A Curious Mind

Introduction:
A Curious Mind and a Curious Book

— ONE —

There Is No Cure for Curiosity

— TWO —

The Police Chief, the Movie Mogul, and the Father of the H-Bomb: Thinking Like Other People

— THREE —

The Curiosity Inside the Story

— FOUR —

Curiosity as a Superhero Power

— FIVE —

Every Conversation Is a Curiosity Conversation

— SIX —

Good Taste and the Power of Anti-Curiosity

— SEVEN —

The Golden Age of Curiosity

Brian Grazer's Curiosity Conversations: A Sampler

Brian Grazer's Curiosity Conversations: A List

Appendix: How to Have a Curiosity Conversation

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Notes

Index

For my Grandma Sonia Schwartz.

Starting when I was a boy, she treated every question I asked as valuable.

She taught me to think of myself as curious, a gift that has served me every day of my life.

INTRODUCTION

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

—Albert Einstein
¹

IT SEEMS LIKE A GOOD
idea to start a book about curiosity by asking an obvious question:

What's a guy like me doing writing a book about curiosity?

I'm a movie and TV producer. I live immersed in the most densely populated epicenter of entertainment in the world: Hollywood.

Whatever picture you have of the life of a Hollywood
movie producer, I've probably lived it. We often have ten or more movies and TV shows in production at a time, so work means meeting with actors, writers, directors, musicians. The phone calls—with agents, producers, studio heads, stars—start well before I reach the office, and often follow me home in the car. I fly to the movie sets, I screen the trailers, I go to the red-carpet premieres.

My days are hectic, they're overscheduled, they're sometimes frustrating. Usually, they're great fun. They're never dull.

But I'm not a journalist or a professor. I'm not a scientist. I don't go home at night and research psychology as a secret hobby.

I'm a Hollywood producer.

So what
am
I doing writing a book about curiosity?

Without curiosity, none of this would have happened.

More than intelligence or persistence or connections, curiosity has allowed me to live the life I wanted.

Curiosity is what gives energy and insight to everything else I do. I love show business, I love telling stories. But I loved being curious long before I loved the movie business.

For me, curiosity infuses everything with a sense of possibility. Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to my success, and also the key to my happiness.

And yet, for all the value that curiosity has brought to my life and my work, when I look around, I don't see people talking about it, writing about it, encouraging it, and using it nearly as widely as they could.

Curiosity has been the most valuable quality, the most important resource, the central motivation of my life. I think curiosity should be as much a part of our culture, our educational system, our workplaces, as concepts like “creativity” and “innovation.”

That's why I decided to write a book about curiosity. It made my life better (and still does). It can make your life better too.

•  •  •

I AM CALLED A
movie producer—I even call myself that—but really what I am is a storyteller. A couple of years ago, I started thinking about curiosity as a value I wanted to share, a quality I wanted to inspire in other people. I thought, What I'd really like to do is sit down and tell a few stories about what curiosity has done for me.

I'd like to tell stories about how curiosity has helped me make movies. I'd like to tell stories about how curiosity has helped me be a better boss, a better friend, a better businessman, a better dinner guest.

I'd like to tell stories about the sheer joy of discovery that open-ended curiosity offers. That's the kind of joy we have as kids when we learn things just because we're curious. You can keep doing that as an adult, and it's just as much fun.

The most effective way to pass on these stories—to illustrate the power and variety of curiosity—is to write them down.

So that's what you're holding in your hand. I teamed up with journalist and author Charles Fishman, and over the course of eighteen months, we talked two or three times a week—we've had more than a hundred conversations, every one of them about curiosity.

I know very well how important curiosity has been to my life. As you'll see in the coming chapters, I long ago figured out how to be systematic about using curiosity to help me tell stories, to help me make good movies, to help me learn about parts of the world far from Hollywood. One of the things I've done for thirty-five years is sit down and have conversations with people from outside show business—“curiosity conversations” with people immersed in everything from particle physics to etiquette.

But I had never turned my curiosity on curiosity itself. So I've spent the last two years thinking about it, asking questions about it, trying to understand how it works.

In the course of exploring and unpacking it, in the course of diagramming curiosity and dissecting its anatomy, we discovered something interesting and surprising. There's a spectrum of curiosity, like there's a spectrum of colors of light. Curiosity comes in different shades and different intensities for different purposes.

