The Success Nuggets

Success Nuggets #46 Larry Kasanoff: A Touch of the Madness

• David Abel • Season 3 • Episode 5

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What does it take to transform wild ideas into billion-dollar entertainment franchises? Larry Kasanoff, the legendary producer behind Mortal Kombat and Terminator 2, reveals his secret weapon: “a touch of the madness.”

From betting his career on Platoon to pioneering video game films, Larry’s journey is a masterclass in daring creativity, bold persistence, and breaking the rules when everyone else plays it safe. He shares the three-part formula behind his biggest wins:

Ask anyone for anything

Persevere beyond what’s reasonable

Have genuine fun doing it

Forget credentials—Larry’s only question is: “Do they get stuff done?” His no-nonsense approach and outrageous success make this one of the most energizing episodes yet.

🎧 Whether you're building in business, entertainment, or innovation, this episode gives you permission to go all-in on the idea everyone else thinks is crazy.

“That crazy, wonderful idea everyone thinks you're nuts for believing in – that’s the one. Go for it.”

Speaker 2:

Thank you about the patterns that drive progress. Get ready to dive into a world of insights and inspiration. This is the Success Nuggets Podcast, with the founder of the Digital Lightbulb and your host, david Abel.

Speaker 3:

Welcome back to the Success Nuggets Podcast, where we uncover the golden clues to success. Today we have absolute legend in the world of entertainment Larry Kasanoff. Larry isn't just a producer. He's a master of bringing the wildest ideas to life. He's the creative force behind Mortal Kombat, terminator 2 and so many more blockbuster hits. I can smell the popcorn from here. But beyond the big screen and billion dollar franchises, larry is a firm believer embracing madness because, as he says, the crazy idea is usually the right one. Hello, larry. Hi, how are you? I'm very good. 1991. If we go back to 1991, which is, I believe, 35 years ago if I do my maths correctly, you must have been having a wild time with the films that you were involved in, and the music videos as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we were having a great time. We're still having a great time. Let me start a little early. You know I wanted to be a movie producer since I was a little kid and I got very lucky. And out of school I got a great job as head of production, acquisitions and co-production for an independent studio called Vestron. And this was in the mid to late 80s and surfing in the wave of what we could call the home video boom. In those days when home video markets blew up, they needed movies, just like when streaming blew up years ago, it needed movies. And I became head of production to that company. I mean, no one would take a chance on a kid like me today doing that and so my instructions were make 80 movies a year, which is a lot Most studios make 12 today. They come, buy them, co-produce them, we don't care, don't lose money. And they were lower budget movies six million and under and we made, you know, rom-coms and kind of B action movies and horror movies and stuff, and they were all doing well and it was a blast. We're traveling around the world.

Speaker 1:

But then I got a script for a movie called Platoon, and Platoon was very different. Platoon was a serious movie about the Vietnam War and the effect it had on kids, more psychologically even than physically, and I wanted to make it. I just had a good instinct and my boss said you're crazy, this isn't what we do. Where's our rom-com with so-and-so star? But I fought for it. He said look, you're the head of production now you can decide, but if it fails you're fired. What do you want to do? And I was listening. Well, I didn't play it safe. So I greenlit Platoon. And when I first saw it I was the only person to giggle their way through the screening of Platoon, not because it wasn't good, because it was so good I was like oh my God, I'm writing a funner.

Speaker 1:

And Platoon was so good that it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year. And a few months later I ran into the director Oliver Stone at. I always liked you, you have a touch of the madness. And I thought a touch of the madness Is he saying I'm a little crazy, am I a little crazy? And then I thought well, my boss was a little crazy about a 25-year-old kid running an 80-picture film slate. With no prior experience. Oliver had a touch of the madness by insisting on a Vietnam movie in a way that no one had ever done before.

Speaker 1:

The touch of the madness by betting the greatest job in the world on one movie. And that's when it occurred to me that a touch of the madness is exactly what you need in the movie business. But I think in any business to be great. And the reason you need it is because it helps you innovate. The current of the river of life will always pull us towards the middle, always, all the time imperceptibly, and the best way to swim away from that is with innovation, and innovation comes from a touch of the madness. So that's been my touchstone ever since and that's what I've done in the movie business and all my other endeavors ever since.

Speaker 1:

And so when it then came time to Terminator 2 and True Lies and the Guns and Roses video, that was for Terminator 2, it was. It was all a series of crazy ideas. They weren't all my ideas, but you know that we were involved in with our group and asking people to do things they never did when, when we made that video for guns and roses with terminator 2, you know terminator 2 was the most expensive movie ever made at the time, so we were trying to make sure that everything we get all the promotion and you know mtv in those days actually we had music videos. So I wanted to make a music video and I had to go ask arnold, who wasn't contractual, obligated the studio, the record company, the director and everyone you know, not easily, but eventually said yes and first said no and on and on and on. But it became one of the videos of the year on MTV and it was a huge hit and it was a huge help to the movie.

