CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.
They say there’s no business like show business. In Hollywood you’ve got huge personalities, big budgets, behemoth production studios taking big swings. At least that’s the perception. But the critique nowadays is that the movie industry is playing it too safe, making too many remakes and franchises rather than taking new risks and making new IP. Today’s guest has lessons for us from that very same film industry in his own career, taking passionate risks to make blockbusters like Platoon, Dirty Dancing, True Lies, Terminator 2 and the like. And he says that by following a proven formula for innovation, taking the steps of create, ask, and play, leaders in all kinds of organizations can learn to be more creative and make good work. Larry Kasanoff is a movie producer, former studio head and the author of the book, A Touch of the Madness: How to Be More Innovative in Work and Life by Being a Little Crazy. Welcome, Larry.
LARRY KASANOFF: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
CURT NICKISCH: We’ll start with Hollywood and then of course talk about other industries as well. But what bothers you about movie making in Hollywood nowadays? What prompted you to write this book?
LARRY KASANOFF: I’ve never seen a time when people are more afraid to be their true creative selves. I find that all over the world in every industry, but especially in a creative industry where the whole game is taking creative swings. People are supposed to be taking great swings because nothing great happens without taking a chance. And especially in Hollywood, the audience wants the new and the different. And so if you try to adopt a tried and true policy, you’ll fail.
CURT NICKISCH: It’s a strange economic conundrum that studios or movie makers are in because movies cost a lot. You need something to do really well to pay it off and then clear your fixed cost investment. You need to take a big swing, but on the other hand, you’re putting so much money into play that it also makes you conservative.
LARRY KASANOFF: Yeah, it does. But I think especially in an industry like Hollywood, you have to swim against it. And my thesis is what helps you swim against it is a touch of the madness. You have to embrace the crazy side of you. All these great movies we could name for the last 50 years were made because someone took a huge chance. The fallacy is playing it safe actually isn’t playing it safe because you’re bound to fail that way.
CURT NICKISCH: Now, you went to business, you have an MBA from Wharton. I want to ask you about your first job where you were producing a lot of movies and your assignment was not to lose any money. You were producing 80 films a year. This was a boom in the movie industry because of home video rentals were really taking off at the time, and then you decided to take a risk on something, your boss let you. And I’m curious how that happened because your job was not to lose money and to do the safe thing.
LARRY KASANOFF: Well, so my first job was head of production acquisitions and co-productions for an independent studio called Vestron. And you’re right, in those days, it was the mid-eighties. Home video was booming and video stores needed product much like now, or a few years ago when the streamer started, they need product. It’s what you call a content gold rush. And I was 25 years old and I got a job [inaudible 00:03:52] to make, bring in 80 movies a year, make them, buy them, co-produce them. We don’t care, don’t lose money. We took swings. We made crazy creative projects, but they all were good genres, horror movies, low budget action films, pseudo sexy rom-coms, things like that. And we got a script from a movie called Platoon, which is very different. If you know the movie, it’s about the Vietnam War, and it’s the first movie about the Vietnam War that really focused on the psychological effect it had on the kids who went not as much the physical effects. And I wanted to make it. No one in the movie was a star. They became stars. The director, Oliver Stone, had done one movie, which we had co-financed prior, which was great, but it didn’t do much business. My boss, who was a great disruptive entrepreneur, he was a huge risk-taker, and he said, “You’re crazy. We don’t do this kind of thing.” But I pushed, I had a good instinct and he said, “Look, you’re head of production, it’s up to you, but if the movie fails, you’re fired. What do you want to do?” And yeah, I thought and thought and said, “Well, I didn’t get into the movie business to play it safe.” I greenlit Platoon and I’m probably the first person who when they watch the first cut of Platoon to giggle their way through it. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it was so good. I kept saying, “Oh my God, I’m not going to get fired.” And it was in fact so good at won best picture that year.
CURT NICKISCH: You probably got a lot of other different scripts before that. It wasn’t like Platoon was the first script that seemed unconventional to you. What jumped out at you?
