Ron Howard and Brian Grazer - Box Office Business - [Invest Like the Best, EP.305]

Today I’m joined by two Hollywood greats, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. They have produced, directed, written, and acted in a number of the most popular films and tv shows ever made, including Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, 24, and Frost/Nixon. Their partnership is one of the longest running in Hollywood, and the business they founded in 1985, Imagine Entertainment, has won 49 EMMY awards, 11 Golden Globes, and 10 Academy Awards. There are few better storytellers in the world and it was a thrill to talk about curiosity, trust, and business building with them both. Please enjoy this great conversation with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. If you're a professional equity investor and haven't talked to Canalyst recently, you should give them a shout. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalyst.com. ----- Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. Brex is the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt, and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:02:44] - [First question] - The value of trust and how Ron built it up over time with Brian [00:08:34] - The spark that allowed Brian to trust and work with Ron [00:14:45] - Ray Stark calling Brian and threatening him over their mermaid movie [00:16:37] - Keeping their creative spark alive as their business scaled and matured [00:20:20] - Principals like the universality concept that they return to most commonly [00:23:24] - Seemingly bottomless wells of inspiration that they both pull from [00:26:18] - Curiosity precedes innovation and the curiosity conversations Brian has [00:30:15] - The pitch format Brian uses to try and secure a guest for a curiosity talk [00:32:16] - The role of engaging with conversations or ideas Brian disagrees with [00:33:56] - How curiosity shapes the nitty gritty of Ron’s directing and producing [00:37:41] - The biggest mistakes they’ve come across that people make telling stories [00:40:27] - Pinpointing the defining moments of their careers outside of the obvious wins [00:44:27] - Thoughts about how the industry has changed across their careers [00:47:19] - How they’ve gotten better at taking a project from nothing to the finish line [00:49:53] - The kindest things anyone has ever done for them

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  updating models, Canalyst is now used by over 400 institutions, including the largest money managers globally and by a number of guests on the show. With detailed company-specific models and data on virtually every public company, Canalyst's clients are able to ramp up faster, update models instantly and incorporate the highest quality fundamental data into any workflow. If you're a professional equity investor and haven't talked to Canalyst recently, you should give them a shout. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalyst.com/patrick. That's C-A-N-A-L-Y-S-T.com/patrick. Today's episode is sponsored by Brex, the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments,

• 1:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  venture debt and spend management software, all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best. That's B-R-E-X.com/best. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 2:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Today, I'm joined by two Hollywood greats, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. They have produced, directed, written, and acted in a number of the most popular films and TV shows ever made, including Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, 24, and Frost Nixon. Their partnership is one of the longest-running in Hollywood, and the business they founded in 1985, Imagine Entertainment, has won 49 Emmy Awards, 11 Golden Globes, and 10 Academy Awards. There are few better storytellers in the world, and it was a thrill to talk about curiosity, trust, and business building with them both. Please enjoy this great conversation with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.

