Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…He was amazing. Here's a guy who was a medical doctor, screenwriter, director, travel writer, short story writer, novelist, and just was probably the greatest guest to ever have at a dinner party because he could talk about anything with an extraordinary depth of knowledge. It's fascinating to me because later we'll talk about another friend of mine who I love putting together, and that's Marc Andreessen. The two of those guys probably suck 90% of the brainpower that God gave away in their birth years. They’re just extraordinary. But Michael ran into a very tough patch, really tough patch. A lot of writers and creative people—you've probably heard of the expression writer's block—occasionally it doesn't flow. Artists have it as well. I have a friend who's a phenomenal painter and she just couldn't get it together for six months. It just wasn't coming out. I think that Michael was in a position where he was going on a couple of years, and he just wasn't happy with what was coming to him. I used to have lunch with him once a week. I would push him constantly at the lunches to try to see if I could ignite a small spark. At one of the lunches, when things seem their bleakest, he said to me, what do you think of three people, age younger and maybe just one’s a little older person stranded in an amusement park off the coast of South America, and the core of the amusement park are prehistoric animals? I looked at him and I said, wow, my young son likes dinosaurs, I like dinosaurs, and my dad likes dinosaurs. This is really an extraordinarily interesting idea. We then talked for almost three hours about paleontology. Is it possible you could breed these types of beings in the 20th century? Could it be made real? Is it possible, in those days, with the kind of technical know-how that was available in the '90s to do it? We came to the conclusion that it was worth him sitting down and trying to write it. Lo and behold, he sat down, and five months later, he called me up. He said I'm sending you a draft of a book about what we talked about. 00 PM. 6:30 PM I had something to eat. I had left the office early and I just started reading type-written manuscript pages. I didn't finish until around 3:00 AM. I called him at 7:00 AM and I said, this is the best thing you've written in 10 years. I said I just couldn't stop turning the pages. Just as an aside, one of the great tasks of whether something works or not is how quickly you turn the page. You know from reading, just recreationally, if you turn the page you like the book. I just devoured this book. I said to him, look, this is brilliant. It'll make an amazing book. It'll make an amazing movie. I said there's only one guy in my mind that can make this movie. They're not two guys, three guys, or four guys. There is one guy and if we don't get him, I would be worried about what this movie looked like. He said, who? And I said, Steven. In our world, there are certain people that have single names. There's Madonna, there’s Cher, and there's Steven. Of course, Steven Spielberg who is also the one director who is not your client.…

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