LARRY KASANOFF: There were two things. I really loved Oliver’s prior movie called Salvador. I thought he was a great director.
CURT NICKISCH: Which he had done with your company.
LARRY KASANOFF: Partially. We partially financed the movie. And I just had an instinct that it was time. If it was 1985 or six or seven or something like that, the Vietnam War had been over for essentially for what, 15, 17 years. That’s usually when people get nostalgic for things. And I thought the approach to it, the tagline is “the first casualty of war is innocence” was unusual. I just had this incredibly strong instinct that it’s time to do this and people will want to either revisit it if they were there in that time period or learn about it if they weren’t. And that was it. I’d like to tell you I had this genius analysis and I went through the script detail by detail, but it wasn’t, it was all an instinct.
CURT NICKISCH: Which is kind of very anti-contemporary times, right? Where data is the big driver.
LARRY KASANOFF: But data would’ve told you never to make that movie.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah.
LARRY KASANOFF: That’s the difference. If you analyze your way to Platoon, it won’t exist.
CURT NICKISCH: Trust your instinct is maybe another way to say having a touch of the madness. Listen to your voice when you have it. Your framework, the steps to think outside the box and take risks of create, ask, and play, create is to create great ideas that seem impossible. And this is an example of one, how do you know when an idea that seems off the wall or outside the norm is really a good idea?
LARRY KASANOFF: I think in general, there’s two ways. The first thing you have to do when you create an idea for movies or anything consumer products or anything is you have to understand the essence of your idea. You really have to understand what is the underlying force that will make your idea successful. When I first made Mortal Kombat, which is a series of movies I make based in a video game, no one had ever made a hit movie from a video game before. It was considered to be a death sentence, movie wise.
CURT NICKISCH: And what was the conventional thinking there?
LARRY KASANOFF: Because they’d all failed before, every attempt had failed.
CURT NICKISCH: It just doesn’t translate is basically what people would say.
LARRY KASANOFF: Yeah, it’s never going to, and it is a different medium. But my secret was I never thought of myself as making a movie from a video game. I thought of making a movie based on the essence of what made that video game a hit. And that, in my mind was, and still is, we’re still making them 25 years later, was Empowerment. Martial Arts, which is what Mortal Kombat is about, teaches you that you don’t have to be the biggest or the strongest on the block to win. If you study and do the right thing and focus, you can win. If you look at an intellectual property pyramid, the top is not the video game in that case, the top is empowerment. And then you go down one rung and that’s the video game, and you go back up to the top and go down another rung, and that’s a movie, and you go back up to the top and go down another rung. And that’s our TV series. The first thing you have to do is really understand the essence of what you’re doing. The second thing you have to do is hold on to that essence with an unbelievable zeal. That’s part of the madness too. It isn’t just the idea is crazy, now you have to go do it.
CURT NICKISCH: Is there another example that you’ve seen maybe in your work or just in real life of really understanding the essence before you start creating?
LARRY KASANOFF: Look at Marvel. Marvel had been in and out of bankruptcy for years and years and years and years and never had successful movies, really TV shows until two things happened. Say Marvel and DC. DC published something called The Dark Knight where they turned Batman from a sort of goofy cartoon into a really dark, dark, more realistic character. And Marvel hired a director to make one of their movies who was really a director of smaller dramas. And so what they both realize was that the key to this is not necessarily the big spectacle that’s important, but the key to it is the dark small drama behind it. Stan Lee, who created Marvel once said to me, “My characters are interesting because, like me, they’re completely psychologically screwed up. We’re neurotic nut jobs.” And that’s what it was. And it took them years to get onto that, and it wasn’t like everyone else knew it. And that’s now propelled this incredible era of superhero movies because these superheroes are complex and dark and full of angst and problems and interpersonal issues and relationship issues, that discovery is worth tens of billions of dollars.
CURT NICKISCH: Then the next step you said is to just never give up on an idea. Tell me more.
