. I tend to think that
action
is the way to get action on something. I know how to be patient, but I don't usually leave things alone. I nudge them along. At least, that's how I operated in the first years of my career. This time I decided to wait. To take no action.

“Doing nothing can be a very powerful action unto itself.”

Then the White House called, and solved the problem for me.

That spring we were getting ready to release
Apollo 13
for a summer premiere—it was set to open June 30, 1995, in 2,200 theaters. In May, we got a call from the White House, inviting us to show the movie to President Bill Clinton, his family, and guests three weeks before it was released, on June 8, in the White House screening room.

That's how a White House movie screening works—the movie itself is invited to the White House, and all the people responsible for making it get to come along.

So Tom Hanks was going to the
Apollo 13
screening at the White House, along with his wife, Rita Wilson, and so was the NASA astronaut that Hanks portrayed, Jim Lovell. The film's director, Ron Howard, was going, and as the producer, I was going too. Also invited: Ron Meyer, the head of Universal Studios, and Edgar Bronfman, the CEO of the company that owned Universal.

What could be more perfect?

My movie gets invited to the White House—perhaps the most prestigious single movie screen in the whole country. And my new boss at Universal gets to be a guest at the White House, not just to see my movie, but
because
of my movie.

That's about as great an introduction to the boss as you could want.

It was my first time at the White House. The night started with a cocktail reception. Bronfman was there. President Clinton and Hillary joined us (Chelsea didn't), some senators and congressmen, a cabinet secretary or two.

After the cocktails, we all stepped into the White House screening room, which is surprisingly small, just sixty seats. They served popcorn; it was very homey, not fancy at all.

President Clinton sat through the whole movie. And as it ended, at the moment when NASA Mission Control reestablished radio contact with the returning Apollo capsule, as the familiar trio of orange-and-white parachutes popped out on the TV screens in Mission Control, the screening room burst into applause.

It was, as I expected, a great setting to meet Edgar Bronfman. A lot of people were competing for his attention that night, of course, but we talked for a few minutes. Bronfman, tall and lanky, is very elegant, and extremely well mannered. “I love this movie,” he told me. “I'm so proud of this.”

He was just a few weeks into owning Universal, but you could tell how genuinely excited he was about the movie business. He came out to Los Angeles three weeks later for the official premiere of
Apollo 13
with his wife, Clarissa. The White House screening was the start of a friendship, and a working relationship, that lasted through the five years that Edgar owned and ran Universal as part of Seagram.