• 3:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So Ron and Brian, I was toying with where to begin our discussion. I always like starting with the area of someone's lives that interest me most relative to like all the great, smart people out there. Since it's both of you together, I'd love to begin with the area of partnership and trust. You've built this incredible entertainment business together since the mid 80s over a very long period of time. And everyone talks about how great trust is, but you don't often hear the stories of how it's built over time. I'd love each of you to open by just describing the value of that trust between you and some of the things that have built that trust over time, because I think if there's anything that I'd love to take away from this, it's how you did that, because it seems so rare in the world of business.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Let me start with a couple of things, and Brian will have his side of this. But going back to the earliest trust-building moments.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  First, it was really interesting and exciting for me to meet Brian. Brian wound up being kind of my first Hollywood lunch in a classic way. Because while I'd been in the business my whole life and I'd certainly eaten lunch before, I never really had somebody say, hey, let's have lunch and talk about projects. And Brian had known that I was producing and directing TV movies. We were both the youngest guys on the Paramount lot with offices. And he'll explain how he'd gotten his. It's kind of a colorful story. I'd leveraged mine through my Happy Days renegotiation, so not so colorful a story. But we both had offices. And Brian had great ideas. He was creative. He had his own ideas that he controlled.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  But he also immediately proved that he just had the energy and the wherewithal to actually get us quality meetings. And the first project we worked on didn't get through, but we had a lot of amazing meetings. He was just able to get these doors open. It was great to see and something that I didn't really have the capacity for, and neither did my representatives particularly. And then the very next idea was another idea of Brian's, which was Night Shift. And not only did we get doors open, we actually got it made and we clicked. But before we actually made Night Shift, the first big trust-building moment occurred. Night Shift is a buddy comedy. Two guys, ultimately Henry Winkler played one part and Michael Keaton played the other. Those weren't the people that the studio really wanted us to get initially.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  They really wanted us to get John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, who had done The Blues Brothers and Saturday Night Live. And they were the hottest thing in comedy, especially as a duo. They were starring in a movie that ultimately didn't wind up being very successful, but at the time it looked great. We were having a hard time. At one point, we were in New York casting and they said, if you can get to this address across town in 10 minutes, John Belushi will talk to you. And we literally left our casting meeting. Brian's running through New York. It was just fantastic. We jump in a cab. This one cab is going too slow, so we give the guy. I think Brian thought he was being a big man. He threw 10 bucks at him.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  It seemed like a lot. Then we left that cab, went and gotten another one, gave him. Money. Anyway, we made it to the meeting. It wasn't that big of a deal. We wound up sitting and hanging out with a guy for like two and a half hours. And gave him the script, but he never read it. Dan Akeroyd had read it and kept saying, I really like it. And John's just, I can't get him to read it. Brian was now working every angle, talking to agents, talking to their famous manager, Bernie Brillstein. Doing all of this stuff. We couldn't do it. Then one day, we had to share this office on the Warner Brothers lot. We had no secretaries. We had nothing. Did we even have chairs? I think we might have had chairs. Barely. If we had a chair, that was it. And a phone. And we're sitting in here and Brian gets word through one of these reps that he's chased down.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  That they're on the lot doing reshoots for neighbors. So Brian says, take the script, go over there, just walk on, you can get on. You're Ron Howard, you can get on, you're famous. Find John, he said, and just talk to him and give him the script again. So I went on this mission, kind of uncomfortable. I'm a bit of an introvert. I'm not that much of a hard sell guy, but I had the script. I go, I do get on the set. No one kicks me off. I see them. I wind up hanging around with them and I think Flea was around. It was easy. It was fun. It was laughs. Totally relaxed. I left the script with them. He said, all right, all right, John. Yeah. And I left it there on the dressing room table.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  And I'm walking back, but now it's been a long time. I've been there for quite a while. And I'm walking back and I rarely do this kind of thing, but I just thought, okay, I'm going to mess with Brian. And it just came to me. I come in and Brian is almost like in some sort of Zen focused mantra position, like just thinking, just still. Been chanting that we're going to get a good result.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  And I opened the door and Brian says, how did it go? And I said, I had to hit him. He went, what? I had to hit him. What happened, Ron? I talked to him. I hung around. I did everything the way you said I should and it was going fine. I went to hand him the script and he said, no, I'm not going to look at that. And he knocked it away. And I said, oh, come on, take a look at it. And then he flung hot coffee at me. I realized I didn't have any coffee on me. So I said, I ducked it. But what do I do? I had to hit him. And Brian goes, oh, my God. And he literally slumped to the floor, like leaning against the wall, sagged to the floor. He's sitting there. And here's what he said. He said, I'm so sorry I put you in that position.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  I felt horrible because he wasn't saying, how could you blow it? He wasn't taking the bait in the way that I wanted him to. He was actually thinking about my feelings. So that's a hell of a long story to start your podcast with, but it's true. And when you talk about building trust over years, and there were so many examples, because things add up. That's the way relationships work.

• 9:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What was the same story for you, Brian? Cause I remember reading in your book, something about you seeing Ron on a lot or something and wanting to meet him for the lunch, I suppose. What turned out to be his first lunch. But what for you was the spark that allowed you to see the potential for that kind of trust over time? And why you think it's valuable and how it's developed?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Well, Ron at one time, not that early on, but he defined what trust was actually in relation to marriage and stuff. So you never want to break that trust ever. And it wasn't then, but it was one point and that stuck with me. And it still sticks with me. The idea that once you break real trust, it becomes challenging. But basically I had three different projects, but the two that I pitched to Ron, one was night shift. It was about two guys running a call girl ring out of the New York City morgue. Based on a true story. And the other one is about love. It's a romantic comedy. I wrote a couple of drafts early on and basically I superimposed the idea of a mermaid on top of

• 10:09Speaker 03

  the definition of what would be the perfect girl for, for me. We eventually, of course, got great writers to write it, Lowell Gans and Bob Luhmandel. But I wrote this rudimentary piece and it's a fantastical idea. When you say, would you please do a mermaid movie? Every person thought I was insane. They run from me in parking lots. They didn't want to hear about this fucking mermaid again. Cause I would drive people crazy like, hey, would you do this? It's about a man falling in love with a mermaid. So Ron definitely wanted to do the Caldwell Ring one first. He was an American icon, having done two huge television series and currently on Happy Days. And he just thought, I'm sort of done with this whole Happy Days image. I think I'm going to do the R rated movie.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Then I said, will you do this next? And he said, yeah, I will. The fact that he did it next, under very uncomfortable circumstance for him, because night shift, although it wasn't a big financial success, it was a huge critical success. And it made Ron fiery hot as a director. So we had a choice to do many different things because people saw that he had tremendous talent. So whatever my instincts were, were further validated in tenfold. So he stuck with the idea, I'll do the mermaid movie, but it ended up at Disney. And that was the time where their most famous movie, their most successful movie in about nine years was Gus, the field goal kicking mule. Ron just thought, I really don't want to do it at Disney and twice they'll cut it up.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Whatever I do, they'll sanitize it. They'll make her wear a bikini top, like a 40s mermaid movie. They did. They insisted that the mermaid wear a bikini top. I said, Ron, trust me, they are not going to cut the movie. So I had to prove a little bit that they wouldn't. So I went to the board and the chairman of the board was an older guy, much older guy named Card Walker. He was the chairman of the board, pretty WASP-y character. We can't have nudity at all. So I said, look, I won't be able to get this director, Ron Howard. If you guys are going to chop up the movie or she's going to wear a bathing suit top. So I have to get your sign off that it's okay for her to not have a top, wear a body stocking.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and let the hair cover her breasts. I promised that you would never actually see her breasts, but we would do it with covering her with hair and you just couldn't be wearing something from a department store.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  So as much as I think Ron creatively liked the movie, there were a lot of obstacles, including the ones I'm telling you, I could go on forever on that. And it was being offered a lot of movies. And so I love that he, in spite of his apprehensions and the tension that it caused him, he still directed it and made this tremendous film out of a mermaid movie. And that really launched both of our careers, for that matter.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  There was another factor here, which was there was a competing movie. These two movies, you've got to realize, a lot of the partnership and the trust and all the things that you're asking about were built in these two movies that wound up launching our careers, Night Shift and Splash. A lot of what we've done with Imagine, that wasn't even Imagine, that was before Imagine, but just a few years afterward, we decided to commit to the partnership and launch Imagine. And so much of what we've done with Imagine, and that's only picking up momentum as our independence grows, is really the same idea of having a business sense, but driven by creativity. There are so many people that I talk to all the time from the creative side, who say, we want to emulate Imagine. We want to do what you

