Wanted: a beautiful mind

Nice work if you can get it! (I mean Brian Grazer's gig, not the "cultural attaché" cum intellectual lackey...)

New Yorker: ...The rumor, according to one (unofficial) e-mail: “Oscar-winning producer Brian Grazer (Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind, American Gangster) is looking for a new cultural attaché.” The e-mail explained:

This person would be responsible for keeping Brian abreast of everything that’s going on in the world; politically, culturally, musically. . . . They’re also responsible for finding an interesting person for Brian to meet with every week . . . an astronaut, a journalist, a philosopher, a buddhist monk. . . . There is LOTS of reading for this position! Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in. You’ll probably get to read about 4 or 5 books a week and you may be required to travel with him on his private plane to Hawaii, New York, Europe—teaching him anything he asks you about along the way. . . . You will also be provided with an assistant. . . . Salary is around $150,000 a year. . . . You will be to Grazer what Karl Rove was to Bush.

...Michael Rosenberg, the president of Imagine, the production company Grazer owns with Ron Howard, said that about a hundred would-be attachés have e-mailed résumés since word of the job got out. One was Ed Cooke, twenty-six, a British writer and education consultant. His résumé: philosophy-and-psych degree from Oxford, three languages, a demonstrated interest in “the philosophy of cricket.” “This seemed like a job that would suit me,” Cooke said. He’d sent in a list of interesting people: the medieval scholar Mary Carruthers; the cricket star Shane Warne; Dmitri Nabokov.

But Cooke didn’t make the final cut. By last week, Grazer’s staff had already narrowed the potential attachés down to four finalists, who would interview with the boss. “I’ve met a lot of good candidates,” Grazer said, reached on his cell phone en route to a meeting with the screenwriter for “Angels and Demons.” He said that he’d been hiring cultural attachés for twenty years, ever since he asked Jonas Salk’s assistant to help him track down interesting people in science. Fifteen or twenty people have held the job since then. (The “attaché” title started out as a joke.) “They have to be really resourceful,” Grazer said. “I like to meet people in dangerous organizations, and my cultural attaché finds out who that person is—who runs the Yakuza, or the Masons, or MI5.” The best attaché so far, Grazer said, has been Brad Grossman, the current one, who is leaving the post, after four years. Grossman is thirty-two; he owned a tutoring business before taking the job, and Grazer said that he is especially good at explaining the things he’s asked to learn about—bacteria or makeup or superdelegates. “I’m looking for a person who has that teacherlike quality,” Grazer said. “Also, it’s good to have a person who is a connector, who is liked by people.”

Grazer has had one bad attaché experience. “A few years ago, I hired this really smarty-pants Harvard guy,” he said. “He was just remarkably lazy. If he didn’t get the Wall Street Journal on his desk, it was like it didn’t exist.” Still, he said, the experience came with a lesson: “Under no condition can you teach curiosity.”

Before Grazer became a successful producer, he was—like most people— his own cultural attaché. Two weeks ago, he found a letter he’d written to the physicist Edward Teller during that period. “It made me remember how much work it was,” Grazer said. “I had to do the begging and grovelling and ass-kissing myself. I had to find the newspapers and magazines. Even then, I put so much thought and effort into trying to meet and learn from the people who mattered to me.”