How to Be Distinctive

On being ‘the guy with the hair’ — and making people talk to you

When I started my career, my hair was very flat. I hadn’t found a way to be distinctive yet, and I was looking for one. The action producers I met had beards, they had bad tempers, they would throw things. I couldn’t grow a beard, I didn’t throw things, so that wasn’t going to be the thing for me. I went on to write and produce Splash, and still I didn’t really feel distinguished. Until, one day, I was swimming in my pool with my daughter, Sage, and I popped my hair up. And she goes, “I love your hair, Dad.”

I’m thinking, “What are you talking about?”

“I love it like that.”

I thought, “Okay, well, let’s go see.”

So we go into the bathroom. I grab some girly product that was around and popped up my hair. My daughter continued, “This is great. I love this, Dad. This is so cool. You should always have it this way.”

She was four years old at the time. I thought I’d give it a try.

It became a litmus test for people. There was a bell curve: 20 percent of people thought, “Well, that’s really cool. How did you come up with that?” Most others, I felt, were just going, “Why did you do that? What was that about?” I’m sure a few thought, “You are such an asshole.” That felt pretty powerful. I thought, “I’m becoming distinctive with this hair, and I’m going to stick with it.” So I did, and it’s become me, really. I even found a product that keeps my hair up while I surf, so I remember who I am.

In every country, people know me as the guy with the hair.

I travelled the world with seven guys, all of them pretty important: Les Moonves, who runs CBS; Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair; and others. The first place we went was Havana. We all wanted to meet Fidel but couldn’t get an audience with him. After several false alarms, we were all packed up and ready to split when his people finally reached out: “Shut the jets down. Fidel will meet with you guys.” And we had this mind-blowing meeting with Castro. I’m sitting in the middle, and Fidel is talking for literally three and a half hours straight. I don’t think he took a breath.

We’re kind of winded just listening, and he looks up and points his finger at me and says, “How do you do your hair?” In retrospect, it made sense that he would be interested, as someone so magnetized by iconography. I mean, he wears those fatigues and the hats and stuff.

In college, I learned how to take tests and how to get good grades, but when I graduated and was about to start law school, something made me think: What have I learned? I couldn’t remember, so I asked myself: Well, how could I learn something? I decided to ask a professor I thought was pretty outstanding, but he didn’t want to meet with me. Eventually, I just showed up at the end of his class and convinced him to give me ten minutes. I turned those ten minutes into an hour and a half, and in that time I learned much more than I ever had in college.

I decided to expand on this and create a discipline where I do this every two weeks for the rest of my life. I call them “curiosity conversations.” I’ve been doing them for 35 years, creating a project for myself and reaching out to experts in any field outside of entertainment: science, medicine, politics, religion, every art form, technology.

Some curiosity conversations have led to movies, but they all start with the intention of learning, just expanding each other’s life.

I met Sting in 1983. I hadn’t yet produced Splash; I hadn’t yet been nominated for an Oscar; I was just a guy trying to be a producer with no success. And yet, we had a great conversation. It turns out he is not just a pop icon, but also a professor and a thinker, and a very interesting one at that.

The following year, he invited me to a barbeque. There were super-powerful people there, and also a Chilean woman named Veronica Denegra. She had been tortured by the Pinochet regime for being subversive. She spent a year being tortured every single waking moment. I was curious about that and I said, “Can we go for a walk?” So we went for a walk on the beach and I learned all about her ordeal. She told me that she had survived by inventing an alternate reality. In order not to experience the pain that she was feeling, she would escape into a story that she created, and that got her through it. That was profoundly interesting to me, so I started to seek out other experts on surviving torture — marines, green berets, our State Department, CIA.

Fifteen years later, I got this 12-page treatment written by Jim Lovell, an astronaut in Apollo 13. I know nothing about space travel, but when it comes to survival, I was now an expert. What I had learned about enduring torture allowed me to relate to three men trapped in space, reaching inside of themselves to find resources to get them to safety. That turned into the movie Apollo 13.

At one point, I set my sights on a curiosity conversation with Princess Di, then the most famous woman in the world. I literally tried calling Buckingham Palace, like, “Yes, my name is Brian Grazer. I’m a Los Angeles producer.” That never really got me very far; neither did the letters I wrote, or my connections. But then I produced Apollo 13, it was successful, and we were asked to do a royal premier. As I had hoped, Princess Di arrived alone. No Charles.

We sat down for dinner, and when she entered, we stood up again. Everything was slowed down by the etiquette. I thought to myself, if we do this, I’m not going to learn anything, nothing will happen. I will have no connection. So I start telling jokes. I start trying to be funny. I’m making her laugh. I’m doing Hollywood gossip.

I’m really connecting with Princess Di. I see Tom Hanks and Ron Howard looking at me like, you’re totally crazy.

For dessert, they served us pastries, but I wanted ice cream, so I asked, “Do you guys have ice cream?” Princess Di immediately looked to someone, and a couple of scoops appeared in front of me. I swivel one over to her side. I take a scoop. I take another scoop. I ask if she would like another scoop of ice cream. She takes a scoop. She left shortly after, at the stroke of midnight, but at that moment I felt like we were full-on making out.