At 25, Larry Kasanoff risked his dream job to greenlight a movie nobody at his studio wanted to make — and Platoon went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. He shares how that bet became a philosophy he carried through Terminator 2, Mortal Kombat, and more than 200 films, and where the line sits between bold and reckless.
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My guest for Episode #357 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Larry Kasanoff, chairman and CEO of Threshold Entertainment. As a producer and studio head, Larry has worked on more than 200 feature films, including Platoon, True Lies, and the Mortal Kombat franchise. He was also president and co-founder of Lightstorm Entertainment, the company behind Terminator 2: Judgment Day. His latest book is A Touch of the Madness, about being more innovative by being a little crazy.
Larry's favorite mistake was a practical joke that went too far. While running an 80-picture-a-year film slate at Vestron, his staff kept trying to prank him at film festivals. Larry decided to end it by arranging for a 12-foot Burmese python to be delivered in a script bag and dropped into the lap of the lead instigator. The room erupted in panic. It worked — nobody ever pranked him again — but he later realized a constrictor snake can bite, and someone could have been seriously hurt. The lesson: playfulness fuels creativity, but you have to know where the line is between a touch of the madness and a ton of it.
But the bigger story is how Larry got to that point. At 25, with no prior experience, he was handed the job of running production at Vestron. When a script called Platoon landed on his desk, his boss told him it didn't fit the studio's formula — no stars, no genre hook — and if it failed, Larry was fired. He greenlit it anyway. It won Best Picture. Director Oliver Stone later told him, “Kid, you have a touch of the madness,” and Larry made that phrase the guiding philosophy of his career.
From there, the conversation covers the real risks behind Terminator 2 — including a helicopter stunt that was never in the script and got Larry screamed at by the studio the next day — and the story of how an 11-year-old kid hyperventilating over a character design saved Larry from a serious Mortal Kombat mistake. Larry also shares the untold story behind the Dirty Dancing hit “(I've Had) The Time of My Life”: when everybody rejected the re-recorded version, music supervisor Jimmy Ienner waited three weeks, changed the label to “Version 2,” changed nothing else, and sent it back. Everyone loved it. The song won the Grammy and the Academy Award.
Larry also weighs in on why algorithm-driven filmmaking produces forgettable work, what a failed 3D TV network teaches about chasing technology for its own sake, and where AI genuinely helps the film business versus where human creativity remains irreplaceable.
Themes and Questions:
- How risking his dream job at 25 to greenlight Platoon — against his boss's formula — became the defining bet of Larry's career
- What Oliver Stone meant by “a touch of the madness” and how Larry turned that phrase into a philosophy for innovation
- The practical joke with a 12-foot Burmese python that worked too well, and what it taught him about the line between playful and reckless
- Why the most expensive movie ever made at the time, Terminator 2, carried risks the studio didn't even fully understand until halfway through production
- The helicopter stunt in T2 that was never in the script — a Vietnam War pilot said he could do it, and Larry got screamed at the next day
- How a hyperventilating 11-year-old saved Larry from changing a signature Mortal Kombat character design, and why listening to your audience matters more than your own preferences
- The untold story behind Dirty Dancing's “(I've Had) The Time of My Life” — everyone rejected the re-recorded version, so the music supervisor changed the label to “Version 2,” changed nothing else, and won the Grammy and the Academy Award
- Why algorithm-driven filmmaking produces forgettable work and why human creativity remains the best tool for surprising an audience
- What a failed 3D TV network that lasted six months teaches about chasing technology without knowing your audience
- Where AI genuinely helps the film business versus where it cannot replace unique human performance and storytelling
- Why hearing “you're crazy” feels like a warm embrace, but hearing “great idea, no problem” makes Larry nervous
- The difference between compromise and creative conviction — why averaging out yellow and orange produces worse results than committing to one
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A Touch of the Madness: Betting Your Career on Platoon, T2, and Mortal Kombat — with Larry Kasanoff
Introducing Larry Kasanoff and Threshold Entertainment
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is Larry Kasanoff. He is chairman and CEO of Threshold Entertainment. As a producer and studio head, Larry has worked on more than 200 feature films, including Platoon, True Lies, and the Mortal Kombat franchise. He was also president and co-founder of Lightstorm Entertainment, the company behind Terminator 2: Judgment Day — a movie I've really loved for a couple decades now. These days Larry is also an author. His latest book is called A Touch of the Madness. It's about being more innovative by being a little crazy. So Larry, welcome to the show. How are you?
Larry Kasanoff: Thanks. Glad to be here. I'm great.
Mark Graban: I'm really excited. There are so many things we can chat about here about movie making and creativity and your experiences. But first off, the key question as we always do, Larry, what's your favorite mistake?
The Favorite Mistake: A Practical Joke That Went Too Far
Larry Kasanoff: All right. So two things. I have to set this up a little bit so you understand the context. But you did say when we talked earlier, fun, so I'm gonna give you a kind of a fun one.
