Brian Grazer: The Life of Brian

"I like to make money on my movies," says Brian evenly. "I really care about that. I really am driven to please the audience. Art for art's sake, I can't do that. The closest thing I did--but that wasn't really art--I made Closet Land with essentially my own money."

An essay on Third World torture, the 1991 Closet Land was so out of character for Imagine that Leonard Maltin exclaimed, "Co-produced by Ron Howard!" in his Movie and Video Guide 1992. Made for a million-eight and starring Madeleine Stowe and Alan Rickman, the story congealed out of a series of meetings Brian had with ex-political prisoner Veronica DeNegri, after being introduced to her by Sting and Bruce Springsteen during the Amnesty International Tour.

"The woman was an inspiration. She survived torture in Chile and she might be one of the very few people who've survived torture that you can come across who is still capable of being hopeful and inspirational. I'm also fascinated with torture, itself." For a man willing to wrangle with Oliver Stone and a cast of 500 hippie-extras, that goes without saying.

"My life," says Grazer, "is collateralized by lots of interests. And more than that, my life, which is fueled by curiosity, and my search for the truth and happiness are commensurate to one another. If I don't feel like I'm in a state of truth, whatever that might be...I'm not completely happy. And because I'm driven by curiosity, if I'm not learning things, or experiencing new things, then I'm not as happy as I would like to be--"

"A state of truth? Does that happen often?"

"Well, yeah..." Grazer avows, sounding like a guy with a system for beating blackjack, for doubling down on providence. "I have different epiphanies."

"So what was your last one?"

"Tell me yours first," Brian counters.

Okay. I discovered not long ago that the debilitating allergy to mediocrity from which I suffer--brought on by things as disparate as those little black arrows that say "key buy" in the market, PTA cupcakes and the Ford logo--attacks women as well. And in the middle of a left turn at an intersection, it hit me like an electrical shock that in Jimi Hendrix's sublime composition, "Castles Made of Sand," it's perfectly okay for him to sing, "And so castles made of sand...slips in the sea," instead of slip.

How all of this can somehow be transferred into Brian Grazer's "useful revelations" file might best be summarized by the expression he casts on my epiphanies. It is a look that suggests a walk through the stables in a pair of slippers.

"I've had some money-related epiphanies," Brian says, now taking his turn. "They're all different--money, for example, in terms of the importance or lack of importance of it. People will do just about anything--people will put themselves through a lot of pain and defer a lot of happiness to have or accumulate money."

"You never did?"

"Not so much, not so much. But I don't care that much about money. I'm driven by other things. I like making money, but money for me is a by-product of other things. I like the process of making movies. I would be richer if I cared more about money."

There is an element of truth in this otherwise specious remark. Due to Imagine's corporate structure (when the company went public back in '86, Grazer and Howard agreed to reinvest their creative fees from other films into Imagine), Imagine's co-founders found themselves short-changed during the '80s boom where, had they been free to offer their services in the open market, they might have realized markedly greater earnings. Grazer and Howard have announced that come this November they will not renew their existing contracts with the company they run together, and will perhaps re-imagine Imagine in a way more to their liking.

"But I still suffer from that to a certain degree. Of liking money more than I should. There are people I know who have seven or eight hundred million dollars that would give up all their money to not have certain physical ailments, like horrible back trouble or arthritic conditions. Or being psychologically imperiled because of their up-bringing. They'd give up almost everything to be free from that. Since I'm not psychologically abused, or because I'm physically in perfect condition, I don't have to make that trade. So it leads me to the conclusion that I should live every single day like the guy that's willing to give up everything to be in the position that I am in. I'm really lucky and I have to take complete advantage of that."

It would not take a divining rod to determine that the subtext here points to a moderate preoccupation with money. Is this a weakness? In a business that has ultimately been forced to grapple with the economic morass the rest of the country has had a head start on, obviously not.

