A Curious Mind Read Online Free

myself to be buff. And I don’t look like a movie star. But I also don’t really look like what you might imagine a movie producer looks like. I have my own slightly offbeat style. I wear sneakers to work, I gel my hair so it stands straight up, I have a big smile.
    And today, I’m still exercising four or five times a week, usually first thing in the morning, often getting up before six tomake sure I have time. (I don’t jump rope anymore, because I eventually ruptured both my Achilles tendons.) I’m sixty-three years old, and in the last four decades, I’ve never slipped back into being soft.
    I took a resolution and turned it into a habit, into part of how I live each day.
    I did the same thing with curiosity.
    Very gradually, starting with that first law clerk’s job at Warner Bros., I consciously made curiosity a part of my routine.
    I already explained that first step, insisting on meeting everyone whose legal contracts I delivered. I took two things from my success with that. First, people—even famous and powerful people—are happy to talk, especially about themselves and their work; and second, it helps to have even a small pretext to talk to them.
    That’s what my “I have to hand these papers over in person” line was, a pretext—it worked for me, it worked for the assistants, it even worked for the people I was visiting. “Oh, he needs to see me in person, sure.”
    A few months after I started at Warner Bros., a senior vice president of the studio was fired. I remember watching them peel his name off the office door.
    His office was spacious, it had windows, it had two secretaries, and most important, it was right next to the executive suite—what I called the “royal” offices—where the president of Warner Bros. worked, as did the chairman, and the vice chairman.
    I asked my boss, Peter Knecht, if I could use that vice president’s office while it was empty.
    â€œSure,” Knecht said. “I’ll arrange it.”
    The new office changed everything. Just like when you wear the right clothes for the occasion—when you wear a suit, you feel more confident and grown up—going to work in that real office changed my perspective. All of a sudden I felt like I had my own piece of real estate, my own franchise.
    This was a great time to be in show business in Hollywood, the late sixties and seventies, and the “royal suite” was occupied by three of the most important and creative people of the era—Frank Wells, the president of Warner Bros., who went on to head Disney; Ted Ashley, who wasn’t ever a household name, but who as chairman of Warner Bros. really brought energy and success back to the studio; and John Calley, the vice chairman of Warner Bros., who was a legendary producer, something of a Hollywood intellectual, a creative force, and unquestionably an eccentric character.
    I was just a law clerk, but I had an office, my own secretaries, and I even had one of those old-fashioned speaker-box intercoms on my desk. Just outside my door worked three of the most powerful men in Hollywood. I had created a situation where I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
    I was baffled by the entertainment business, and it seemed as if even many of the people in the entertainment business were baffled by it. It was hard to understand how movies andTV shows got made. It was definitely not a linear process. People seemed to be navigating in a fog, without instruments.
    But I was fascinated and captivated by it. I became like an anthropologist entering a new world, with a new language, new rituals, new priorities. It was a completely immersive environment, and it ignited my curiosity. I was determined to study it, to understand it, to master it.
    It was John Calley who really showed me what being in the entertainment business was all about, and he also showed me what it could be like. Calley was a