So first of all, the background of this. I wanted to be a movie producer since I was a little kid, and I got incredibly lucky. Out of school my first job was to be head of production, acquisitions, and co-productions of an independent film studio called Vestron. This was in the late '80s when home video was skyrocketing, like streaming is today. There was no streaming, then there's streaming, you need a lot of movies. And the same thing would happen with Vestron and home video. So my job as a new head of production was to deliver 80 movies — 8-0 — a year to the studio. Normally a studio today makes 12 movies a year. And we didn't have a lot of money to make each movie, so we made low budget horror films and sci-fi films and rom-coms and action films.
But then one day I got a script for a movie called Platoon. And if you don't know Platoon, it is a very serious movie about the Vietnam War and the effect it had on the kids in it. The tagline of the movie is, “The first casualty of war is innocence.” And I wanted to make this movie. Now, my boss, who's a great entrepreneur, said, “This isn't the kind of movie we make. No one's famous in it.” They all became famous, but they weren't then. The director, Oliver, we had done another movie with — it was great, called Salvador, but it wasn't a hit. And so there was no reason under our formula to make this movie, but I just had an instinct. And my boss said, “Listen, you're the head of production. You can do whatever you want, but — there's always a but — if it fails, you're fired. What do you wanna do?” And he fired people all the time. He wasn't bluffing.
So I thought, I'm not gonna get into the movie business to play it safe, so I greenlit Platoon. I saw Platoon early one morning in Italy at a film festival alone. I had a private screening, and I'm the only guy in history to giggle his way through Platoon, not because it wasn't great, because it was so great I was like, “Oh my God, I'm not getting fired.”
A few months later, I ran into the director at a bar in New York one night, and he bought me a drink. And he said, “Kid, I like you. You have a touch of the madness.” And I thought, “A touch of the madness? A touch is a little. Madness is crazy. Am I a little crazy? Is he calling me crazy?” Then it occurred to me that my boss had a touch of the madness by letting a 25-year-old kid with no prior experience run an 80-picture film slate. Oliver, the director, had a touch of the madness by insisting on doing a Vietnam movie the way no one ever had. And I had a touch of the madness by gambling the best job in the world that I just got on one movie.
And then it occurred to me that this is what you need to be innovative and to be great. Why does everyone talk about innovation? Because the current of the river of life will always pull you towards the middle, and if you don't fight against it, you'll be eclipsed by those who do, because the audience wants the new and the different. And the best way to fight against that river is with a touch of the madness. If you give into that crazy side of you, that unusual side of you, you can come up with great ideas and great things and take big swings. And I decided then and there that that was gonna be my philosophy for my life in the business and just my life, and it has been.
So what I think about a lot in my life is a touch of the madness — great, a little bit of crazy to get that extra innovative spark — versus a ton of the madness, maybe not so great. You want to have a touch of the madness, but you don't wanna go too far. So when is a touch a ton and when is it too far?
The Snake in the Script Bag
Larry Kasanoff: So one of my very simple steps for a touch of the madness is always try to have fun. Try and play it like a game. In a state of play, we're more creative, we're more open, people enjoy it better, we're more relaxed, we're more innovative.
When I was head of production at Vestron and trying to buy every movie we could get our hands on, there were film festivals, like the Cannes Film Festival, one called the American Film Market. And at these film festivals I would get a huge suite, because we had like 40 people all constantly active on phones, getting scripts delivered, videotapes, meeting actors. We'd all leave for dinner, and everyone who came and went in the suite — I realized that every night, someone in my staff was trying to play a different practical joke on me. I'm pretty good at practical jokes because my brother and I grew up playing them on each other all the time, and I usually caught them. But I thought, “Okay, I gotta stop this. They wanna play, my staff wants to play — let's play.”
So I figured out who the culprit was. And at the film market, there was a guy promoting a horror movie with a snake. He got a 12-foot Burmese python and a handler to come to his suite as a gimmick to promote his movie. But I was friendly with the guy, and I made a deal to have the snake handler show up as a mailman that night when we had our evening meeting before dinner, and deliver the mail. But instead of a script bag, which it looked like, inside would be the 12-foot Burmese python.
So this happens. Everyone's crazy that night, a million things going on. Knock at the door. I said, “I'll get it. It's the scripts.” I said, “Oh, scripts.” And the woman on my staff who was the lead instigator of the practical jokes was sitting there cross-legged, and I said, “It's for you, your scripts.” And I dropped the bag, and it fell right in her lap, in her legs. And the snake on cue went out like this and just pointed right at her. And the place erupted like I had thrown a percussion grenade into it. People went crazy screaming. A guy we worked with who was maybe 250 pounds, kind of a football player type, jumped on a table. Everyone went screaming. It was just insane.
I later learned that there are people who have primal fears of snakes. And I also later learned that while Burmese pythons are constrictor snakes, and if they have a handler there they're okay, they also can bite.
Mark Graban: Ah.
Larry Kasanoff: And so I probably, as I've thought over the years, what's the lesson there? That's probably too far. Because someone really could have gotten hurt. Now, here's the downside of that decision. The “is it too far?” Everyone came up to me and said, “We're not gonna screw with you anymore.” No one ever played a practical joke on me in that company for the rest of my time there. So it kind of worked in an odd way. But it probably was too much.
So what I try and ask myself now, when I ask people to play, sometimes, look, if you're going skiing, you're taking a physical risk. You can't avoid all physical risk. But that probably was too much for the average person.