• 13:40Speaker 02

  and Brian have done, which is to always be creative, chase a wide range of projects, but find an audience for them and be businesslike about it. It sounds simple, but people are usually just one thing or the other. And I think we've been able to maintain a balance. But along the way, there was one more giant hurdle for Splash. This one fell on Brian's shoulders. The most powerful producer in Hollywood at that time was a guy named Ray Stark, had his own production company, but he was also embedded with Columbia Pictures before they were Sony.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  And they would just do anything Ray Stark wanted. It was a true David and Goliath story between our Little Mermaid movie with no stars and Ray Stark, the most powerful producer in all of Hollywood. And he had a mermaid movie. And that was going to kill our mermaid movie, because he was announcing it and he had Robert Downey, who wrote Chinatown to write it. Robert Ross, I believe, was the director. Who did Turning Point, I think he was nominated or won an Oscar. So it was filled with Oscar and huge stars.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  There was a lot of urgency and at one point, the Disney people, once they've gotten over that hurdle of allowing it to be a PG movie, their first PG movie, based on Brian having gone to the board and those assurances and the budget was the appropriate amount of money, I thought, to make the movie well. They said, but what about this Ray Stark movie? And I said, well, I'm 27 years old. I will beat their movie to the market. If you say you're making the movie the way I want to make it, they just cannot do it. Herbert Ross and Warren Beatty, they're just not going to work harder, faster than I'm going to. You'll be there first. And they accepted that. But then Ray Stark, I wasn't privy to this until later, called Brian Grazer. And you should tell the story, Brian, because you lived it.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Well, he threatened me, basically.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  First, he threatened this chairman of the Motion Picture Group, who was Walt Disney's son-in-law, named Ron Miller. So we said, listen, you have to do our movie. Forget your dumb little movie. I'll give you 5% of the gross of our movie. I'll give you something for it, too. That didn't excite Ron Miller because he didn't like being threatened because he was an ex-USC football player. For me, Ray Stark called me and threatened me and said, I'd have no career. Whatever part of Hollywood I thought I was in, I wouldn't be in any longer. He was ruthless. It was almost like a prison situation where he was the Heavy. He was a heavy. And he was basically saying to me, well, every threat you could imagine. I'll keep it PG.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Then he called me again and I wouldn't even take his call. I just thought if I talk to him, then I'm going to be engaged in some little psychodrama with him. He'll completely screw me. We ended up getting it made, which was tremendous. There was one final thing. The movie gets made, it gets incredible reviews, makes tremendous amount of money in that day. Lines around the block, that was the measurement for what Ron and I wanted in a movie. Lines around the block by E.T. The new chairman of the studio named Richard, I'll leave it at Richard, said, wow, this is great. We've just been invited to the Deauville Film Festival, but he tells that to Ron and everyone but me. And I'd been carrying around this mermaid movie. It was like a mythology almost. I was this guy that kept pitching a mermaid movie and finally

• 16:55Speaker 03

  got it made. Just going to the Deauville Film Festival, but I wasn't invited. So I said, Ron, were you invited to go? Yeah, yeah, I'm invited. I said, well, they didn't even invite me. And he said, well, in that case, I won't go. I was really touched by that.

• 17:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's amazing how these crucible moments early on are so much of the foundation that's laid for what comes later. Like, the lesson I'll take from that is work really hard in those early days with somebody new that you're doing something with, and don't try to rush through it. Those early foundations are shockingly important. You said something really interesting, which was within Imagine, this balance of the business sense and the creative sense. It's not at all a leap to compare that to most companies where, as the company matures, as time goes on, more and more of the business is run in spreadsheets, and it kills the soul of the business when the CFO is running the business rather than the original person that had like a zero to one product idea. How have you kept that balance inside of Imagine?

• 17:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's been immeasurably successful. How have you kept the creative spark alive even as the business has matured?

