Grazer wants serious success

Mr. Cartoon is the hip-hop world’s favorite tattoo artist, a San Pedro-born troublemaker gone straight to the top, having left his ink marks on a host of stars, including Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent. But to Brian Grazer, Mr. Cartoon has an even more tantalizing appeal: A life filled with all the ingredients for the kind of movie Grazer likes to make these days, a compelling drama with some cultural sizzle.

In recent years, Grazer has produced a string of films based on pop culture lightning rods, notably the Eminem of “8 Mile,” the daredevil astronauts of “Apollo 13,” the math wizard John Forbes Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” and Depression-era hero James J. Braddock in “Cinderella Man,” which opened Friday. That’s why the hyperactive Hollywood producer hopped into his black Mercedes the other day to make the trek down to a warehouse district near Little Tokyo to see Mr. Cartoon.

In the car I joke that few showbiz luminaries have been known to drive east of La Brea. Ever alert to the power dynamics of any situation, Grazer responds, “Cartoon makes a lot of money, so he doesn’t have to drive to me.”

After spending a couple of hours with Grazer and Mr. Cartoon, I can see why Grazer is so energized about the prospect of a film based on the tattoo artist’s life. A compactly built man with a goatee and baggy shorts, Cartoon has a street cred that’s leavened by an impish sense of humor. He’s full of outrageous stories, including a manic trip to Japan, where he didn’t sleep for five days, had 30 people waiting for tattoos and imagined there were yakuza gangsters coming after him. When a big lug comes to the door, Grazer asks Cartoon if the man’s there for a tattoo. Cartoon nods, saying with a sly grin, “Half the experience is having to wait.”

The vague idea of the movie is that it would capture Cartoon’s escapades as well as his art’s role in his spiritual redemption. It’s telling that Cartoon and Grazer bond over their embrace of various New Age gurus. When Grazer asks how he got off drugs, Cartoon explains: “I got into Tony Robbins the first year I got sober.” Grazer: “Did it really help?” Cartoon: “You’re here now, right? I’ve done the fire walk, 12 feet of burning coals and everything.”

This strikes a responsive chord with Grazer, who’s been meeting with Deepak Chopra for years, seeing him just the other day to work on what Grazer calls his “addiction” to validation. “This [movie] could really capture how you decided you didn’t want to kill people -- that you wanted to own your own life,” Grazer says to Cartoon. He then adds triumphantly: “It’s a survival story!”

Mr. Cartoon nods in agreement. Grazer, whose hair famously stands up in spikes, as if being pulled skyward by a rogue satellite, adds, even more triumphantly: “It’s about identity! You got some consciousness, looked in the mirror and saw yourself a different way. It’s survival and identity!”

Everyone in America today seems obsessed with reinventing themselves, but no one has worked harder at it than Grazer. For years, he was Hollywood’s top comedy producer, cranking out hit comedies with Eddie Murphy, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Jim Carrey. But as much as he reveled in the success of films like “Liar Liar” and “The Nutty Professor,” he always wanted to make his mark in a bigger way.

For years, he’s been setting up meetings with Important People, peppering them with questions, hoping some of their gravitas would rub off. “I’m an autodidact,” he says. “I can’t really read, but I can ask interesting questions.” Grazer even has what he calls a “cultural attache” on the payroll who reels in the great thinkers. Over the years, he’s met with Jonas Salk, Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), physicist Sheldon Glashow and author Malcolm Gladwell. When I first met Grazer a dozen years ago, he was schmoozing with former CIA Director William Colby, hearing him discuss, prophetically as it turns out, the possibility of a nuclear showdown with North Korea.

At first, Grazer only made dramatic fare when it was a project for his Imagine Entertainment partner Ron Howard to direct. But since 2000, the producer has taken a surprisingly serious turn. In addition to “A Beautiful Mind” and “Cinderella Man,” he’s made the documentary “Inside Deep Throat” and the Texas high school football drama “Friday Night Lights.” He has two more dramas starting later this month, an adaptation of the “The Da Vinci Code” and a Spike Lee-directed thriller, “The Inside Man.” He’s also producing a reworking of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” a gritty portrait of a ‘70s-era New York City drug lord called “American Gangster” and a NBC miniseries based on the 9/11 Commission Report.