Mark Graban: Well, at least that didn't completely backfire on you. You managed to learn the lesson without losing a job or having a huge consequence.
Larry Kasanoff: No, and it really helped. I mean, everyone looked at me like, “Whoa, we better stay away from you. You want us to do something, boss? Sure, no problem.” No one thought I was being a tough guy. I just thought it was funny. I like animals. So it never really occurred to me. The other thing that I thought I learned too is when you're gonna do something like that, maybe research it a little bit more. I've done a lot of things where I just said, “Hey, let's do this.” I flew to and landed with my production staff on a US aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean. That was amazing, but it was scary as hell. I think I got a little bit better maybe at researching some of these things before I say, “Hey, let's go do this,” without losing spontaneity.
The Risks Behind Terminator 2
Mark Graban: It seems like, if not a perfect track record, Larry, you've got a pretty good track record on making bets. Platoon and Oliver Stone. Working also with James Cameron. I wanna talk to you about Terminator 2. I re-watched it again the other day. It's probably the 10th time I've seen that movie, including when it first came out in the theaters. Did everyone think that was gonna be a big success?
Larry Kasanoff: Well, when Terminator 2 got made, it was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. And the funny thing about Terminator 2 was, the studio was obviously incredibly supportive. But the effects were theoretically possible — Jim had proved that on a prior movie — but they were never done at this scale before. This really became the dawn of the age of CGI and digital effects.
And what's really interesting is the studio, I realized halfway through the movie, didn't realize that there was a risk with these effects. I mean, you could argue there wasn't a risk because we were so confident, but there was a risk. And we didn't know till halfway through the movie if they worked, when we saw the first final shot. So there were a lot of risks in that movie — the cost, the effects, some of them not known to the audience.
But one of the other things I believe with a touch of the madness is when you have a goal, your mad, crazy goal, you have to ask anyone anywhere in the world anything that will help you achieve the goal. So we did tons of stuff. We wanted to do a music video because in those days MTV played a lot of music videos, and that would help promote the movie. But no one was contractually obligated. It wasn't thought of, but I started asking everyone. Everyone said yes except the studio. The studio said no. But I kept asking everyone. I got Arnold. Jim was on board, of course. We got Guns N' Roses, who was the biggest band in the world at the time, to give us a new song. And the studio still said no, so I gambled again that when I got all those people, the studio would say yes the second time around. Always ask and never — no is just the beginning. And then that worked.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Larry Kasanoff: So we just kept asking and asking and asking, and people honestly were great about it. But there was a ton of risk in that movie, because what if it didn't work? If you make the most expensive movie in the world and it doesn't work, you got a problem.
Mark Graban: Of course you do. Did you feel like your career was on the line? Did Jim Cameron —
Larry Kasanoff: It was on the line. Friends told me, “You're crazy. You're nuts. This is crazy. You're gonna go…” Oh yeah, absolutely. I've had that a lot of times. When I started making Mortal Kombat, there had never been a successful movie from a video game, ever. They all failed. And once again, people said, “You're crazy. You're nuts. This isn't gonna work. Your career's gonna be over.”
Mark Graban: Having a touch of the madness helps you stay the course to your vision, to run counter to what others are sometimes advising you.
Larry Kasanoff: It's beyond that. I'm at the point in my career where if I pitch a movie and everyone says, “Oh my God, Larry, what a great idea. That's fantastic. Easy. No problem,” I get a little nervous. But if people say, “You're crazy. This will never work,” I feel a kind of warm embrace of a touch of the madness, like a mist in the morning on the beach when I set off to make it. I think you have to have that craziness. People are always telling me my ideas are crazy, as recently as yesterday. It happens all the time.
Mark Graban: So what I hear you're saying is, being told it's a little bit crazy might be a warning. Being told it's really crazy tells you you might be onto something.
Larry Kasanoff: Even a little bit crazy is pretty good. When people tell me it's great, that's a warning. But when anything — as long as it's “you're crazy” — then I'm feeling good. And it's not to be flip. The audience wants the new and the different. Anyone who sells a product works for the audience. What does the audience want? The audience wants something different. When you run a company and you run a big studio and you work for a big corporation with stockholders, it's hard to keep taking these risks. It's easier as an independent producer. You just gotta convince someone to do it. But that's what the audience wants. The audience wants the new and the different, so you have to give it to them.
Arnold as the Good Guy and How Robert Patrick Got Cast
Mark Graban: So the original Terminator, Arnold was of course the bad guy, and I was reading about some of the teasers and the lead-up to Terminator 2. It was kept secret, it sounds like, for a while, that there was gonna be this role reversal of Arnold being the protector Terminator this time. Was there any fear of a thing like, oh, the audience wants Arnold as a bad guy? They don't want him to be —
Larry Kasanoff: No. Jim's — one of the first times I sat down to talk with Jim about Lightstorm, and I said, “How can you have another Terminator? They're bad guys.” He goes, “They can make more. They just made a different one. They reprogrammed this one to be good.” It's a genius idea. And then we made a trailer that showed the building of a Terminator that revealed what was gonna happen. Arnold was gonna be a different guy. No, no, no. The second audiences saw that, they loved it.
