Brian Grazer: The Lost Intro

With the LAT's unfortunate decision to callously discard all the hard work superproducing guest editor Brian Grazer had put into his masterfully curated Sunday Current section just because the paper caught a faint whiff of possible publicist-related impropriety, we feared that the words of introduction that Hollywood's Grand Inquisitor of Interesting People so painstakingly dictated to his assistants for later transcription might be lost to history. (Luckily for his support staff, their notoriously quixotic boss abandoned a poorly conceived plan to have his introductory remarks on his editorial mission pressed into a clay tablet in cuneiform--an idea that grew out of a brief obsession with producing an action-thriller set in ancient Sumeria--ultimately tasking them with translating his scattered thoughts into comprehensible English instead.) But thanks to LA Observed (and someone on the inside with access to the Times's editing system), Grazer's Lost Introduction has been preserved for as long as these blogowebs exist:

For virtually all of my professional life, I've made my living - and my name - as a movie and television writer-producer. But what I've really been doing is pursuing a 25-year journey of curiosity. Curiosity informs everything I do. The prospect of exploring unfamiliar subcultures, meeting smart people who look at the world in new and interesting ways, learning more about how things (and people) work - that's what inspires me.

So when The Times invited me to guest edit an issue of the Current section, giving me creative freedom to choose whatever writers and subjects I wanted, I couldn't resist. In the end, I whittled the list to a few of the areas I find currently intriguing: the dynamics of popular culture, the relationship of matter to mind, and the effect of morals and mores.

In short, what makes us the way we are in a constantly evolving world? It's a question that's fascinated me for as long as I can remember, and one I expect to continue asking for the rest of my life.

LA Observed also has a statement from the LAT publisher apologizing to Grazer for the pain he and his contributors have suffered during this scandal; perhaps in time, their squandered output will surface on the internet, allowing us all to evaluate how Imagine's resident Big Thinker responded to the guest-editing challenge before bringing the paper to its knees.

Grazergate: Guest-Editing Producer Tears Apart The 'LAT' From The Inside

The dominoes in Grazergate have fallen, and fallen quickly: The paper's publisher this morning announced it would kill Brian Grazer's blockbuster Sunday Current section to avoid the appearance of undue publicist influence in the superproducer/intellectual dynamo's coronation as guest editor-king, prompting embattled, flack-entangled section editor Andres Martinez to quickly resign, and the Times Ouroboros to hastily swallow its deliciously scandal-tipped tail by immediately posting a story about the resignation. The real victim in all of this is Grazer, whose selfless desire to share with the public an all-consuming, lifelong curiosity about Stuff has now been tainted by controversy, with the pages upon which the precious words he so lovingly curated--but is tragically unable to read--were printed soon to be recycled into Best Buy circulars advertising specially discounted A Beautiful Mind DVDs.