What changed? “I just see more bad things in the world today,” he says, speaking in bursts of ideas, many of them easier to grasp if you recognize the self-realization buzz words. “I used to think I could make anything funny, be it disability or corruption or being fat, but I don’t think those things are funny anymore. ‘Liar Liar’ was about a guy with a lying sickness, but now lying is so pervasive that it’s not funny.”

He sees comedies today as being about attitude. “And when it’s just about attitude, it’s too hard to give them the kind of stickiness they need to embed in the culture. My whole goal is to make movies that are singular, that matter, but to do that, you have to go to a deeper place.”

Grazer contends that all of his comedies could’ve just as easily been dramas, pointing out that the premise of “The Nutty Professor” isn’t so different from “A Beautiful Mind.” “They come from the same place -- they both deal with emotionally handicapped people. Sherman Klump is clever and funny, but he’s fat. John Nash is really smart, but he gets abused in the same way as Sherman. You feel bad for Sherman, but to destigmatize disability, I chose to make you laugh. With ‘Beautiful Mind,’ I chose to make you cry. It’s the same message in a different artistic form.”

Grazer says he finds himself drawn to stories about “emotionally broken” people because he’s that way himself. He admits to getting depressed and obsessing over failure. The day of the “Cinderella Man” premiere, he was fidgety and distracted, groaning aloud several times, clearly not having slept much the night before. After lunch he showed me a tube of Denavir he keeps in his desk drawer, a medicine used to prevent cold sores, the first manifestation of his anxiety attacks.

“I deal with failure horribly,” he says. “There’s so much self-punishing. I’m miserable, bordering on total paralysis. I don’t go out. I’ll have a conversation and my lips start throbbing -- everything seems to go to my lips.” It’s telling that Grazer becomes even more animated discussing his failures, as if exorcising a demon. Asked about “The Cat in the Hat,” which was excoriated by critics, he says “So many things went wrong! There was no story. Zero conflict. We took this great childhood myth and completely failed to meet the audience’s expectations. I should’ve looked myself in the mirror and said, ‘No!!’ ”

It’s easy to make light of Grazer’s antics -- he’s always checking his hair and his teeth in the mirror -- but there’s a method to his madness. His jittery nerve endings are also his creative antennae, his shrewd sixth sense about what’s percolating in the pop zeitgeist. “Brian is a seeker,” says Viacom Co-President Tom Freston, an old pal who often takes Grazer on trips to Dakar, Senegal, and other exotic locales. “He has this ADD persona, but that’s just the way his mind works, bouncing from place to place. He has an incredible ability to sniff out something that’s out on the edge just before it reaches the mainstream, like he did with Eminem and ‘8 Mile.’ ”

Because Grazer is so close to Freston and Paramount Chairman Brad Grey, rumors abound that he might jump ship from Universal, where he’s under contract until the end of 2008. He insists he isn’t going anywhere. “They’re a winning team and have been a really great partner,” he says. “We’ve had so much success together that I can’t imagine leaving.”

Still, Freston has him pegged: Grazer is always on a quest for something new, whether it’s a box-office smash or spiritual enlightenment. All that restlessness has made him a high-maintenance personality. As his wife, the writer Gigi Levangie Grazer, put it recently, “Brian is the movie star in our house.” When he leaves his office, a bevy of assistants fusses over him, handing over a backpack, car keys, water bottles, energy bars and meticulously typed directions, as if he were indeed taking off for Dakar, not downtown L.A.

“I just want to become more evolved,” he explains, scanning the freeway traffic. “I’m a serious, deep, dark person. But I keep telling myself -- enjoy yourself. When I go to a premiere, I think -- even if I have to, say, do an interview with ‘ET,’ unless I throw up on the interviewer, what could really go wrong?” Grazer sighs. The path to enlightenment is often studded with thorns. “See, there I am, thinking of throwing up. That’s not really enjoying myself, is it?”