Mark Graban: The movie's famous for the digital effects. CGI, I think, entered the vernacular. George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic. You played a really important role —
Larry Kasanoff: With ILM. Yeah.
Mark Graban: With ILM.
Larry Kasanoff: I mean, yeah. ILM did a lot of the effects on the movie.
Mark Graban: Was George Lucas personally involved, or that was just his company? That's my mistake.
Larry Kasanoff: We also did a lot of post-production at Skywalker Ranch. So I didn't interact with Lucas, but I assume Jim did. I didn't.
Mark Graban: But that was part of your role within Terminator 2. You were managing different aspects of the production.
Larry Kasanoff: Yeah. I was president of the production company. But I mean, everyone — the talent in the movie was just great. Everyone was fantastic. Even getting Arnold. When we said to him, “Will you do a music video?” he said, “Well, only if you get the best band in the world.” And I said, “Okay, who's the best band in the world?” I called his brother-in-law who's in the music business. He said, “Guns N' Roses.” And I said, “No problem.” I didn't know Guns N' Roses. I had no idea how to reach Guns N' Roses, but I did. I just kept calling. And then once we got Guns N' Roses interested, Arnold and his then wife had a dinner party at their house for us and the band. I mean, everyone was just wonderful.
It was just a great spirit of filmmaking where everyone worked together these incredible hours at something never been done before. And then, you know, remember you asked about the bad guy. The thing about Arnold's character — because it's a new robot, a new cyborg rather — Arnold is now the good guy, and the bad guy is someone completely doing something on film you've never seen before.
And the way the real bad guy got the role — in my previous job at Vestron, we were making 80 movies a year. We made a really low-budget movie in the Philippines starring Robert Patrick. And when we decided at one point to have an open call for the T-1000, I get to the studio that morning and there's like 1,000 people there. And in the back of the line I see Robert. And I'm like, “Dude, what are you doing here?” He said, “I came for the open call.” I said, “No, no, no, no, no. Come on.” And I brought him to the front of the line to meet Jim, and that's how he got cast.
Mark Graban: And it seemed like such a twist where Arnold is Arnold, of course. And Robert Patrick looked not at all physically imposing. He looked very normal, which maybe was part of the — you made it more creepy than physically imposing, right?
Larry Kasanoff: I think the idea is that these infiltration characters, these assassins, blend in. If he looked like a monster when he's walking down the street, he wouldn't get very far.
Mark Graban: Because whoever he touched, he could take their form.
Larry Kasanoff: Well, he could take anybody's form. He could take any form he wanted to. But in his natural form when he was moving about, you just think about it logically — you don't want an assassin to stand out.
The Helicopter Stunt That Wasn't in the Script
Mark Graban: I wanted to ask about the mix of effects. There was so much attention on the digital effects. I've seen the movie so many times, but even last night, the scene in the steel mill where Robert Patrick's Terminator gets thrown into the wall, and then digitally kind of just reverses himself without turning around. That was still mind-blowing. I remember how mind-blowing that was to see an effect like that in the film, and it still looks impressive. It's not one of those things where you look at it today and think, “Oh, how cheesy.” It's still impressive.
Larry Kasanoff: Well, because great filmmaking is more than the effects. The effects are a tool. I can just speak for myself here, but when I make a movie, I don't want people to come up to me and say, “What great effects.” I want them to say, “What a great movie.” Or, “What a scary bad guy.” I don't want them to say, “Oh, I see you used the Digatron 2000 to make this.” You just want them to completely be swept away by the suspension of disbelief with the movie. And I think that's the most important thing. So it works because the filmmaking is so good and the stories are good and the acting's so good. You can watch movies from the 1940s or '30s that work for the same reason.
Mark Graban: I was reading the IMDb page of trivia after watching the movie. It delved into what are called the practical effects, where I was really surprised that the helicopter chase — that helicopter was actually physically flown under the low overpass by a stunt pilot. That was almost more amazing to realize than a digital effect. Nowadays it would be —
Larry Kasanoff: You mean when the helicopter flew through the tunnel?
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Larry Kasanoff: So what happened there was we were in a tunnel in front of Long Beach, south of LA. There's an oil refinery. And that tunnel was in front of the oil refinery. And the pilot wasn't gonna fly through it, but we were running behind, and there was gonna be an effect. And the helicopter pilot — I forget his name, but he was a great guy — he said, “I can do this all day long with my eyes closed.” We said, “But there's only like three feet of clearance on either side of your blades.” And he said, “I was a helicopter war pilot in Vietnam for X years. Are you kidding? This is nothing to me.”
And so we thought, “Huh.” And here's where it was — it was a good question. We didn't have the insurance to do that, because it wasn't in the script. It was just supposed to be an effect. But we did it, and it worked great. And the next day when the studio found out, boy did I get screamed at. And they were probably right. And we probably shouldn't have. But again, that's one of those touch of the madness things. You don't have a lot of time to decide, and you make a decision, and it works great, and that's great filmmaking. You have an obligation to finish the movie on time and on budget, but you also have an obligation to make it great. So sometimes you gotta have a touch of madness. You gotta take some chances.
