Brian Grazer Fights to Stay Out of the Hollywood Bubble

It was Oscar night, 2002, a few minutes before best picture was to be announced, when I found a sweating Brian Grazer pacing the men’s room, dabbing his face with paper towels. “A Beautiful Mind” was a favorite to win, but Grazer, its producer, was in a panic. “Do you think we have a prayer?” he asked, still pacing. “Has the bad publicity hurt us?”

His frenzied questions, I thought, reflected the tension of Oscar night but, over the years, I have come to realize this was standard Grazer behavior. The look of apprehension, the fusillade of questions, this was the Grazer style — and now, 13 years later, he has even written a book about it.

The key to success and tranquillity, the book argues, is to keep asking questions — even if you get insulting answers. Keep being curious, he maintains, even if you’re not. Titled “A Curious Mind,” the book, a semi-memoir, is itself, well … curious.

Grazer feels his approach has been a key influence in developing and producing “Apollo 13,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Splash” and his many other hit movies and TV shows. Working with director Ron Howard, he has built Imagine Entertainment into a major supplier of content.

Except Grazer doesn’t like the word “content.” He says he’s telling stories that stem from his questions. To be sure, his personal style is as idiosyncratic as his spiked hair (he uses gel). He has even employed a cultural attache from time to time to help him stalk scientists, scholars and others with whom he can play his mind games.

And he is unabashed about reciting the many rebuffs he’s experienced. “Look, you’re basically full of it,” Lew Wasserman told him. Edward Teller, the nuclear scientist, scolded him for “wasting my time.” Isaac Asimov’s psychiatrist wife Janet yanked her husband from a Grazer meeting, snapping, “You don’t know enough to have this conversation.” Once, when Grazer tried to collar Brandon Tartikoff, a burly aide barked, “What the f*** are you doing?” and pushed him away. Even Howard was initially put off by Grazer’s pushy self-introduction.

Grazer insists he has never been fazed by rejection, because he has no recourse. “I have to feed my curiosity,” he frets, “or I’ll end up in a bubble here in Hollywood, isolated from what’s going on in the rest of the world. I use curiosity to pop the bubble and keep complacency at bay. And storytelling gives me the ability to tell everyone what I’ve learned.”

Grazer is candid about acknowledging his foibles. As a child, he was pudgy and had learning difficulties; reading was painful if not impossible. “Even today in my 60s, the physical effort of reading drains some of the pleasure from whatever it is I’m reading,” he writes. Some writers who work with Grazer claim he rarely reads the scripts they’ve written.

Though lacking confidence, Grazer has disciplined himself to seek out difficult encounters. Once he even paid a call to Letitia Baldrige, the expert on etiquette, to coach him on the secrets of protocol. “Manners are quite simply, making people feel welcome, comfortable and respected,” he concluded.

And those are precepts he faithfully pursues. Even under the pressure of red carpets or premieres, I have never seen Grazer behaving rudely. I did a TV interview with him once in Cannes following the chaotic screening of “The Da Vinci Code,” and tried asking him why the French cinephiles had resisted his movie. Before I could get out my first question, though, Grazer, familiarly, fired off a fusillade of his own.

It was hopeless, I realized. Grazer was curious. He had lots of questions and wasn’t going to wait for mine. That’s the Grazer style.

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