Oscar-Winning Producer Brian Grazer Would Love To Talk To Pretty Much All Of Us Face-To-Face

BRIAN GRAZER LIKES TO TELL THE STORY ABOUT the time he didn’t meet Vladimir Putin.

- Jeffrey Kluger

Not meeting Putin is a story nearly all of us could tell, but Grazer came closer than most, right into the anteroom of the Russian President’s office, in fact.

Grazer—producer and founding partner, along with friend and director Ron Howard, of Imagine Entertainment—had gone to Moscow for one of what he has dubbed his “curiosity conversations,” which are pretty much just what they sound like. You may be one of the great power players in Hollywood, responsible for such cinematic classics as A Beautiful Mind and Splash, and such TV hits as Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights, but that doesn’t mean you know everything. So Grazer tries to sit down with accomplished people and simply ask them questions. “I lay out the ground rules,” he says, “and basically I say, ‘I’m going to research you; it’s not going to be hard. This won’t be your worst date.’”

Of course, “accomplished people” doesn’t have to mean nice people, and Putin was always high on Grazer’s wish list. In 2016 he got his shot, when friends in Hollywood connected him with friends in Russia who threaded the Kremlin needles and got him his audience. But, as Grazer recounts in his new book Face to Face: The Art of Human Connection, it all came apart in the final seconds, when he was about to be ushered into Putin’s presence and his Kremlin handler explained to the press secretary what the purpose of the meeting was.

“We are here because Brian loves our country,” the escort explained. “He would like to do a film about our President. He feels as if for 20 years, people in the West have been misled about what happens in Russia, which he loves.”