The curious career of film producer Brian Grazer

The Hollywood producer Brian Grazer has a new book out, “A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life,” and he is making the rounds to promote it. The Wall Street Journal’s Alexandra Wolfe published a fine interview with him over the weekend. Grazer and his co-author excerpted some anecdotes from the book on The Daily Beast Wednesday.

Then on Wednesday night the Silicon Valley bigshot venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway co-hosted a book party for Grazer at the trendy San Francisco offices of Pinterest, with Andreessen ably sitting in the interviewer chair. (The Netscape co-founder was in the other seat just last week with Fortune’s Dan Primack.)

Cutting straight to the chase, Grazer is simply fascinating. The bulk of his conversation with Andreessen, and presumably the book, was about the unusual practice Grazer developed as a new college graduate of requesting meetings with interesting people simply to meet them and learn about their lives. Starting with a former professor and continuing with entertainment-industry worthies he’d meet while working as a lowly functionary in the Warner Bros. law department, Grazer kept up the practice for decades. Many of the people he met, including the mathematicianJohn Nash, gave him ideas for films. In the case of Nash it was “A Beautiful Mind,” one of Grazer and film partner Ron Howard’s greatest hits and the inspiration for his book’s title.

It isn’t at all clear if Grazer’s tales will lead readers to a “bigger life.” But he is exceedingly entertaining and inspirational. If a guy slightly built guy who styles his hair straight up can meet anybody he wants and build a career out of the experiences, maybe you can too. At the very least you can buy his book and be amused. Some examples:

Read the rest of this article at Fortune.com.