Mark Graban: Well, that one certainly worked out. I'm sure somebody would have been thinking of the movie The Twilight Zone and that tragedy involving a helicopter and an actor being killed.
Larry Kasanoff: I mean, you're always thinking that. You're always thinking about things to keep your actors and everybody safe. And the world has gotten better that way because, I mean, today the whole shot would've just been digital. We wouldn't even have a helicopter.
Goro's Pet Panther and Why It Didn't Work
Larry Kasanoff: Another one of my touch of the madness, ton of the madness things is on the first Mortal Kombat movie, we made the last great big animatronic character before everything went digital, and it was called — there's a character in Mortal Kombat called Goro. He's eight foot tall, general of the armies of Outworld, the evil armies of Outworld, four arms. And the Goro animatronic character was great. It took all these people to run him.
And I thought, “You know what would be cooler? If Goro had a pet panther.” And I love animals, and there used to be a ranch around here. They trained animals for the movies. Now it's all digital. And they had a panther — like, the family pet was a panther named Paco. So we bring Paco down. I'm so excited. Goro now is gonna have a pet panther with a jeweled collar and everything.
And when Paco came to the set, we had Goro go “Rar,” which was his move, and Paco went nuts. I mean, he went crazy. The poor panther thought Goro was real. It never actually occurred to us, or to me, that the panther — how will the panther look at Goro? So I guess it's a testament to how good Goro was as a practical effect, because the panther thought it was real. And we tried everything we could think of to get that panther to calm down, but at the end of the day, we thought, “It's too dangerous, and the poor panther is under too much stress.” So we didn't do it.
Today a lot of things that you wrestled with back then, you just don't wrestle with. Goro would've had a pet panther, but it would've been all digital. Goro would've been all digital.
Was There Pressure to Cut Scenes from T2?
Mark Graban: One very analog scene from the movie — tell me if this is your recollection. Again, this is the IMDb trivia page, could be true or not. But because of the concern about the cost of the film, somebody at the studio wanted different scenes cut, and the biker bar scene at the beginning of the film supposedly was something somebody wanted cut, where Arnold famously comes in naked — he's just time-traveled — and tells the scary-looking biker, “Give me your clothes.” Is that true, or is that somebody making up a story online?
Larry Kasanoff: I have no recollection of that. No one ever tried to screw with Jim creatively. If they wanted to yell at someone about the money, they would yell at me all the time, which was part of my job. But no one ever told Jim what to cut from the movie. From day one, the dailies were just great. So I don't have any recollection of that.
Mark Graban: We can't believe everything that's on the internet.
Skynet, AI, and Science Fiction Predicting the Future
Mark Graban: T2 has come back into a lot of our vernacular these days with discussions around AI. We hear Skynet come up a lot. How does that affect your conversations with people these days?
Larry Kasanoff: The only thing that's a little strange is a lot of conversations we had then about a fictional movie are very similar to conversations I'm having now about reality. So if you believe The Terminator was a warning by Jim to the world, should we heed it or not?
I assume pretty soon on your podcast, My Favorite Mistake, you're gonna be hearing a lot of AI mistakes one way or the other. “I bet too much. I didn't bet enough.” So we don't know. That's a good question.
I think for the film business, AI is great. Now, for the world in general, I am not qualified to comment. But for the film business, AI is great. I've been involved in a lot of technological firsts in the movie business — the beginning of home video, the beginning of CGI effects, the first 3D Steadicam. I've been involved in a lot of things like that, and every time everyone says, “Oh my God, it's gonna ruin the business,” and it only ever makes the business better.
What I believe AI will do for the business: it'll make movies a little bit cheaper and a little bit better, which will make more movies get made and make movies more profitable. It'll be great for the business. What AI does for the world as a whole — you'd have to ask a politician that question.
Mark Graban: We think of the things that took place in the movie, which was set in 1997, so when the movie was released in 1991, it wasn't that far into the future. Arnold's character, the Terminator, talks about being a learning computer, and we have that now — systems that learn. But the one thing in the movie was that it became self-aware. There are questions about that, and then there are questions about giving AI control over weapons, taking human emotion out of the equation. We know in the plot — no need to say spoiler alert at this point — Skynet decides to eliminate the threat of people shutting it down by launching global nuclear war. Hopefully we're learning from that lesson.
Larry Kasanoff: Hopefully.
Mark Graban: Understatement of the day.
Larry Kasanoff: I don't think — it's great that you're so into The Terminator and it's a great movie, but it is a fictional movie. I don't think —
Mark Graban: It's not keeping me up at night.
Larry Kasanoff: It might have been prescient, but I don't believe there was some computer program that said exactly on this date in real life. It was a fictional movie. But a few summers ago we did a program with some interns where we tracked science fiction for the last 100 years — movies, radio shows, TV shows, books — and actually science fiction has been remarkably accurate at predicting things.
I used to be very friendly with Douglas Adams, who's passed away unfortunately, but Douglas wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a little tablet that had the full knowledge of everything in the universe. We have that today and Douglas predicted it. Now, what he didn't predict was that when everyone had a tablet with the full knowledge of the universe, they would use it for Reddit chains and butt selfies — but that's what everyone's doing. So what we're doing with it, he missed. But it's remarkable how much science fiction in general has been predictive of the future.
