EXCLUSIVE: Happy 40th anniversary to Ron Howard and Brian Grazer and their Imagine Entertainment, which the pair founded in November 1985. They are celebrating the occasion by joining me for this special edition of my Deadline video series Behind the Lens, and it is a wide-ranging conversation you don’t want to miss, especially if you want to find out the secrets to surviving and thriving in a business that seems to change every week. Theirs is a marriage longer than almost any other in Hollywood.
They are so busy that it was hard to find a time to get them together in our PMC studio, but we finally managed to do it in September and run it this month exactly 40 years after the birth of Imagine. They point to “quality alignment” as the key to their partnership incorporating trust, transparency and, very importantly, work ethic. “There’s never been a time we’ve been on autopilot,” Howard says. That could include his separate career in the business in front of the camera, which he talks about. His first job was at age 5 opposite Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in 1958’s The Journey, so he is knocking on 70 years of doing this and still as excited and motivated as ever.
Starting with their first film together, 1982’s Night Shift, and then 1984’s Splash pre-Imagine, the collective body of work since has been pretty impressive including Apollo 13, Backdraft, Parenthood, The Grinch, Rush, Willow, Parenthood, Thirteen Lives, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, The Missing, Frost/Nixon, Eden, and of course their Best Picture Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, among countless others that were just directed by Howard. The list of other Imagine Films stretches endlessly including The Doors, The Nutty Professor, 8 Mile, Friday Night Lights, all the way up to Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt, which is in theaters now before its streaming date on Prime Video. A documentary division is turning out one after another including recent Emmy winner Jim Henson Idea Man, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, Music by John Williams and the upcoming Avedon.
They talk about all this, their successes and challenges in an ever-changing environment, their relationships with studio executives (“We actually like these people,” Howard laughs) including longtime partnerships with different regimes at Universal and now Amazon MGM Studios, among others. And they highlight their upcoming slate including David Leitch’s How to Rob A Bank along with Whalefall, Spaceballs 2, The Mosquito Bowl, Wild Things and more. Howard and Grazer also talk about television, where they have had such hits as 24, Arrested Development, Parenthood and Friday Night Lights; they discuss rebooting the latter for a new go-round with original creatives Jason Katims and Peter Berg.
Howard also talks about the one movie that really stands out for him when I ask if there is a favorite, and Grazer talks about the value of his penchant for cold-calling people he doesn’t know and setting a lunch for what he describes as “curiosity conversations.” His only rule now is they aren’t people in the business. If you are a Nobel Prize winner, expect a call.
To watch our conversation and to go “behind the lens” with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer on 40 years of Imagine, just click the link above.
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