LARRY KASANOFF: There are two things I do when I have a creative idea and I believe I know the essence of it. The first thing is I forget about everything business-wise, and I ask myself, “Creatively, do I just love it? I might be involved with this idea for 10 or 20 years. Do I just love it? Is my instinct right creatively? Do I think it’s just rich and great?” And the answer has to be yes. And then I forget about everything creative, and I say, “Okay, does this make sense? Forget about the creativity, just as a business venture, does this make sense?” And that has to be yes. And if the two things are independently of each other, yeses, then I pursue it.
CURT NICKISCH: If it feels like the tide is against you, what do you do?
LARRY KASANOFF: Here’s an example in Dirty Dancing, the movie was a big swing for us. It was an unusual movie and it wasn’t in great shape when we got a hold of it. And we managed to lure in a kind of musical legendary producer named Jimmy Lenner to oversee it. And he brought in a great musical supervisor named Michael Lloyd. The song “Time of my Life” when they got to it was this kind of high falsetto disco-y song, which they didn’t want. They re-recorded it, pulling a favor from a great performer named Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, and they sang a much lower deeper ballad, and they sent it out to everybody, the director, the record company, and so forth. And no one liked it. And they said, “You got to change it. Please make these comments, please do this.” And they got all kinds of notes and they said to everyone, “No problem. We’ll make all the changes. Give us three weeks.” Three weeks later, they sent everyone a note with version two and they said, “We made all your changes. And we showed it to radio stations.” Radio stations in those days were very instrumental in helping promote an album. And the radio station seemed to like it. All the notes came back. “Thank you so much for doing this. We love it. It’s great. You’ve been so accommodating. You’ve been so open-minded. Thank you. Great, great, great, great job.” The question is, what did they do between version one and version two to turn everyone around? And here’s what they changed. Nothing. They didn’t change a thing. They changed the label to read version two and a different date. But they also said radio stations liked it. They doubled down because if radio stations didn’t like it at that point, it would’ve been out. And when people read that, they said, “Well, we love it too. But they didn’t change the thing.” And that song that year won the Grammy and the Oscar for Best Song. Had they not stuck to what they believe was right. Had they not done something crazy like that, talk about a touch of the madness, you wouldn’t know the song Time of My Life.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Now in that story, they’re sending out their first version with for notes and feedback from everybody. One of the things you write about in the book is how we emphasize listening way too much nowadays. And you actually tell people they should listen less, like don’t listen to people. Can you explain that a little bit more?
LARRY KASANOFF: I mean, I can’t really say, but I’m going through a similar thing now in a movie, it never really changes, where some of the people talking just really don’t have the experience for what they’re saying. We are being polite, but really telling my team, “Just don’t really listen. We’re not going to do it because it’s just wrong.” Yeah, everyone talks. My father used to say, “People talk a lot, but they don’t say much.” And so this notion that listen to everybody, blah, blah, blah, everyone, you can’t, sometimes you just have to make a call and you have to listen to people less because people mostly are talking from fear. And back to your first question of this podcast, what’s going on in the industry today in the movie business? It’s all fear. It’s fear that you’re going to get canceled. It’s fear that you’re going to make a mistake. It’s fear that you’re going to lose your job. Legitimate, but nevertheless, not a good way to be creative and not a good way to be extraordinary.
CURT NICKISCH: The other interesting ploy that those two music producers made with version two of The Time of My Life, they took it to the audience. Essentially they went to radio stations, which is the ultimate feedback in your business. I want to ask about just you’re passionate about something you love, something you want to make it happen or you want it see it through. You’re also doing it for an audience in your business or you’re doing it for customers in other businesses. How do you kind of refine what you want or what your instinct is based on audience feedback? That’s a little bit of a push-pull, and I’m just curious how you navigate that philosophy.
LARRY KASANOFF: That’s a great question. Again, on Dirty Dancing, I was very, very new to the business and thank goodness Jimmy was there because one of the first things I ever said in my career as a movie business was, “Are we sure we want to cast Jennifer Gray? I mean she’s great, but she’s not as famous as some of the others. She’s not as glamorous as some of the others.”
