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The Oscar winning producer of “A Beautiful Mind” and “Apollo 13” still has to troll for funding like the rest of us.
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In a Variety interview released this week, Oscar winning Hollywood producer Brian Grazer discussed what it takes to keep his movies relevant to an ever changing class of filmgoers and new demands from movie studios.
There once was a time when a successful producer like Grazer or Steven Spielberg would get a blank check from any studio to make a movie. Today, as Grazer laments, the studios are only looking for bankable commodities that will turn into long running franchises, with a synergy of marketable merchandising.
This is in part due to dwindling DVD sales for movies in an era of live streaming services like Netflix and vast Internet piracy.
About the work involved in finding the financing needed for his films, Grazer said, “It’s easy to get preoccupied with the shift in the financial culture of making movies. You spend a lot of time on terms and conditions that are comfortable to you, but then you have no scripts, because you’ve wasted your time trying to find financing.”
Imagine Entertainment is also suffering from a decrease in income from its development deals with NBC Universal and Fox Television for new programming. The company is currently supplementing that income with a multi year, $5 million partnership with Discovery Communications to develop original content for the Internet.
Grazer, known for his trademark spiky hair do, is described as being in constant need for attention. Tom Hanks, who starred in several Grazer movies, (Apollo 13), told Variety, “Brian has made himself Brian Grazer; it has required a number of remakes. He’s always had an eye out for grander results. He’s extremely pragmatic about how life works, and he’s trademarked his face and his head. He’s pretty healthy now, and happy, although he’s still hell bent on some degree of self-improvement.”
Grazer also talked about how he uses art to relax. The 63-year-old producer keeps a two room studio in his 10, 000 square foot Santa Monica home, which he designed, built and decorated with architect Waldo Fernandez. In it, he uses blow guns to produce his own works of art, by shooting paint onto canvasses made from blowups of newspaper advertisement pages. .
Grazer is currently working on a book with Charles about curiosity and how it has affected his life and work. To be released in 2015.
He co-founded Imagine Entertainment with director Ron Howard 28 years ago.
