Here’s my book review of a curious mind by Brian Grazer, Hollywood mega-producer.
Brian Grazer is well known for his commercial and artistic successes, but I don’t believe he has any particular academic credentials as an educator. Nevertheless, teachers and parents everywhere should adopt the mantra of A Curious Mind:
Encouraging and stimulating curiosity should be the first priority of education.
Now, you’d think such a notion would be obvious. Apparently, it’s not – in this country, at least. The emphasis on standardized test results necessarily limits the permissible range of student curiosity. Teachers have to go by the book, as well. There’s the risk of embarrassment. Teachers and parents may not be comfortable with student queries, for which they have no ready answers:
- What was before the Big Bang?
- How many termites would it take to eat a house?
- How can I get an agent?
Grazer admits he never finished law school. He took a job as a legal clerk at Warner Brothers. His duties involved running contracts to the offices in private homes of agents, producers, directors, and stars. He made a deliberate decision to use these meetings for what today we’d call networking. He’d insist that he was under strict instructions to hand-deliver the documents to the high-powered addressee. More often than not, he’d be received warmly and invited to sit and chat. And that’s when he says his curiosity took over. He engaged moguls and celebrities in conversation by asking them questions about themselves. And they were usually more than happy to talk.
Grazer cautions in the book that he never asked any of these new acquaintances for favors. He simply learned their likes and dislikes, their foibles and their fantasies. He thus learned the business from the inside, by politely asking question after question after question. So it was that exercising his genuine interest in people gave Brian Grazer the ability to work a room – and eventually a company town in a global industry.
But his curiosity didn’t stop there. He came to realize that the entertainment business was too confining to feed his curious mind. “For thirty-five years,” he writes, “I’ve been tracking down people about whom I was curious and asking if I could sit down with them for an hour. My only rule for myself was that the people had to be from the outside – from outside the world of movies and TV.”
A Curious Mind is essentially a celebrity autobiography. Grazer discloses that coauthor Charles Fishman wrote drafts based on a series of in-person interviews with him. It is an engaging story. And its scope extends beyond the basic notion of investigation is education to include the arc of a producer’s remarkable career and open-minded outlook on life.
As for Fishman, co-writers, ghosts, and editors face a difficult task in subordinating their own personal styles so they can capture their client’s unique voice. He is to be commended for capturing both Grazer’s still-boyish enthusiasm and his Hollywood savvy to generalize from all this. If you can stimulate curiosity in a child, you don’t even have to point it to the library.
There’s this new thing called Google. I wonder, was the Bing search engine name for Crosby or that sound you hear in your head when the light comes on?
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To some of her patients and even her friends, Dr. Berman can seem cold and calculating. She thinks of herself as wise and practical. All of the therapists in this story are trying improve the lives of their patients, who range from troubled to disturbed, many of them needing medication but not hospitalization.
Ptolemy Grey lives by himself in a shabby one-bedroom apartment in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. His place is stacked with the trash of a lifetime. You see, he hasn’t paid any attention to it since he woke up one morning to find his beloved last wife Sensia lying dead beside him.
