Connection is why we’re here.” —Brené Brown1 IN THE SPRING OF 1995, we at Imagine Entertainment got a new boss. Like anyone, I wanted to make a good impression. I just wasn’t quite sure how to do that. In fact, I haven’t had a boss in the conventional sense in thirty years, someone who could call me up and tell me what to do, someone I had to check in with every few days. Ron Howard and I had been running Imagine together—along with a lot of other people—since 1986. During that time, we’ve had our longest partnership with Universal Studios—they finance and distribute many of the movies we produce. So I consider whoever is running Universal my “boss” in the sense that we need to work well with that person, we need to develop and sustain a strong personal and professional relationship so we can agree on the kinds of movies we’re making together. Tens of millions of dollars are always hanging in the balance. By the mid-1990s, we’d done a run of movies with Universal that were both great and successful: Parenthood (1989), Kindergarten Cop (1990), Backdraft (1991), and The Paper (1994).
