A Curious Mind (6 page)

We chatted while eating our tuna and chips. Or Chief Gates was eating, at least. I couldn't take more than a few polite bites of my sandwich.

As we sat there, Gates's chief lieutenant suddenly burst into the office, totally adrenalized, shouting, “Boss! Boss! You're on TV again right now, the city council says you're out, they say they are firing you!”

Gates turned to me. He didn't flinch. Nothing in his biochemistry changed at all. He appeared totally calm.

He said, to me and to his lieutenant, “No chance. I'll be here as long as I want to be. They'll never get me out.”

He said it in a totally matter-of-fact way, just as he might ask, “How's that tuna sandwich?”

His ego, his arrogance, was just completely imperturbable. He had been in intense situations all his life. He wasn't acting—for him, it was the sum total of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months of working under incredible pressure, and mastering it.

He had accumulated all this authority, the ability and the willingness to use it. He was totally acclimated to it. He had become unflappable, impervious to the possibility that anything outside his own will could change his life.

In fact, the city council had announced his replacement just two weeks before the Rodney King riots broke out. Gates had been vague about when he would leave—and got more stubborn after the riots. His cool cockiness with me notwithstanding, six weeks after our lunch he formally announced his resignation, and he was gone as chief two weeks after that.
³

My visit with Daryl Gates was strange, memorable, unsettling. In other words, it was perfect.

Some people might have been curious why Gates became a police officer, and how he climbed the ladder to become chief of an 8,000-officer force.
⁴
Some people might have been curious how a man like Gates spent his workday—what did he pay attention to, in terms of what was going on in the city? Some
people might have wondered what being immersed in nothing but the crimes of Los Angeles does to one's view of such a beautiful city, and to the view of its people.

My mission was different. I wanted a sense of the personality of someone who wears the chief's uniform with absolute confidence, who commands a miniature paramilitary state.

What does an encounter like that do for me?

First, it gets me completely out of the world I live in. For a few hours, I lived in Daryl Gates's universe—a world that could not be more different from my own. From the moment he opened his eyes in the morning to the moment he closed his eyes at night, every single day, it's likely that Chief Gates dealt with things that I had probably never even considered.

The big stuff is different—his goals, his priorities, his values.

The minutiae are different—how he dresses, how he carries himself, how he talks to the people around him.

Daryl Gates and I lived in the same city, we were both in positions of influence, we were both successful, but our worlds were so different, they hardly overlapped. We literally looked at the very same city from completely different perspectives, every day.

That's what Daryl Gates did for me: he completely disrupted my point of view.

•  •  •

WE ARE ALL TRAPPED
in our own way of thinking, trapped in our own way of relating to people. We get so used to seeing the
world our way that we come to think that the world
is
the way we see it.

For someone who makes his living finding and telling stories on movie and TV screens, that parochialism can be dangerous. It's also boring.

One of the most important ways I use curiosity every day is to see the world through other people's eyes, to see the world in ways I might otherwise miss. It's totally refreshing to be reminded, over and over, how different the world looks to other people. If we're going to tell stories that are compelling and also varied, we need to be able to capture those points of view.

Consider for a moment just a few of the seventeen movies that Ron Howard and I have made together, that I've produced and Ron has directed.

There's
Night Shift
, with Michael Keaton running a call-girl ring out of the New York City morgue, and
Parenthood
, about Steve Martin's effort to juggle work and being a good father.

There's
Backdraft
, about the courage firefighters require and the split-second judgment they need on the job, and
A Beautiful Mind
, the story of John Nash, who was both a Nobel Prize–winning mathematician and a schizophrenic.

There's
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
with Jim Carrey bringing Dr. Seuss's Grinch to life, and
Frost/Nixon
, the drama behind David Frost's television interviews with ex-president Richard Nixon.

Those six movies capture the perspective of a raffish morgue attendant, a funny but self-critical father, a team of
fearless firefighters, a brilliant but mentally ill mathematician, a cartoon misanthrope, and a canny TV journalist interviewing a disgraced former president.

That's a wonderfully varied range of characters, a wild array of points of view, stories that include comedy and quest and tragedy, settings that range from Princeton University during the Cold War to the inside of a burning skyscraper in the eighties, from the cold room at the New York City morgue to suburban America. They don't seem to have anything in common—and yet they not only came from the same company, Imagine, but all of them were shepherded by Ron and me.

That's the kind of work I want to do, and have always wanted to do, in Hollywood. I don't want to produce the same movie over and over again with slightly different characters—even unconsciously.
⁵

So how does this relate to my conversation with LAPD Chief Daryl Gates?

Curiosity. I don't know how other people in the story business keep themselves from going stale, but my secret is curiosity—and specifically the curiosity conversations.

The variety in my work (and my life) comes from curiosity. It is the tool I use to search out different kinds of characters and stories than I would be able to make up on my own. Some people can dream up a person like Daryl Gates. I have to meet someone like that in person. To see how the world looks from his perspective, I have to sit in the same room with him. I have to ask him questions for myself and not only hear how he
answers, but see how the expression on his face changes as he answers.

The curiosity conversations have a critical rule, an almost completely counterintuitive rule: I never have a curiosity conversation in order to find a movie to make. I have the conversations because I'm interested in a topic or a person. The conversations have allowed me to build up a reservoir of experiences and points of view.

Often, in fact, what happens is not that a conversation will inspire a movie or an idea—just the opposite. Someone will develop an idea for a movie or TV show—someone at Imagine will have an inspiration, a writer or a director will come to us with a story, I'll have an idea—and a curiosity conversation I've had years earlier will bring all the possibilities of that idea to life for me.