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Well, I think when you start with a mermaid movie, which could be the stupidest idea of all time, and it works, you go, wow, everything points to that should not work, but yet it did. And there was a little piece of me in that movie and a big piece of Ron in that movie that made it work. So you kind of conclude, if you can make a mermaid movie work, then just stick to your own instincts and don't prognosticate what the market wants. Don't prognosticate anything. Don't say, oh, no, these concepts have been done before, or, oh, yeah, this is going to create a new trend, because it is a art form. If you start prognosticating the art form and how it's going to connect to the audience, or they're going to love it, then you're missing the whole point. And it doesn't really work. I

• 18:43Speaker 03

  think you have to know what connects to your soul and Trust that. And if you trust it and refine that trust and understanding and the case of Ron and I, we have the advantage of each other. So we can test these ideas back and forth. When we really feel that our gut is into it, it's very high batting average.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  And I think what we've learned to do more and more is find the people, whether they're executives or whether they're writers, producers or directors, and empower them or support them to also trust their instincts. Us and our team, we need to believe in the idea, but I would say we run away from trends. Our instinct is if you're seeing a lot of that, look in another direction fast and find somebody who shares that because it's just not manufacturing. It's not exactly a product like that, which is maddening. But there are principles that add up to engagement, entertainment, and memorable ideas and projects. We look for people who share that sensibility.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And we also learn from people coming in and taking ideas to a new place, either aesthetically or tonally.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  When Ron says there's principles, for example, there's a concept, then a story, and then there's a theme that's embedded within that story. We would test ourselves, that theme, does it have universality? And that's not trying to pick a trend. It's just trying to say, if it's about called Parenthood and it's about family, is there universality to family? We say, yes, there is. If it's Apollo 13, sure, it's about space and aviation and astronauts taking off to get to the moon. But it became about survival and people relate to family and survival. You do look for these touch points.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  And it implies even as the worlds around them are different, and you want that because it's fresher, it's compelling. But Brian's involvement with Empire reflects that sensibility and those principles. And even though it's a world that has nothing to do with the world of a movie like Parenthood or Friday Night Lights.

• 20:52Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Are there other principles like that, like the universality concept, that you find yourself returning to most commonly?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Characters. We are character driven, whether the character's on the right side of an issue or the wrong side.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Or even the case of Jack Bauer in 24. He was a great character personified through the actor Kiefer Sutherland.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Or American Gangster. Denzel Washington plays this character and it's pretty morally debatable, yet there was something underneath all of that that actually spoke to the human spirit and the need to define yourself. And Brian was very passionate about that project for those reasons. What's interesting about the company to me is when you look at it, what does Arrested Development have in common with Friday Night Lights? Or what does American Gangster have in common with the movie Rush or 13 Lives that's out right now? At first glance, you'd say, well, not a hell of a lot. Yet if you peel it away and you get to these principles of characters defining themselves, being tested, and what we can

• 21:54Speaker 02

  learn from it while engaged in a really entertaining narrative. I think that's it. We never want to bore an audience. We never want to be caught on a soapbox. But there are ideas that are present there through those thematics and the characters do what storytelling has always done, which is build a bridge of empathy to an audience and make you, the audience, say, what would I do in that situation? Would I feel the way that character feels? Would I do the things that that character is doing? I'm not sure, but it's interesting to contemplate that and feel it.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  I think I learned along the way, and I actually think Lowell and Bobbi actually said this, that you have to have conflict and you have to have stakes in a movie to really propel it so that it has life, so you care. But in the case of Apollo 13, it was their physical lives that were at stake. Lowell and Bobbi said, well, there's also emotional life. Your emotional life can be life or death as well. And that probably is demonstrated in the movie Eight Mile with Eminem. He literally would have died, not physically, but emotionally would have died because he was on the cusp of dying anyway.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's a really valuable point because a lot of people ask me in the last 20 years or so, sort of since Apollo 13, I've done a number of movies based on real events where you know the outcome. And people say, how do you maintain the suspense?

• 23:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's just interesting dynamic, yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  It boils down to two things. One, you get really granular about process and audiences find that interesting, especially when you then connect it to the personality of individuals involved. Like, this is what this person is expert at. This is what this person doesn't know how the hell to do, but tries. But the one thing that you never know is what Brian was just talking about. What is the psychological scar tissue that this character is going to come out of this with? What prices are people paying beyond the physical? When you put people in that kind of a gauntlet, it can be incredibly suspenseful and audiences can really relate and connect to it. And I think it deepens that sense of investment that you have. We're drawn to other writers and directors who find that in the way they want to tell a story.

• 23:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  When we're making investments and evaluating founding teams, often we're investing very early. One of my favorite things to do is understand the sources of motivation behind people. Like, often you find this core fire that just burns no matter what, like some deep rooted motivation. And I'm curious what that is for each of you. Brian, I've seen you say you hate bullies. One example of a motivation that runs very deep that maybe leads to a lot of these story ideas. How would you both describe, if you had to go to the innermost fire in your belly that will never run out, where does that come from for each of you?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  To me, they're like cinematic mathematical equations. So you're trying to prove out a story or an idea or a theme or all of those things within this equation. And you get the advantage of using cinematic images and people to act that out. So I just find the puzzle of it to be so fascinating. I just enjoy it. It's something I wake up every day wondering how this is going to unfold. I like narratives. But I think startups, even tech startups, you have to have a story. So stories are interesting to us.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  We depend on stories. In fact, that's really the way we think all the time. We both have come to recognize that we want to celebrate more than critique. We haven't made that many tragedies, but even when we have made a tragedy, like Ransom was arguably a tragedy, American Gangster is a tragedy. We still find within it that idea, that lesson, building this empathy bridge with the audience. And so for me, I'm always curious. I'm always looking for that empathy. Whatever the tone can be, the Grinch, but how does the Grinch feel? What's it like to be around the Grinch? What's it like to be the Grinch? You can deal with it comedically, or you can deal with it very earnestly, or you can deal with it in a fantasy environment. And we've done all of that.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  But whether it's Liar Liar, and it's a crazy wild fantasy comedy, or Nutty Professor, or we're making one right now with Eddie Murphy, Candy Cane Lane, which is really fantastical and hilarious. It still boils down to giving the audience insight and an opportunity to connect with those characters and come away with feeling something and understanding something. I think we both really share that. Ryan and I are very different guys, different sensibilities in a lot of ways. But, and I think it's another reason the partnership has worked so well. And I think it's another reason that the projects are so diverse. We're both curious, and I think curiosity is another thing that really drives us. I think a story feels like it works,