The technique is the same—asking questions—regardless of the subject, but the mission, the motivation, and the tone vary. The curiosity of a detective trying to solve a murder is very different from the curiosity of an architect trying to get the floor plan right for a family's house.

The result is, admittedly, a slightly unusual book. We tell it in the first person, in the voice of Brian Grazer, because the central stories come from my life and work.

Partly, then, the book is a portrait of me. But, in fact, it's more of a working portrait of curiosity itself.

Curiosity has taken me on a lifetime of journeys. Asking questions about curiosity itself in the last two years has been fascinating.

And one thing I know about curiosity: it's democratic. Anyone, anywhere, of any age or education level, can use it. One reminder of curiosity's quiet power is that there are still countries on Earth where you have to be very careful at whom you aim your curiosity. Being curious in Russia has proven fatal; being curious in China can land you in prison.

But even if your curiosity is suppressed, you can't lose it.

It's always on, always waiting to be unleashed.

The goal of
A Curious Mind
is simple: I want to show you how valuable curiosity can be, and remind you how much fun it is. I want to show you how I use it, and how you can use it.

Life isn't about finding the answers, it's about asking the questions.

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

—Dorothy Parke
r
¹

ONE THURSDAY AFTERNOON, THE SUMMER
after I graduated from the University of Southern California (USC), I was sitting in my apartment in Santa Monica with the windows open, thinking about how to get some work until I started law school at USC in the fall.

Suddenly, through the windows, I overheard two guys talking just outside. One said, “Oh my God, I had the cushiest job at
Warner Bros. I got paid for eight hours of work every day, and it was usually just an hour.”

This guy got my attention. I opened the window a little more so I wouldn't miss the rest of the conversation, and I quietly closed the curtain.

The guy went on to say he had been a legal clerk. “I just quit today. My boss was a man named Peter Knecht.”

I was amazed. Sounded perfect to me.

I went right to the telephone, dialed 411,
²
and asked for the main number at Warner Bros.—I still remember it, 954-6000.
³

I called the number and asked for Peter Knecht. An assistant in his office answered, and I said to her, “I'm going to USC law school in the fall, and I'd like to meet with Mr. Knecht about the law clerk job that's open.”

Knecht got on the line. “Can you be here tomorrow at 3 p.m.?” he asked.

I met with him on Friday at 3 p.m. He hired me at 3:15. And I started work at Warner Bros. the next Monday.

I didn't quite realize it at that time, but two incredible things happened that day in the summer of 1974.

First, my life had just changed forever. When I reported for work as a legal clerk that Monday, they gave me a windowless office the size of a small closet. At that moment, I had found my life's work. From that tiny office, I joined the world of show business. I never again worked at anything else.

I also realized that curiosity had saved my ass that Thursday afternoon. I've been curious as long as I can remember. As a
boy, I peppered my mother and my grandmother with questions, some of which they could answer, some of which they couldn't.

By the time I was a young man, curiosity was part of the way I approached the world every day. My kind of curiosity hasn't changed much since I eavesdropped on those guys at my apartment complex. It hasn't actually changed that much since I was an antsy twelve-year-old boy.

My kind of curiosity is a little wide-eyed, and sometimes a little mischievous. Many of the best things that have happened in my life are the result of curiosity. And curiosity has occasionally gotten me in trouble.

But even when curiosity has gotten me in trouble, it has been interesting trouble.

Curiosity has never let me down. I'm never sorry I asked that next question. On the contrary, curiosity has swung wide many doors of opportunity for me. I've met amazing people, made great movies, made great friends, had some completely unexpected adventures, even fallen in love—because I'm not the least bit embarrassed to ask questions.

That first job at Warner Bros. studios in 1974 was exactly like the tiny office it came with—confining and discouraging. The assignment was simple: I was required to deliver final contract and legal documents to people with whom Warner Bros. was doing business. That's it. I was given envelopes filled with documents and the addresses where they should go, and off I went.

I was called a “legal clerk,” but I was really just a glorified courier. At the time, I had an old BMW 2002—one of the boxy two-door BMW sedans that looked like it was leaning forward. Mine was a faded red-wine color, and I spent my days driving around Hollywood and Beverly Hills, delivering stacks of important papers.

I quickly identified the one really interesting thing about the job: the people to whom I was bringing the papers. These were the elite, the powerful, the glamorous of 1970s Hollywood—the writers, directors, producers, stars. There was only one problem: people like that always have assistants or secretaries, doormen or housekeepers.