Mark Graban: I re-watched the original RoboCop a couple of years ago and the idea of robotic security guards —
Larry Kasanoff: That's happening today.
Mark Graban: That reality is catching up. But the one thing RoboCop got very wrong — I forget what year way into the future it was set — but you had a stenographer in a boardroom and everybody was smoking. So that's something they certainly didn't anticipate.
Larry Kasanoff: But there are robotic security guards now.
How a Hyperventilating 11-Year-Old Saved a Mortal Kombat Character
Mark Graban: I wanna talk a little bit more about Mortal Kombat. It's a movie I haven't seen. I remember the video game, of course. But in the book you have a chapter called “Don't Listen,” and there was a really interesting story about one of the characters in the movie looking a little bit too much like the Terminator, and you actually did —
Larry Kasanoff: So Mortal Kombat has been around for 30-something years now. We just had our fourth movie come out, which was the best for the franchise, so it's still growing. And again, everyone said, “You couldn't do this. This would never work.”
When we were doing the first movie, in pre-production we had some local school class come in. It was someone's kids' school. They were like 11 years old. And we showed them how we make a movie — here is how the sets are built, here's the actors, here's the costumes, and they loved it. And here are the character designs, because how are we gonna put these 2D video game characters into a live movie?
One of the characters is named Kano, and he sort of had a metal eye patch. But we thought, “Well, that's a little like the Terminator, so we'll change it.” And as we're going through the characters, they love this design, they love Goro, they love Raiden. And when we said Kano, one kid said, “Kano has a metal eye patch.” And I said, “Well, you know, I was just involved in this movie called Terminator 2, and the character had a metal eye patch, and I thought it would be boring to do the same thing again.” And the kid said, “Kano has a metal eye patch.” And he started breathing really heavily.
And I explained again how I didn't wanna do it, and the kid started hyperventilating. “Kano has a metal eye patch.” And I thought — that's really a lesson about who you work for: the audience. The flaw in everything I've just said in telling this story is I kept saying, “I wanted this. I thought it'd be boring. I –” No one gives a crap what I want, and they shouldn't. They should care what the audience wants. The audience wants Kano to have a metal eye patch.
So I took down the drawing, ripped it up. Kano then, and continuing 30 years later, has a metal eye patch. And the kid calmed down. The kid saved what would've been — had I done that, that would've been the mistake I talked about today.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Larry Kasanoff: The kid saved me. But it goes — you have to listen to your audience. You have to listen to your audience.
Innovation and Listening Are Not Competing Forces
Mark Graban: So there are these competing forces of having a touch of the madness and having a vision, but also being willing to listen. That's, I guess, the challenge in life.
Larry Kasanoff: I don't think they're competing at all. No. A touch of the madness — it'd be partly because you listen to your audience. We have some movies that we're developing that we're positive the audience wants them. Sometimes it's hard to convince the established powers that be that this is different and new and that's what we want. That's the convincing. It's like we're saying, “But the audience wants this,” but it might not be safe. What if it doesn't work? What if we get embarrassed? Sure. So that's the challenge we have with a touch of madness.
From the audience, it's fantastic. I think it's often abundantly clear what the audience wants. Especially today, you can look — there are so many metrics out there. We've lived in a very politically correct world the last 8, 10 years, but that's happened throughout history. It happened after the Italian Renaissance. It happened in the 1950s. It happens all the time. I think we're just coming out of one now. And to convince people — what you have to do, that's a challenge. But it's not contrary to touch of the madness. It's using a touch of the madness to convince people.
Why Algorithm-Driven Filmmaking Produces Forgettable Work
Mark Graban: When you talk about the data and streaming and what people want, everyone talks about the algorithm now — algorithm-driven movies, stuff created to feed the algorithm. Seems like you're not a fan. Tell us more about that.
Larry Kasanoff: I think you have to use everything, but at the end of the day, you have to trust your instincts. And you also have to listen. You have to interpret. You can't really make movies or paint or do anything creative by rote, because what is usually great about great art is that it is surprising. It's hard to predict — let's say you had algorithms in the late 1800s. I don't think the algorithm would have predicted impressionism. “Let's make pictures that look fuzzy.” And when they first did impressionism, everyone thought it was terrible.
So it's not that I'm not a fan of research. I think it's just a tool. But at the end of the day, there's no tool better than human creativity. If you want unique movies, you have to have unique people. Everyone is worried that AI's gonna eliminate the use of people. I don't think so at all, especially actors, because actors who are surprising and different — a computer is probably not gonna do that. And you want actors who are surprising and different. You want actors where, when you look at the actor, you think, “I don't know what this person's gonna do next.” That's surprising.
So I think these are all tools, these algorithms, but do I think you should make movies completely by rote? No. You'll get bored in a second.
Mark Graban: So it sounds like there's a difference between using data or market research or looking at what people are watching, but don't be a slave to the algorithm.
Larry Kasanoff: Can never be a slave to the algorithm.