CURT NICKISCH: She’s kind of an every woman you said.
LARRY KASANOFF: Yeah. And she’s an every woman. And Jimmy said, “You idiot. That’s the point. Every woman in the world, no matter how old they are, will identify with her and think, ‘Now I can get a guy like Patrick Swayze.’ If you make her some alien looking beauty queen, no one will identify with her.” And he said, and again, since then I give a speech when I start every movie, “You don’t work for me, you don’t work for the director, you don’t work for the studio, you work for the audience.” Now, there are people who disagree with that and say, “Just do it for yourself.” I don’t think so. Jimmy doesn’t think. You do it for the audience. You think, what does the audience want? Who cares what I want? What does the audience want? I’ve screwed up things by just doing it based on what I want. I want this, I want that.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. You got some feedback from a customer, a future movie goer when you were making Mortal Kombat.
LARRY KASANOFF: Yeah. Pre-production had in this group of kids from a junior high to show them how a movie works. And they saw one of the characters in Mortal Kombat who we had changed as we were adapting from the video game to the movie. And the kids started-
CURT NICKISCH: And they all know these characters from the video game already.
LARRY KASANOFF: They knew them intimately, and the kids started breathing heavily. They go, “Who’s that?” And I said, “Kano.” They go, “Well, Kano has a metal eye patch.” And I said, “Yeah, but I just did this movie called Terminator 2, and that character had a metal eye, and I thought I’d be repeating myself.” And he goes, “But Kano has a metal eye patch.” And the kids started hyperventilating.
No matter how many times I tried to say, “Well, this would be a little boring for me.” I was really getting worried that we have to call a medic. And I eventually thought the problem with what I just said even to you right now, is that sentence was full of I, it’d be boring for me. I did it before, my last movie. Who gives a crap? This kid loves Kano. And I took down the drawing and I ripped it up and I said, we’re going to go back to the original one. And he started breathing normally, and he was fine. And we did go back to the original one. And Kano is still a beloved character in Mortal Kombat. And had I not listened to that kid, I would’ve screwed it up.
CURT NICKISCH: In this create, ask, play framework, ask is the next main header. You recommend asking anyone you need to help you no matter who that person is.
LARRY KASANOFF: Your second step is you have to ask anyone anywhere in the world for anything that helps you advance your goal. If we were to ask your audience right now, if right now you could call anybody living on Earth and ask them a question, who would you call? And what would you ask? And most people say, “Oh gee, that’s a good question. I really thought about that.” Because we’re not trained to think you can. Talk about a touch of the madness. I had a great professor at Cornell, my undergrad, who taught me how to do that. And so I’ve been doing it since before I was a movie producer. And you can call people and you can get in touch with them, and if they say no, so, but if they don’t, you’ll get something great. We did an animated movie a few years ago, and we wanted Cher to be in it, but we wanted her likeness as well, not just Bobblehead Cher, not just her name, her voice, but her name. And everyone said, “Oh, great, you’ll never get her. She’s never done it. No way.” But we called and asked and a few times, and Cher, we got her. And she was great in the movie. And when the movie came out, it was from Universal. People Magazine interviewed Cher, and they said, “You’ve never done an animated movie. Why did you pick this one?” And she said, “I’ve never done an animated movie because no one ever asked me before they did.” Can you imagine if Cher one of the most iconic, talented women on earth, was sitting there. No one ever called her up and asked her. How many people in your life you’re not calling because you think, “Oh, everyone’s going to ask them this question.” Maybe no one has. Maybe you’ll be the first. I was the first ask Cher, so do it. Take a shot.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. And is part of asking, also just trying to find people who are willing partners or people who just identifying people who are going to latch onto your idea and help you?