A popular conception rests with the assumption that Brian Grazer is boyish, that his enthusiasm can be traced to an arrested adolescence, that if you're in a room with him you can expect to hear the clang of a study-hall bell. In fact, this is not exactly true, unless foregoing a tie and a suit puts you in Doogie Howser's age group. If, indeed, he bears an attribute associated with the young, it might be a weakness for immediate gratification. To appease the near-gluttony of his curiosity, he holds meetings with physicists, hangs out with think tank genius-stiffs from the RAND corporation, talks Nobel prize winner Donald Cram into giving him a crash course in molecular structure, picks the brain of a political prisoner. And unwilling to neglect the psychic and the physical, he has his surfboard and a hankering for sweat lodges.

"It's the oldest form of church in the North American continent. You stay in about an hour and a half. The real place to go is on an Indian burial ground. When we were location-shooting in Montana for Far and Away, I found one there." If you're envisioning Arnie and Mel and Julia shorting out their portable flip phones with perspiration, forget it. Says Brian, "There's a lot of effort that goes into them. First of all, the only place you can go locally is in Point Dume, north of Malibu where there's an Indian burial ground. It's work because you have to have the right people in the sweat lodge. You want a chief in there, like Nobby Brown, the Crow Indian. You want other Indians. You wanna make sure that some rock star's not in there with you. You don't want it to be this Hollywood thing. What you're trying to do, after all, is to take your mind off of yourself, and put it on a higher plane, or, at the very minimum, another plane."

Grazer is about to eschew higher planes in favor of the full-strength glitz of Cannes, where Europeans will get an early glimpse of Far and Away. But before submitting to such things as the inevitable tyranny of Madonna's cups, Brian will visit his mother, who owns a home in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. Along with him, he'll take his girlfriend, his two kids, a nanny and his surfboard. "The surf there is fantastic--it's the Mexican pipeline," Grazer enthuses, his voice rising to the swell of a six-foot knuckle. "Surfing is obsessive. It's completely different than any other sport--it's an adrenaline-provoking sport--because the variables are changing all the time. The water always changes. The wave changes in height, speed and dimension and there are people on that wave other than you. It's a synergy between the wave and the competition of the other people on the wave."

Setting his chopsticks aside for a brief moment to give what must be a tapeworm as long as the twine used to wrap Michael Bolton's hate mail a rest, Brian gives me a canny once-over. "I know you'd like there to be a parallel to the rush of my business, but there isn't. The only thing that has a similar axis point, from my side of the business, is that I create and make movies and I have no idea, really, how the public is going to react to them. You just never know. I like that sense of complete unpredictability to a certain degree. The excitement of surfing comes from its own unpredictability. I don't wanna get beat up ... but I kinda like the idea that it's possible."

Brian abruptly announces that it's time to stop, but he looks puzzled when I reach to flip off my recorder.

"Oh, I meant eating. I don't like to eat for too many hours. It's 2:30 and I really should stop."

"You mean you time yourself for eating?"

"Yeah, I guess that's how organized I am ... See, if I'm going to eat at 7:30 tonight, I don't want to be eating after 2:30 in the afternoon."

"You can't just eat until you're full?"

"I don't get full. I could eat this and go up for another round. So I have to time myself. I'm extremely organized." Grazer shrugs. "And I suppose that could be viewed as a strength and a weakness. To the good, I have everything compartmentalized and sorted out. But it's probably not fun to live with. I'm not Felix Unger, but I'm in that category."

Speaking of the anal retentive, that brings us to Tom Cruise's Irish brogue in Far and Away.

"Perfect," Brian insists. "He lived with this Irish family for three months."

"I read somewhere that he has some kind of sound technology to improve the quality of his voice," I say, referring to reports that a few of Cruise's fellow Scientologists developed some high-tech recording equipment designed to erase a perceived squeak in his voice.

"No, no, no, he's just a fanatic," Grazer says in a tone of forgiveness. "He's a total perfectionist and he really, really works hard. He has sound equipment that's good and we used it. D'you see him on Barbara Walters? Didn't he look cute?"