• 26:31Speaker 02

  but neither of us is particularly curious about the world or the characters or their particular predicament. I don't think we're as inclined to really throw our support behind it. But all of this has led to a company that I'm really proud of because we've succeeded in a lot of areas of narrative. And we've made money at it for ourselves and our partners.

• 26:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I think curiosity needs to be the next major chapter in our conversation because it seems to be the uniting factor between the two of you. And I think also the insight, Brian, that I've seen you say elsewhere, that curiosity precedes innovation. Like everyone wants innovation. That's the word that you'll see in Harvard Business Review case studies or something, but what really has to come before that almost by definition is curiosity. I'd love you to just begin by outlining these curiosity conversations that you've been having for decades now, why you started them. I love the spirit of this exercise that you've been doing. And maybe we could start there.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  I'm just going to tee this up before Brian tells it because I'm just going to corroborate, which I always do for people when they ask me about Brian's book and these curiosity conversations. I always say, he's been doing them our entire relationship. They are literally purely curiosity conversations. So go ahead, Brian.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  It's true. I've never really commodified them. Anyway, I should have started a podcast. Why didn't I?

• 27:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Would have been the best.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Would have been the first one. In any event, I have been doing these for about 35 years. Every week I reach out to somebody that is expert in anything other than what we do for a living. It won't be media related. It will be science, medicine, all art forms, religion, all aspects of faith, technology, anything other than media. It's got to be at least 100 Nobel laureates over time. And I just use this sort of internal engine of curiosity to seek somebody out. I mean, I still have a handwritten letter to Edward Teller, who is the father of the hydrogen bomb.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  And that was about 30 years ago, I guess. Oh, that was during Splash because I told Ron and Tom Hanks that he insulted me.

• 28:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  He was a grumpy guy, right? Notoriously.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  He was a really grumpy guy. And he said, oh, you know, I don't see the importance of storytelling. The humanity of it doesn't matter. He was a pure technocrat. So basically I will curate many of them. I'll create a list and I'll send out letters, now emails. And then I wait for the timing where someone actually can or is willing to meet with me. And almost everybody will say yes, even reluctantly, but it might take a year or it might take two years. Jonas Salk, creator of the polio vaccine, childhood hero of probably all of ours. It took two and a half years. It's just something that I do is create this and there's no ask involved. I make it clear that I'm not going to ask for anything. There isn't any request.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  They can stay as short as they want or as long as they want. Isaac Asimov, the most prolific science fiction writer, he lasted only a couple of minutes and then left. I flew coach to New York and his wife didn't feel like he was clicking. So.

• 29:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  We're out of here.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  We're leaving. But I have had people that last three or four hours, actually.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  I once asked Brian, not that long ago, maybe a decade or so ago, in our relationship, that's not so long. Why do you do it? Really, why do you do it? Before he wrote the book or anything, and Brian's somewhat dyslexic. So he's not going to sit down and devour a book on a subject. He gets a lot by connecting with people and beginning to understand what makes them tick. So they not only describe their subject and he learns from that, but he also just understands their approach to life, which is very edifying for him. He's always trying to improve himself based on those conversations. And the other thing, we're in the taste business. I want to make knee jerk decisions that are informed and based on good taste.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  And when I'm in these conversations with these people, I have to be at my best intellectually, but I'm also understanding our world better. And I'm drawing from that, something that I can apply in an instant when we have to decide about a script or a casting or a subject for a TV show or a movie. And I see that, I witness that all the time.

• 30:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Brian, early on, I'm sure it's gotten easier as you've become more well-known, maybe even just for these conversations, but more well-known in general. When you were lesser known and asking for these things, how did you do it? What was the structure of the sales pitch, so to speak, to get someone to come do this with you if they didn't know who you were?

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Well, I learned even as a law clerk at Warner Brothers that assistants, secretaries, assistants, chiefs of staff, whatever it is, all the protection or assistance that any of these people have, you have to work them really hard. You have to entertain them, you have to be respectful, you have to know your time limits. You have to have a reason for why you want to meet their boss. Usually, certainly now with Google, you can create your reason quickly. All you need is one reason other than, I really respect him. Those general requests just don't work. You respect them for what reason?

• 31:43Speaker 03

  So you have to give them something specific so that they carry that to their boss and ultimately the boss. Even today, I have three assistants and I won't let them make telephone calls for me. I will always, to this day, make my own outgoing phone calls because I always want to get the tip on the jump ball. I don't want to put somebody on hold. I want to always be not only there for that person so that when I'm calling, it's my voice, but also I want to be able to talk to the assistant. And usually I try to entertain them, try to be funny. Or at least warm or funny so that I'm differentiated because I think everything is about, look, everybody wants Tom Hanks in a movie. Everybody wants Denzel Washington in a movie.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  You want to be the most interesting person for those people. I do think there's a few actors that thought, well, Grazer is probably pretty resourceful. He knows a lot of different subjects so that when we get in this inevitable foxhole on the movie, he'll get me out of it. So I think there's something kind of primordial about that, too.