LARRY KASANOFF: Well, I think it depends on what you’re asking. I am trying to get the Pope to endorse a movie of mine. We get lovely past letters. I haven’t done it yet, but no is just the beginning. We keep trying to get to the president of a South American country for something. We’re in the middle of this project about treasure hunting. I call all these archeologists all over the world, and sometimes I want the crazy touch of the madness of a partner. Other times I simply want to know some very specific question. It’s whatever you want, you need, I wouldn’t waste their time, but people are usually very willing to help. And so whatever you need, you have to be relentless in pursuing your idea. You’ve come up with your idea, you understand the essence of it. You’re going to attack it with a touch of the madness zeal. If that means calling the president, call the president.
CURT NICKISCH: In any organization for something to get made or for changes to happen, it takes more than one passionate person. What’s your advice for getting others on your side when you really believe in an idea?
LARRY KASANOFF: You have to mitigate the fear that comes from it. There’s a great expression, people will do more to avoid what they fear than to seek what they desire. You have to explain the opposite. You have to say, “We have a shot to do something different.” In my life, especially where, again, like I said in Platoon, we didn’t get into this business to take chances. You do have to find like-minded people, and then you have to assure them that if you’re the head of the organization or the head of the department, “I know what I’m doing, you can work with me. I’ll run point on this, but here’s where I need your help.” And where are they going to get them involved? And I think if you give them a chance to do something they’ve never done, so the success of it is clear to them. They’ll jump several places in their career if they do it, then I think you have them.
CURT NICKISCH: Are there kinds of questions you use, or what kinds of things do you use to identify people who you want to partner up and team up with?
LARRY KASANOFF: What we do is we often, if we’re not sure, we give them a test assignment or we push them to a level just to see if we’ll do it. We might call an actor in for an audition once we’ve already decided that they’re talented enough. But do they have the touch of the madness? Talent is half the battle, and you can talented as can be, but if you don’t have what I’ve been talking about, the kind of madness zeal to pursue it no matter what, to work hard no matter what, to never give up, you’ll never get there. The long story short is it’s part of the instinct, but we test.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, it’s almost like you’re selecting for the perseverance you think is really critical.
LARRY KASANOFF: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. Our late great martial arts instructor for all our Mortal Kombat movies said, “I’d rather have someone that’s all heart and no talent. It’s all perseverance and no talent versus all talent and no heart.”
CURT NICKISCH: The final piece of this framework is play, and you write about living in a state of play. How do you think about this? How do you make play work for you?
LARRY KASANOFF: I think fun is wildly underrated today, and part of my mission in life is to bring back fun. And I think that includes in what you do, and it’s hard sometimes, but I mean, it’s hard to, maybe you’ve got some bad news at work and you turn to your staff and say, “Let’s go bowling.” But that’s exactly what you need to do because in the long run, you’ll be more open-minded, more creative, more relaxed, and you’ll do better that way. You got to kind of play it all like a game. I’m sure that when Tom Brady played football, he played it like a game. It doesn’t mean you don’t take it seriously, but you have to engage in a state of play and you have to engage in some fun. And doing that, you’ll respond to situations differently than if you don’t. And you just have to train yourself to do it. And once you get into it’s pretty fun way to live. You can think the average person, especially during the pandemic, makes their own hours. But if you say, “Well, I’m going to go out and get frozen yogurt at three o’clock,” they go, “No, I can’t do that.” Well, why not? You can just work from until eight, until seven. You can do whatever you want. But we’re trained not to do that. We’re trained not to call people and ask a question. We’re trained. It better not be fun. Why not?
CURT NICKISCH: What’s something that you’ve seen where this has been critical?
LARRY KASANOFF: When I started that first job, they had ordered one movie to be shot in Italy, which was today, we’d call it kind of the Game of Thrones, but to be clear for a millionth of the budget. And my boss, the same one who let me make Platoon, said to me and my staff when we were starting it, he said, “Look, I want everything. I want violence. I want fighting. I want sex.” And someone yelled, “Snakes and wizards!” And he goes, “Yeah, snakes and wizards, everything in the kitchen sink I want in this first movie,” because he knew that would sell on home video. And so I hadn’t gone to Italy yet. We had a producer who was there, remember I was the executive producer of the studio, and every time we ended a phone call with him, a development phone call, a pre-production phone call, we and the staff would yell, “And snakes and wizards!” And everyone would laugh and applaud.