The richness and variety of four decades of movies and TV shows have depended on the curiosity conversations, but these meetings don't create the movies and TV shows in the first place. Curiosity spurs me to chase my passions. It also keeps me plugged in to what's going on in science, in music, in popular culture. It's not just what's happening that's important; it's the attitude, the mood that surrounds what's happening.

In 2002, when I produced the movie
8 Mile
, about hip-hop music in Detroit, I was fifty-one years old. The movie had its spark when I saw Eminem perform one night on the Video Music Awards (the VMAs). I'd been paying attention to hip-hop musicians for two decades—I'd wanted to do a movie about the hip-hop world since the 1980s, when I met Chuck
D from Public Enemy, Slick Rick, the Beastie Boys, and Russell Simmons, who founded the hip-hop label Def Jam. The idea for
8 Mile
crystallized when music producer Jimmy Iovine brought Eminem to the office, and the three of us sat down to talk about what a hip-hop movie might look like. Eminem actually spent the first forty minutes not talking. Finally I said to him, “C'mon! Talk! Animate!” And he gave me one final glare, and then he told his life story, the harrowing tale of his upbringing in Detroit. That became the spine of the movie.

About the farthest thing you can get from the tumultuous, energetic, angry, antiestablishment perspective of rap music is the buttoned-down, perfectly compartmentalized, analytical world of covert intelligence. Just as
8 Mile
was being filmed, we were also launching the TV series
24
, with Kiefer Sutherland playing counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer, whose job is to foil terrorist attacks against the United States. The first season of
24
was already in production when the real terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, hit the United States. (The premiere of the first episode was delayed a month out of sensitivity in the aftermath of the attacks.) I loved the idea of
24
, and I connected with the sense of immediacy and urgency we tried to create in the show by unfurling it each week in real time, with an hour of the show being an hour in Jack Bauer's life.

I was ready for a show like
24
—I've been absolutely captured by the world of intelligence and covert operations for decades. I've had curiosity conversations with two CIA directors (William Colby and Bill Casey), with agents from the Israeli
intelligence agency Mossad, the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6, and with a guy named Michael Scheuer, a former CIA operative who in 1996 helped set up and ran Alec Station, the secret CIA unit charged with tracking down Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks.
⁶

I'm amazed at the amount of information that people in intelligence—people at the top like Colby and Casey, and also people on the front lines like Scheuer—can accumulate and keep in their brains. They know a huge amount about how the world
really
works, and theirs is a hidden world. They know about events and relationships that are secret from the rest of us, they make decisions based on those secrets, often life-and-death decisions.

So I had years of being curious about the intelligence world, and trying to understand the motivations of those involved, and their psychology, when the TV show
24
came along. I knew a lot about the world, and I knew it could be the setting for a compelling story.

That's the long-term benefit of the conversations: the things I'm curious about create a network of information and contacts and relationships for me (not unlike the networks of information intelligence officers map out). Then when the right story comes along, it resonates with me immediately. Curiosity meant I was open to Jack Bauer in
24
, and also to the antithesis of Jack Bauer, Eminem's character in
8 Mile
, the young rapper Jimmy “B-Rabbitt” Smith.

And after that conversation I had with Daryl Gates on April 30, 1992, as our city started to riot and burn—I recognized that personality again immediately when I got the chance to produce
J. Edgar
, the movie directed by Clint Eastwood about the career of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Leonardo DiCaprio played Hoover. Had I not spent time trying to understand Gates twenty years earlier, I'm not sure I would have fully grasped the reality of Hoover's controlling paranoia, which Eastwood and DiCaprio infused so well into the mood, the acting, even the lighting of
J. Edgar
.

It was, in fact, one of my earliest conversations that taught me in unforgettable terms that I needed to bring ideas to the table in order to make movies—a conversation from back at Warner Bros., when I was trying to meet at least one new person each day inside show business.

I had been at Warner Bros. about a year as a legal clerk when I managed to talk my way into that meeting with Lew Wasserman. In terms of meetings, that was a stunning accomplishment—as big a deal for me at twenty-three as Jonas Salk and Edward Teller would be decades later, maybe bigger. Wasserman was the head of MCA, and he was critical in creating the modern movie business, including the idea of what we now think of as the event movie, the blockbuster. When I went to talk to him, in 1975, he had been at MCA since 1936. While he ran MCA, Wasserman had under contract movie greats like Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Judy Garland, Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Alfred
Hitchcock, and Jack Benny.
⁷
MCA's Universal Pictures had produced
Jaws
and would go on to produce
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
,
Back to the Future
, and
Jurassic Park
.

On the day I went to see him, Lew Wasserman was undoubtedly the most powerful person in the movie business. I was undoubtedly the least powerful person. It had taken me months of patient cultivation to get onto Wasserman's calendar, even for just ten minutes. I talked to his assistant Melody on a regular basis. At one point I said to her, “How about if I just come by and meet you?” And I did—just to put my face and personality with my voice.

When I finally got to see Wasserman, I wasn't nervous or particularly intimidated. I was excited. For me, it was an opportunity to get some wisdom from a man who, in fact, started out in the movie business one notch lower than me—as an usher in a movie theater. He had practically
invented
the movie business. Surely I could learn something from him.

That day, Wasserman listened without much patience to me talk about my determination to become a movie producer. He cut me short.

“Look buddy,” Wasserman said, “you somehow found your way into this office. You're basically full of it. I can see that. If there are a dozen ways to become a producer—having money, knowing people who have money, having connections, having friends in the business, representing movie stars or writers—if there are a dozen ways to become a producer, you don't have any of them.