The Dirty Dancing Song Nobody Liked — Until the Label Changed
Larry Kasanoff: There's a story from Dirty Dancing. When we got to Dirty Dancing at Vestron, another studio had started and stopped it — that's called a turnaround. My boss at Vestron was very smart, and he got an amazing guy named Jimmy Ienner, who was a genius of music, TV, movies, everything, to come in and supervise it. And once we had Jimmy we knew, okay, everything's gonna be okay.
One of the first things Jimmy did was get a look at the song “Time of My Life,” which had been recorded as a high falsetto song. And Jimmy hired a guy named Michael Lloyd to be his music supervisor, and they both wanted to re-record the song to a lower kind of ballad. And they did. And they sent it out to everybody — the director of the movie, the record company. And no one liked the song. Everybody said, “No, no, no, no, it's no good.” And they all gave Jimmy notes. “Here, can you do this?”
And Jimmy and Michael said, “Yeah, no problem. We'll do the notes, of course. Thank you very much. Just give us a little time.” And three weeks later, they sent out version two, and they wrote a little letter saying, “We actually showed this to some radio stations” — radio stations in those days helped promote albums in a huge way — “and they like it too. But let us know what you think of the new version.” And everyone said, “Oh my God, it's great. Thank you so much. Love it, love it, love it.”
So the question is, what genius change did Jimmy make between version one and version two? And here's what he changed. Nothing. He didn't change a thing. He changed the label. Version one, version two. Because he just knew it. But he had to give people the impression that they were being listened to. That's a touch of the madness. He knew what he had. By going to radio stations, he gambled the whole thing, because if the radio stations didn't like it, you're out.
But that's a touch of the madness. And you're never gonna get an algorithm to do that. An algorithm would've said, “Oh, everyone doesn't like it. Don't do it.” That song won the Grammy and the Academy Award for Best Song that year. Because Jimmy said, “I'm not listening to anyone. I know what's great.” And that's what he did.
When Feedback Is Just Ego
Mark Graban: You think of sometimes where executives feel like they have to give feedback, or their ego says they want to give feedback. You hear enough about the industry of, “Oh, we got notes.” How much of it is — I'm sure it depends on the situation, but how often are people just giving notes to give notes, whether the feedback is helpful or not?
Larry Kasanoff: That's a great question. Everyone has a job to do, and you try and look at it with a place of playfulness, and you try and think, again, everyone has a job to do. But some of the studios now have gotten so big — they're mammoth corporations with huge stockholders and shareholders. And that's who they essentially work for. That's their audience. So sometimes that is counter to what you wanna do in a situation where you're Jimmy and you're saying, “I don't care, this song is great, and I don't care if everyone disagrees with me.”
We all have the same goal at the end of the day, which is a hit, but you get there different ways. I tend to think in movies it's better not to compromise. Let's say I want yellow and you want orange. Rather than combining them — one shot we have yellow, one shot we have orange. I'm a big believer in extremes in entertainment, and I think you want that sort of thing. But mostly if you get down to it, people just have a job to do, and they're trying their best.
Mark Graban: What you're saying about the extremes and not averaging out everything reminds me of a famous Detroit auto executive, Bob Lutz. I saw him give a talk once, and he said, “When you're designing cars, it's better to design a car that some people love and some people hate, instead of designing a car that everybody thinks is okay.”
Larry Kasanoff: Oh, I say that all the time. I constantly say to my staff and people — or someone says, “Well, what should I do in the audition?” An actor friend. I say, “You gotta take a shot.” Lutz is entirely correct. Have half the people hate you, half the people love you, rather than everyone thinks, “Eh, you're okay.” Because if they think you're okay, they won't remember you.
Mark Graban: And Lutz was saying the car people think is okay is everybody's second choice. At least the people who love the car — it's still different. But if somebody loves what that actor did, they cast the actor.
Blood Diner, Tarantino, and the Power of One Great Line
Larry Kasanoff: At Vestron when we made all those low-budget movies, we made a ton of movies that weren't Dirty Dancing or Platoon. And one was pitched to us — it was a horror movie called Blood Diner. It was just — I didn't understand the script. I liked the director, but it was a nutso movie. But it had a catchy title, and so we had our art department make a test poster, which we sometimes did just to see if we liked the visual image, because sometimes you could sell a lot of video cassettes with a poster.
And they made a beautiful art deco poster with this kind of old diner, and it said Blood Diner, and the tagline was, “First they greet you, then they eat you.” And I thought, “That is so great. One day, years from now,” — this was 30 years, 35 years ago — “I'm gonna be talking about this.” So I greenlit it just based on the poster.
Right before the pandemic, I got a phone call saying, “Would you come to Quentin Tarantino's movie theater in Beverly Hills for a midnight screening of your old movie Blood Diner?” I said, “You're kidding me.” It turns out Blood Diner still plays in midnight shows all around the country and the world. Because that is an unforgettable line and poster. So just one line and one poster can keep a movie — which, with all due respect, I still don't understand the movie — can keep it alive for 30-plus years. And if you didn't take that chance, we wouldn't have that. You gotta take a touch of the madness shot.
Mark Graban: I'm old enough to remember going to Blockbuster or whatever video store and literally picking up VHS boxes, and that would catch your eye maybe in a way that scrolling through a streaming service —
Larry Kasanoff: Well, but in a sense we're doing the same thing. We're seeing all these little thumbnail posters, so we're probably doing the same thing.
