Ron Howard and Brian Grazer - Box Office Business

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:35)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum, and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions, and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:07)
Today, I'm joined by two Hollywood greats, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. They have produced, directed, written, and acted in a number of the most popular films and TV shows ever made, including Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, 24, and Frost Nixon. Their partnership is one of the longest running in Hollywood and the business they founded in 1985, Imagine Entertainment, has won 49 Emmy Awards, 11 Golden Globes, and 10 Academy Awards.
There are few better storytellers in the world and it was a thrill to talk about curiosity, trust, and business building with them both. Please enjoy this great conversation with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.
So, Ron and Brian, I was toying with where to begin our discussion and I always like starting with the area of someone's lives that interests me most relative to like all the great smart people out there. Since it's both of you together, I'd love to begin with the area of partnership and trust. You've built this incredible entertainment business together since the mid-80s over a very long period of time and everyone talks about how great trust is, but you don't often hear the stories of how it's built over time. I'd love for each of you to open by just describing the value of that trust between you and some of the things that have built that trust over time because I think if there's anything that I'd love to take away from this, it's how you did that because it seems so rare in the world of business.

**Ron Howard** (3:23)
Let me start with a couple of things and Brian will have his side of this, but going back to the earliest trust building moments, first, it was really interesting and exciting for me to meet Brian.
Brian wound up being kind of my first Hollywood lunch in a classic way because while I'd been in the business my whole life, and I'd certainly eaten lunch before, I'd never really had somebody say, hey, let's have lunch and talk about projects. And Brian had known that I was producing and directing TV movies. We were both the youngest guys on the Paramount lot with offices, and he'll explain how he'd gotten his. It's kind of a colorful story. I'd leveraged mine through my happy days renegotiation. So not so colorful story, but we both had offices and Brian had great ideas. He was creative. He had his own ideas that he controlled, but he also immediately proved that he just had the energy and the wherewithal to actually get us quality meetings. And the first project we worked on didn't get through, but we had a lot of amazing meetings. He was just able to get these doors open. It was great to see and something that I didn't really have the capacity for and neither did my representatives particularly. And then the very next idea was another idea of Brian's, which was Night Shift. And not only did we get doors open, we actually got it made and we clicked. But before we actually made Night Shift, the first big trust building moment occurred.