In March 2007 the LA Times announced that Brian Grazer would guest-edit the Sunday Op-Ed section, Current, for the March 25 issue. The pitch in the paper’s press release was that the Imagine Entertainment chairman’s “endless curiosity” would produce something unconventional. FishbowlLA noted, dryly, that Grazer had no shortage of platforms already.
Then
The LA Times was kicking off a guest-editor program that spring, and Grazer was the inaugural pick. The press release language was distinctive — the paper said it wanted to “tap into his creative vision” and praised his “notoriously wide-ranging” interests. Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment, the production company he ran with Ron Howard, had by 2007 produced A Beautiful Mind, The Da Vinci Code, Apollo 13, American Gangster, and an extensive television slate including 24.
The original Kate Coe framing was lightly skeptical. Grazer had access to extensive media platforms already — film, TV, print interviews, awards-circuit appearances. Handing him a Sunday Op-Ed section read more like a Times marketing decision than an editorial one.
The Current section under guest-editor format was a specific 2007 experiment. The idea was to get cultural and business figures from outside journalism to shape the section for a single Sunday, on the theory that fresh eyes would produce different conversations.
Now
The Grazer-edited Current section did publish March 25, 2007 — covering topics he selected and including contributors he chose. The guest-editor program at the LA Times continued for a stretch but did not become a defining franchise; the Current section itself was eventually reorganized as the broader Op-Ed structure of the paper went through multiple revisions across the Tribune-bankruptcy and Soon-Shiong-ownership transitions.
Brian Grazer has continued at Imagine Entertainment through the entire interval, with Ron Howard, and the company has produced a substantial subsequent slate including Frost/Nixon, Rush, Genius the National Geographic series, and various streaming-era projects across multiple platforms. He published the book A Curious Mind in 2015, leaning explicitly into the curiosity branding the LA Times pitch had used.
The guest-editor format the 2007 experiment introduced has subsequently appeared in various forms across U.S. newspapers — most prominently when Ta-Nehisi Coates guest-edited Vanity Fair’s George Floyd issue in 2020, when various cultural figures have edited The Guardian’s Saturday magazine, and when curators have shaped The New York Times Magazine special issues. The LA Times’ 2007 version was an early move toward what eventually became a recognized format for major print operations.
The broader question the experiment raised — whether op-ed pages benefit from outside-curator perspective — has not been definitively answered. What the 2007 Grazer experiment did demonstrate was that the city’s flagship paper was willing, in the months before the Zell-buyout-and-bankruptcy chain reaction, to try things. The years that followed offered fewer such opportunities.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: March 2007 snapshot