CURT NICKISCH: It was a joke.
LARRY KASANOFF: I get to Italy and it’s going well, as I think it is. I never made a movie before and the people were so nice. And Italy was wine with lunch and a movie set, which is unheard of here. I didn’t know that at the time though. And they said, “We have a surprise for you in a few days.” And they were very excited, and I didn’t know what it was. And then that day came and at lunch they came outside and they said, “Look.” And we see the hills of Rome behind us, and it’s just dirt. And then I see one of the dirt pieces is moving and it’s getting bigger, and I realize it’s a truck coming down the hills. And then a band starts playing. I don’t know where they got a band. And they were in a semicircle around me. And the truck finally pulls up, its painted brightly with balloons, and the back opens and out runs all these people dressed as wizards with boa constrictors and Burmese pythons around the neck. They got us the snakes and wizards, except the only problem is there were no snakes and wizards in the movie. It was a joke. We had never really made it clear to them. I guess it was just a funny phrase we all liked. It was like a little rallying cry. Not in a state of play, I would’ve freaked out. I would’ve screamed at them, “What are you doing? You don’t have the budget for this. You don’t have the time for this. They’re not in the movies. How could you do this?” But then I would’ve demoralized the crew. We would’ve wasted money. I would’ve lost them for the rest of the movie. In a state of play. But also, you’re in a 12-foot Burmese python. It’s hard to say no, but in a state of play. I said, “Put them in the movie.” And somehow we shoved them all in this movie and they looked great. And you know what? The movie was terrible. I mean, honestly, but the snakes and wizards looked great. It added to the movie, and the movie made a ton of money because it did work. And so it was all because of that play. Not in play, I would’ve screwed up the entire movie. In play, “What the hell? Who cares?” The audience, we never got one letter of, “Why are there snakes and wizards in the movie? They don’t cohere with the plot.” No one cares. It’s another thing too. If you watch a movie, if you’re having fun as an audience member, you’ll forgive almost anything. You’ll forget plot mistakes, you’ll forgive continuity mistakes. If you’re having a good time, you’ll forgive almost anything. It works for the audience too.
CURT NICKISCH: And your point about demoralizing the crew, [inaudible 00:25:31] at Quest Room Business School, she did a research on studios in Nashville, and the engineers there have a saying that misery sticks to tape, right? If you’re not having fun in the studio, it’s going to show in the sound no matter, even if you think you could just be professional.
LARRY KASANOFF: I think that’s true. Yeah, I really think that’s a good point.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. When you look around businesses today outside of the movie industry, what do you think they’re getting wrong when it comes to being innovative?
LARRY KASANOFF: I think everyone is scared. I think everyone is fearful. It’s not just movie people who say to me, “I have this idea, but I’m not doing it.” I think everyone is. I think there isn’t an industry that isn’t doing it, and it’s not just industry, it’s entrepreneurs. There’s so many times in promoting this book, or even podcast hosts have said to me afterwards, “I really want to start a bakery, but I can’t do it.” I think everyone has their idea and I think they should be trying it. I don’t think it’s endemic to one. And it’s easier to spot the movie business because it’s supposed to be creative and different, and everyone kind of sees movies in common. We probably don’t see what the computer coding center is doing if not in it. But you see movies. I think everyone’s prey to it, and that’s why I wrote the book.
CURT NICKISCH: Larry, this has been a real joy. Thanks so much for sharing this with our audience.
LARRY KASANOFF: Thank you. Had a good time.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Larry Kasanoff, movie producer and author of the book, A Touch of the Madness. And we have more than 1000 episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at HBR.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, senior producer, Mary Dooe, senior producer Anne Saini, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back on Tuesday with our next episode. I’m Curt Nickisch.
