More than a few great things in Hollywood have been created around two people meeting through happenstance, merrily swirling together fortune and fate. The coupling of Brian Grazer, 68, and Ron Howard, 65, the founders of Imagine Entertainment, is just such a story.
Back in the ’80s, when Grazer was starting out as a television producer on the Paramount Pictures lot, he made it a practice to sit down with a new person every day who he felt was important in the business. More often than not, these conversations were scheduled, but there came a day when he had neglected to line up something. “I look out the window, and I see Ron Howard,” Grazer recalls. “And Ron Howard is the star of Happy Days, and I’m thinking, That counts!” “I kind of yell, Ron! He sort of blows me off a bit. That was okay,” Grazer goes on. “Then I found a way. I called his office.”
From there, Howard and Grazer married their ambitions together—Howard’s to be a director, Grazer’s a producer—collaborating on the films Night Shift (’82) and Splash (’84) before formalizing their partnership with the formation of Imagine Entertainment in 1986. Their work includes such instant classics as A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13 and television successes like 24, Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights.
Their success, which they talk about at length in the video above, has partly come from a willingness to evolve with the entertainment business, and the duo is now positioning Imagine Entertainment to take advantage of the streaming-video boom. Flush with $125 million in fresh funding, Imagine has the freedom to pursue projects like tick, tick … BOOM! a musical adaptation of the original stage show by the late Rent creator Jonathan Larson to be directed by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Imagine has also launched an incubator program, Imagine Impact, to bring fresh voices from around the world to Hollywood. Applicants apply to take part in a paid eight-week program, where they’re mentored and develop their ideas. The project culminates with a pitch day, where buyers bid on the projects. One participant from Zimbabwe, Godwin Jabangwe, landed a mid-six-figure guarantee from Netflix for his animated adventure musical, Tunga.
“Some projects get bought on pitch day,” Howard said. “In some instances, it just launches careers. … They wind up being hired, they get agents, they get managers, they wind up on TV shows. … Definitely, there is a long tail.”
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