The 3D TV Network That Died in Six Months
Mark Graban: One other thing I wanted to ask you about, and I think this is a really interesting story for all the entrepreneurs listening. You think about tech trends. 3D television was a trend that seemed like it was there, it was coming, and then it disappeared pretty quickly. You have a story about a company, a studio, that was doing a 3D TV network. Can you tell us more about that?
Larry Kasanoff: Yeah. I'm a huge believer in the junction of entertainment and technology. As I mentioned, I've been involved in it a lot. But I believe you have to use the technology to help tell a better story. “I need to get this shot. How am I gonna get it?” is different than, “Well, there's a gizmo that does a certain shot. Where can I figure out how to work in the shot?” The technology works to help tell the story.
We also make theme park rides. One of our first theme park rides was we pitched Paramount on a Star Trek theme park ride going into a Borg cube. And if you're a Star Trek fan, those are some of the bad guys. And 3D, stereoscopic 3D with glasses — cameras at that point had never moved. Long technological story why, but they were always stationary. We had come up with an idea for how to make a camera that would move. So we pitched them that we'd have the first walking, moving 3D shot in a Borg cube in a theme park ride. They loved it. We didn't know how to do it. Again, we had a good theory, but we didn't know how to do it. But it worked and the ride was a huge success, and that helped start the era of 3D in movies.
And yes, this TV network came to us and said, “We're gonna have a 3D network. Can you give us some content?” We said, “Great. Who's your audience?” They said, “We don't know.” I said, “Well, what do you want?” They said, “We don't know.” “Well, why are you doing this?” They said, “Well, everyone's doing it. It's the thing.”
We didn't get involved with them, and they were gone in six months.
So you have to use technology to tell your story, not the other way around. I get calls all the time now, “Hey, do you know AI can do X?” And I think, “Okay, but is X a thing I need done in one of my movies?” I'm not gonna just make a movie based on what AI can do. I don't believe in that. I think you have to use technology to help you accomplish your goals.
Mark Graban: That's a great cautionary tale, and the red flag in hearing that story, I think — and it's all hindsight — but we'd all say big red flag if we're just using tech to use tech.
The IMDb Goofs Page and Letting Go of a Finished Movie
Mark Graban: Well, I guess today, Larry Kasanoff — the book, I've enjoyed it. It's called A Touch of the Madness. Inspiration there for all of us, whether we're in software or starting other types of companies or even doing a podcast. And it's interesting as an outsider to read about the entertainment business.
I wanted to ask you one final question, Larry. On IMDb pages, I love reading the trivia about a movie, and there's always that section on the page called Goofs.
Larry Kasanoff: Called what?
Mark Graban: Goofs, the mistakes.
Larry Kasanoff: Oh, okay.
Mark Graban: Continuity errors or other things. I'm curious what you think about the Goofs pages and the mistakes that become visible to the audience. Is that just part of the process?
Larry Kasanoff: You can get into someone else's IMDb the same way you can get into a lot of things other people write, like Wikipedia. So a few years ago, I woke up one day and someone on my staff said, “There are four movies on IMDb that say you're the producer — well, three say you're a producer, one says special thanks — that I don't think you did.” And I had nothing to do with them. I never even met the people. They were just doing it to try and get names of real producers on their movies.
Mark Graban: For their credibility, yeah.
Larry Kasanoff: Yeah. But it had nothing to do with me. So I gotta be honest with you, I don't read that stuff. Occasionally something surfaces, but I think at the end of the day when you make a movie or a book or anything like that and you're done with it, it's not yours anymore. You can't put a chyron on the bottom of the screen saying, “Well, I didn't want this shot, but the costume designer liked this shirt, so…” It's done.
And what people are gonna read and what they're gonna think — I love doing stuff like this where I can just tell these stories because I think people maybe get a little inspired by them. But I don't read them, and I don't know that anyone takes it terribly seriously. Because it's so easy for anyone to pirate it.
Mark Graban: And to your point, maybe just to wrap on this point, I appreciate what you're saying about what matters is the movie and the entertainment and the way you're engrossed in it. One of the goofs — and it's so inconsequential, it's pretty nerdy for someone to have ever pointed this out — when Arnold's Terminator is riding the motorcycle through the LA basin, the river, and jumps off from up above, the goof says when you see him coming it has a pointy end, and when you see him flying, the end he's jumped off has a flat end. That's not the type of thing anybody actually watching and enjoying the movie is really gonna notice or care about.
Larry Kasanoff: I don't even know what you're talking about, so I have no idea.
Mark Graban: Great movie. Inconsequential little mistakes don't matter. I'm glad you've avoided big mistakes, and I'm glad you've taken some risks that have given people a lot of entertainment. True Lies is next on my go-back-and-rewatch-it list.
Larry Kasanoff: Good. It's a great movie.
Mark Graban: Larry Kasanoff, thank you. This has been great fun, hearing your stories, your perspectives about movie making and technology. Really appreciate you being here.
Larry Kasanoff: Thank you. I had a good time.
Mark Graban: Thanks.