• 32:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What is the role of meeting people and maybe even telling stories in movies or TV that you either actively dislike or strongly disagree with? How many of those curiosity conversations would you seek out, like the Daryl Gates story pops to mind from the book, where you would seek out someone where your expectation going in is this is not going to be like kumbaya, like I'm learning about somebody that on the face of it, I probably don't agree with?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, there are many people that I would go to meet that are achieving something, making a difference, but they're making maybe a negative difference in my view. Could be politically, it could be racially, it could be a lot of different things because I want to be enlightened from all perspectives. And that of course lends itself to storytelling. It mostly just widens my aperture of knowledge about motivation. What is motivating a person? I remember meeting with Fidel Castro for six and a half hours for lunch and I wasn't about ready to like sign up for communism, living in their country. And I couldn't condone all the people he killed or tortured or starved, but I really wanted to know how he thought

• 33:56Speaker 03

  and how he would actually demonstrate charm. All of these people, everybody is charming when they want something. And if they're successful at it, they're charming and smart, cunning. There was a time when I was talking to Fidel that I thought, I really get it. I get why people follow him. He knows the people and he knows the physics of this little island that he's the dictator of. He knows what a kilowatt represents in a home. I remember just breaking down the physics of the island, every aspect of it. He was pretty granular. He was good at it and it was convincing.

• 34:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Ron, as you think about the role of curiosity for you as a director and as a producer, go into like the nitty gritty of that. Curiosity is a great sounding word. I think a lot of people don't realize it also often means a lot of work and grit and grind.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  For me, movies and TV shows, I'm more now speaking as a kind of producer-director than I am as a company guy. With the company, it's fascinating for me to understand the sensibilities, the aesthetics of a lot of different people and try to figure out how to support that and get excited about it and make smart decisions with Brian and with our team. When I'm directing, it's much more than that because I'm asking the questions and looking for leads. I'm looking for the kinds of threads that are going to reinforce the entertainment value of the story. And often that's insight. You're going to deepen an emotional idea, even if you don't describe it in the movie, if you understand a character's motivation, you can share it with an actor,

• 35:28Speaker 02

  it's going to deepen that actor's performance at a key moment. If you understand the mechanics of how something happens, you can decide which ones are surprising and interesting and you want to convey that to an audience. You can actually create moments which wind up being aha moments out of details. For me, it really is about delving and continuing to follow up, follow up. How does it work? How did it feel? Why did it go the way it went? Whether it's a true story or not, it can be fiction. And I'm asking those questions because in my mind, you create a world and it becomes real to you. And you decide what the physics are, whether that's Whoville for

• 36:07Speaker 02

  The Grinch, or The Galaxy Far, Far Away, or whatever it might be. To me, it's part of the job. I'm curious as well and I'm interested, but it fills in the mosaic of a narrative in incredibly useful ways. And it also really activates the team. What I do is I ask the team, production designer, first AD, cinematographer, costume designer, props, take all of your best research and let's put it on the walls of the production office, especially by the kitchen and the bathroom where people inevitably are gonna go. I put up video monitors where I run an endless loop of documentary footage,

• 36:50Speaker 02

  or other movies, or visual references, or anything. And we just turn the sound on and have it going so that slowly but surely, people are just being inculcated and informed by details. It stirs conversations, or it leads to shortcuts where you say, this moment needs to kind of look like this picture. And it's just fun and stimulating. And soon, everybody's pulling in the same direction in a really exciting way.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Certainly, in building our company, and it's grown quite a bit, we try to find people that have that same engine, that have curiosity. And not everybody does. My belief is that I don't think you can really teach it. It's not really sustainable. You're either constructed to want to know what's behind that door, or you're not.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  And you gotta have the right kind of ambition. You gotta have an ambitious curiosity, because it is about getting to something that of course you're gonna wind up applying. But it's not simplistic. Like, when people say, what's an Imagine show? What's an Imagine movie? I always say, well, it's good, hopefully. But yeah, it's about characters and it's about things that we find important and entertaining. You've got to be understanding fundamentals about story and narrative, and the market, and your buyers, and all that. But you've also got to be really ambitiously trying to go deeper than that, and be excited about that search.

• 38:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  There's this tremendous demand on our attention and competition for our attention. And so, we talk all the time with companies about the role of story. Like, you have to have a story as a business for recruiting, for everything, right? If there's no good story, it's very hard to win. And everyone can go look up the classic storytelling techniques. There's lots of great ones out there. What about the inverse? What have you found to be the biggest mistakes in storytelling that people trying to weave a narrative about their thing should most actively avoid?