He looked fine, sure. My groaning at this point has more to do with the lemon-lipped huckster of living legends, the diva of the discerning stare, as piercing as a rubber knife.

Brian responds to my objection. "Movie studios saying, 'Tom, get out there and plug the movie.' Cruise would not do it--if he wasn't promoting the film, he wouldn't do it. Everyone's different, but..."

"Would you do it?"

"Well, yeah. I'm not gonna lie to you. I would do it. Thing is, the quality of people that she's had has been so consistently good. Look at 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.' I loved that show at first. First six episodes were great, until after a while it got to the point where you're looking at Donna Mills in a condo. But, really, a movie producer doesn't belong on a show like that banging knees with Barbara.

"We all have to self-promote," Grazer continues. "My girlfriend works for Fred Silverman. She's very bright, works extremely hard. Because she doesn't self-promote, she's been there for seven years. And, you know, you shouldn't work for anybody for that long unless you--no, you just shouldn't do that. What exacerbates it for her is it's fucked up for women. America, and how it treats its executives, is very chauvinistic. And it's even more pervasive in the movie business."

Grazer may not be the primo arrested development case he's often taken for, but what is taking shape before me is an individual wildly put off by instruction, by authority, by patience--a lawn-crosser. The kind of person who learns to play Gershwin by ear, type 80 words a minute through hunt-and-peck. The unordered wrinkle of his manner might be his most potent weapon; yeah, you surf between deals but you don't wipe out. Grazer can laugh at his own imponderability, his New Age lapses, but he's driven his spirituality into untended corners enough times to finally resign himself to the certainty of the dog finding its way back.

"I have to be spiritual in order to cope with all of this... I have to do my best to keep the artifice at an arm's length. So I pick and choose people that I allow into my emotional and psychological self. I am extremely non-trusting. In the scope of things, however, I still believe that people are basically good and can be trusted. I don't think they're mutually exclusive thoughts."

When your philosophy is based on the assumption that anything can happen, that anything is possible, suspicion becomes a cottage industry. How do the number of great movies made on trust, one has to wonder, stack up against the great ones borne out of sleeping with the light on?

"On an emotional level, I don't expect very much from people," Brian alleges. "So, when someone goes, 'Do you believe what that guy did to me, how he fucked me over?' I go, yeah, I believe it. Or, 'Can you believe that guy did that to you, Brian? He totally betrayed you.' Sure, I believe it. I suppose the percentages keep you from being bitter. The good is qualitatively more powerful than the bad. Six people can fuck you over, then one treats you well, and it's worth all six."

Grazer currently has his faith in a comedy called Blowhard, a film for which David Friendly, Imagine's president of production, gave the best pitch Grazer's heard in a long time. "It's sort of an Airplane! parody of Die Hard, and we're gonna make it. It's not just a one-liner that won't go anywhere. I mean, look--it's got a building in the middle of it." Principle photography is already under way for The Concierge, a Grazer-conceived comedy with Michael J. Fox. And Grazer has plans for old pal Henry Winkler to direct Burt Reynolds in Cop and a Half.

"I'm proud of this crop of movies," says Brian. "And insofar as my selectivity, I have complete confidence. But I still like being hungry and desperate." He lets go of a sleepy yawn.

"You at low level?"

"Yeah ... I'm getting down. I think that lobster had sugar in the sauce." Brian hands me my fortune cookie. While he's distracted with his, I stuff another one in my pocket for later, having forgotten to eat until I'm full. My immediate fortune reads, "You will be attending a wedding soon."

"You getting married in the near-future?" I ask Brian, showing him my fortune. Shaking his head, taking care not to appear too resolute, Brian surrenders a disappointed groan and points to his own little slip of paper. Brian from the East recites his fortune: "Look deeply within to root out negative attitudes."

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Michael Angeli has also written "The Sound and the Furry" for this issue.

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