Preloading

How Getting Kicked Out of an Office Inspired Brian Grazer to Write Splash

Season 6 Episode 611
Aired on 04/19/2015 | CC tv-14
When Oscar®-winning producer Brian Grazer was still a young legal clerk at Warner Bros., he made a practice of meeting one new person in show business every day. One of the people he most wanted to meet was legendary studio head Lew Wasserman.

The day Brian got his chance, Lew's reception wasn't quite as warm as he had hoped. "He gave me that look, like, 'Don't waste my time, kid,'" he says. "Usually I could get through this. Navigate through it. But I could tell I couldn't with him. And I started out with my opening sentence, and he just said, 'Look. You don't have much to say. Wait here a second.'"

Lew disappeared into his office and returned with a notepad and a pencil. "He says, 'Put the pencil to the paper, and it's worth more than it is at separate parts,'" he says. "I thought, 'What's he mean?' And he said, 'Okay, now get out of here.'"

In the video above, Brian reveals the important lesson he learned from that day and how it inspired him to create his smash film Splash.

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