• 38:41Speaker 03

  I made a movie that people thought, and I thought was amazing. I let my friend see it as rough cut and he said, well, who do you like? And I thought, oh shit. So you do have to like your protagonist. It could just be a gesture of generosity that your protagonist has. You have to like something about them. And I produced a movie about somebody that just wasn't likable. You didn't find the character's nobility, or generosity, or faith, or kindness. They didn't have that.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  We've actually been getting involved in doing some of this because Imagine has grown in ways. We have a kids and family group, Tiny Chef and Bossy Bear. But we also have a branded group. Sometimes we spend time talking about finding what is laudable, likable? What's winning about a company's history? Is there a natural mantra? Is there a feeling that you get? And I know advertising agencies spend a lot of time thinking about it, but we look at it along with Mark Gilbar, who runs that group for us, a little more holistically and try to help find surprising ways in which brands can express their story in ways that are winning and relatable. Again, that you can connect to. You need to connect and also feel like you learned something.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Just connecting is kind of, you just fold your arms and nod. If you feel like you can connect and relate, plus there's some new information, there's some new idea, there's some new feeling, then it feels a lot fresher. I think our documentary group has been inspiring to all of us. It's Justin Wilks and Sarah Bernstein who run it. And we love working on them, but we also love the filmmakers and voices who are coming in and these subjects. And I think everybody on the scripted side, don't you agree, Brian? Everybody gets fired up by the closeness to these stories.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, they get excited about all the subjects and the success of the subjects. Most recently, Louis Armstrong is out. You kind of admire the speed and tenacity in which they're getting made. And they're all classy subjects. One was Lucille Ball. One is going to be the Hinsons. We have Marty Scorsese who's done a couple with us. We did ILM, which is, I think, six hours.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  I had one about Jose Andres and World Central Kitchen.

• 40:52Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Oh, wow. Cool.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  In fact, I was just in Washington DC. His portrait was included in the National Gallery, which was a great honor and fun to be around.

• 40:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you both think back on your careers and setting aside the formative splash, night shift days, what would you say is the defining moment of your career?

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Should we be really commercial and say when we won Oscars?

• 41:13Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  That's boring.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  It's not a defining moment, but it's happened two or three times where we launched our company as a public company and then found that some of the principles, the model, didn't hold up. So suddenly, while we had committed to this thing and while money was running out, we had to trust ourselves and find a partner who would embrace what we were doing. And we had to take some financial risk at the same time that we hadn't expected we would. And we did all this. We wound up landing at Universal and having a very long relationship with them. And while we've moved on from that because we raised money and broadened where we think the company can go and what it can do beyond a singular relationship.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  I thought that was very defining because the company couldn't have just expired at that point. And we would have still had careers and we would have worked together and separately or whatever. We had that kind of ambition, but turning that corner and surviving that. And then five, six years later, realizing that being a public company didn't really make sense and taking another big step, including some financial risk on our part and taking it private. Those two giant steps while just continuing to be creative and saying, all we want to do is find great stories and tell them. That's what the company was built around.

• 42:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What do you think, Brian? Anything different stand out for you as a defining moment?

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Well, my gut is on this question because we both are so failure adverse. And we've been successful for a long time. I realized that you can survive a movie failing. I didn't think I could survive if a movie failed. I mean, I just thought I'm physically dying. I realized that, wow, that happens. You can have a few movies that don't work or a television show that doesn't work. But if you just go at it with the same amount of intensity and curiosity and life and buoyancy, you'll get through it. Then talented people do. You get through it and you climb the next mountain. That's it.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  I did think that failing in a movie would be just tragic. I'd say to Ron, is that the end of our careers? And then, of course, there'd be this whole other chapter with better results. So that's a big thing to me.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  That was true. And even go through a period of a down 18 months or even two years and begin to have the confidence to know that if you just keep slugging, keep going, keep finding, that you'd have these breakthroughs. And once you see that cycle happen a few times, you begin to trust it. I had the advantage that Brian didn't have of growing up in a business where, you know, the Andy Griffith Show went for eight years and was a huge success, never got a good review, never.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Just ripped.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't know.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Happy days every year would just get torn apart by the critics and kind of ignored by the award circuit, both shows with a couple of exceptions. And while they were successful, I was also in and around other things that weren't. And I would see my own father, who was a career character actor. You never want to disappoint. You don't want to fail as a producer or a director. But I had a little more confidence in the fact that, especially when we had some good early successes, I felt like if we just kept with it, and we're still keeping with it. The other thing is, I don't think either of us, I think we're excited about the company, but I think we're discovering the company anew almost every six months. The business shifts, who you can collaborate with, it shifts.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  And yet, the fundamentals are the same, the drive to solve is the same, but it's kind of the medium that can't be mastered. That's sort of the good news for us.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  What makes it fun?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  I don't think we ever feel like we can coast. I don't think anybody at our company believes that either. I guess if they did, they wouldn't be here.

• 45:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  As you think about the state of entertainment today, it seems like the core thing itself, like the stories that drive it, lasts forever. The universality things that you talked about earlier as appealing to in each of these stories is going to be around forever. But the technology and the business and the distribution, like all this stuff around the story seems to have gone into warp speed in the last, call it 20 years, the era of modern technology. How do you think about that? Does it occupy much mind share? Or are you just thinking about this as, look, this is the wave we're on? We'll distribute in the ways that are popular. Any closing thoughts on the role of the change of the business and what it's like to work within it, given that you've done so for so long?

• 45:37Speaker 03

  You just have to be adaptable. The advantage that Ron and I have cognitively is that we've always done stories of all sizes, shapes and forms. If all of a sudden, people aren't doing TV any longer, they're just doing movies, we know how to do that. If TV is becoming only 22 minutes, the most profitable and most exciting are the 22-minute shows, and that's that. We've done that with Arrested Development and a few others. You just have to be able to use all the tools you've got in that toolkit.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  I would say that both of us, I think I learned a lot from Brian about this, but I think it was my instinct as well. I don't think we fear the gatekeepers. I don't think we fear the decision makers. We know how to be influential, but we also know how to listen and work with them. We like a lot of different things, too. It's not like there's one lane that's the only thing that we really love to do. We have a real interest in telling a lot of different kinds of stories and dealing with different characters. It's an incredibly challenging time for them. I think we appear as the people who can help. Because as Brian said, you need this? We know how to do that. We know the people who know how to do it, too. You need a little more of that? Talk to us. We're excited about it, and that's genuine.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  It doesn't represent some sort of adjustment from us. All it really is, is recalibrating our focus or the impetus around it and knowing that it's going to change right away. The other thing that I would just say is that all of this, in terms of platforms and where things live and where they sustain, in its own way, it's heightening the drive for quality. Now, I know that's a little antithetical to what you're hearing, where there's so much stuff, there's so much clutter, that how much of it can be good? Well, I'll tell you, the stuff that lasts is what's going to be good. The stuff that cuts through is going to be what's good. It's exciting that a lot of things can get done. The reins are being pulled in a little bit as we speak, but there's still a large appetite for content, and that's a great thing.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  In a lot of ways, it's fueling the creative community, certainly the people we want to be in business with and who reflect our ambitions for what a movie or a TV show can be. It fuels to be better, because that's the stuff that's going to cut through, and that's what we're always trying for.

• 47:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I have two closing questions for you. The first is around this unique experience that you've had where if you think about each of these creative projects is almost like a little mini startup. And especially interesting in that they're discreet, meaning they end like the thing is produced and released. You've kind of had more startup experience than anybody alive collectively. Say a bit about how you've gotten better at getting things from zero to one, especially around recruiting, galvanizing and motivating the team that does it. Obviously you're leading the project, but there's lots of people involved. I'm just so fascinated by this since you've done more of it than anyone else I've ever talked to.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  You have to start with being curious enough to want to fill the white space, starting from zero every time, not in conflict with what I said about trends and all that. It's more of, you do have to be aware of the culture. So you have to be sensitive to, right now, we're in a divided nation. Should there be a divided nation? Probably not. Probably we should all find a way to coexist better together. You're not going to necessarily solve that politically, but stories can do that. Stories can lead you to do that. Am I interested in trying to do that? Yes, we have a couple of movies that are designed to try to do that. So you have to be sensitive to what's going on in the culture, what's going on in the world and where the problems are in the world.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  And I think you have to be excited about each one as a discrete opportunity. They are adventures, but the people that we deal with, the people that we bring into the company, they're not in a one and done mentality. They want this to be their life's work as well. I think for us, the novelty is part of it. The newness, the high wire act, it's part of it. I think if you took that away, we'd probably get a little bored or suddenly I would start to feel like manufacturing, which is again, not really what we do. There is building on something. There is taking a good idea and letting it run for seasons or finding those spinoffs. But that's just finding value, narrative value, character values in ideas.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  So what we like about frankly, working with the brands is often their brand narrative is an interesting jumping off place. We're finding that the documentary subjects are inspiring. They're inspiring scripted content, scripted projects for us to do. Everything informs everything else and there's a lot of, wouldn't that be great? And we have that kind of excitement around a company. Yeah, we could do this and then we could, oh man, we could, then we could do a scripted version of that. Well, that would be exciting. That's just part of the culture, but it's also built into our, the people who inhabit this business.

• 50:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I've just so enjoyed not only today's conversation, but all the output over the years from both of you, whether it's shows or movies. I remember seeing Apollo 13 for the first time and just the exact same thing you said before, like, how could this be so good, given I know it's gonna happen? It's a testament to why stories are so important and it's not just about plot. And so much of this can be applied to business, to investing, to all acts of life. I have a fun, traditional closing question, so I get to ask each of you this time. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 50:54Speaker 03

  I have a few. Currently, there's somebody on our board named Jeff who is so selfless. And I've had this relationship with him and probably other than Ron, most trusted friend. And he just is pure generous. He's constantly offering his expertise and advice endlessly. I think he likes to mentor, so I became a mentee.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Henry Winkler is like about seven or eight years older than I am. And we went through this period for me as a young guy where his character became so famous and it took off and was explosive. And he had opportunities to go do his own show called Fonzie. And then they wanted to change the name of Happy Days to Fonzie's Happy Days. And I didn't want to do that. Gary Marshall did a very kind thing by backing me up. But in retrospect, and I didn't really think about this until I was working on this book with boys that my brother Clint and I did and put out last year, which is really just about our growing up in the business. It's not about our adult lives and careers. But I recognized Henry Winkler had done such a great job of being older,

• 51:57Speaker 02

  being in this power position and making me feel okay with everything that was going on, giving me a certain kind of power and confidence. And it was interesting because all these years later, working on this book, I kind of recognized that that was an act of kindness that I really appreciated. And then a few years later, when we couldn't get John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, Henry jumped in and agreed to star in Night Shift and basically got our movie greenlit, which he enjoyed, by the way, but I just felt like, wow, Henry was good to me. And I would characterize them as acts of kindness.

• 52:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, I won't forget the discussion on the early building of trust between the two of you. I think it's such an incredible story and lesson to take away. It's great to meet you in this format, Brian. Thank you so much, both of you, for your time.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Pleasure. Thanks, Patrick.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Thanks a lot. Thanks for doing it. Great being with you.

• 52:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.