Speaker 1:

And again, it was just constantly asking, because I think there are three tenets to my touch of the madness and one of them is ask. You must always ask anybody anything you want to help you get to your goal Anybody and so I would ask you'd probably do this already, but I would ask whoever is listening or watching now if you could call anyone in the world right now I mean a real person and ask them a real question. That would advance something you do, who would you call and what would you ask? And most people say, huh, that's a good question. I don't know. And the reason they don't know is because we're taught to believe you can't do it. But you can do it, I mean. So what? So they don't answer you?

Speaker 1:

The phone call I had before we started this podcast was literally about that talking to a director who's friends with an actor who's a very famous actor, saying, well, call him, and people just are so scared to make that ask. Just they're so scared to make that ask. But I'm telling you, ask anybody anything if it helps you. So what you know? People are afraid of a. No, you know, if you look at a boxer, you bet. You know. You said you met evander holyfield. You look at the best boxer in the world and he wins the match. He still gets hit like 200 times and in training for the match. He gets hit 20 times a day for like three months. So you know, no one bats a thousand, as we said so anyway.

Speaker 1:

Anyway. So the answer is it was a blast, because the other tenant I have is at three, the other one is having a lot of fun and we had a blast doing it because they were all new and different ideas. You know, no one had ever done more, you know, in a movie extensively in Germany, or two before, and no one had done a music video like we did before. So that's what was exciting.

Speaker 3:

They did and is that like the first rule? It sounds like you bet on yourself. It is a wild idea. I worked at a clothing company called ted baker and we actually went from 20 oh, I know that company. Yeah, yes, I was there end of the 90s. We went from 20 to 100 million in those five years, which was pretty rapid growth. What was interesting was we didn't have a marketing budget. Everyone had sort of forgotten because no one really liked marketing. Everyone thought sort of newspaper spreads were boring and not really what we wanted. So we just made the windows move. We had like a world on a train. We had a Santa with in those days, you know, reindeers in like lap dancing gear and he was drinking a beer and it would stop traffic and people would go in the shop you did that kind of an increase all from the windows.

Speaker 3:

Yes, pretty much because, yeah, we had no marketing budget. It was that a repeat customer's word of mouth as well Wow, that's great as you walk through the door. It was good music, great service, good-looking people, clothes that were awesome.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's great. You know, I think you have to do whatever it takes. I mean, you know, at Vestron, at First Jump, it's some of the lower-budget movies we made. We didn't have much of a marketing budget either, but we'd make these great posters and we'd make these outrageous kind of campaigns which people for a long time in the last few years have been scared to do. I think it's coming back.

Speaker 1:

We want to bring back fun and those campaigns worked and then if you hit with a campaign, the press will spread the wildfire themselves, and so we did a lot of crazy things. You know, know, we had this low budget movie, just terrible low budget horror movie, called blood diner, and we came up with a tagline that said first they greet you, then they eat you, and the poster that our marketing department did was so beautiful, it was like an art deco, old diner and first degree you, then they eat you. And I mean the movie. I mean, you know I still don't get it, but 30 years later that movie is still playing in midnight shows and I'm telling you it's because of the poster, not just. But so I think Atlanta's ideas are great. It's been harder the last five years of worldwide political correctness to get people to be out there. But I think that ice is finally cracking.

Speaker 3:

Good, now I do as well. Come on, let's warm it up a little bit and crack it some more, but you did say bringing fun back. Bringing fun back, and I remember in 2023, someone said 2023 is the year we're going to get back out there and look in the whites of people's eyes and there was still a lot of people held back, not coming out and becoming more. Stay on your own, stay away from people and those kinds of things, and they took a long time to warm up. How are we getting fun back and where are the blocks?

Speaker 1:

do you think? Well, you know, here's a little different, because in hollywood we had in 2023. We had strikes and the after the pandemic we couldn't work for whatever two or three. It strikes in the writer's strike and the actor's strike, which also mean you couldn't work. So that was really a second kind of blow to it, so people got even more scared. But I think you have to then be very creative.

Speaker 1:

So that was the year we couldn't make any movies and so I wrote the book a touch of the madness that we just spoke about. But I also did a photography book called malibu blonde, yeah, which is gorgeous models on the beach in malibu. It's like a throwback to the old days of malibu with, you know, rent convertibles and beach boys, music and puppy dogs and beautiful women, aspiring movie stars can. All the proceeds go to charity to elephant and it's fun, and the whole point was to bring back fun and it's doing really well, and so we couldn't make a movie that year. I said, well, I can, I have a camera, you know I can, I know how to shoot a picture, and so whatever it is you can do to help, you got to do it, whether it's even just fun.

Speaker 1:

The movies we have coming up not all, but almost all are breaking some mold or having some idea that are very, very, very outlandish, and it takes a little while to convince people. But you have to be relentless. A great, crazy idea or talent is half the battle. You then have to be relentless about pushing it and you cannot give up, because the political correctness does not come from the audience. It doesn't come from your customers or my audience. It comes from Twitter or whatever it's called.

Speaker 1:

I mean not literally that company, it comes from a small group of cognoscenti and that you have to get over. You just have to have a touch of the madness also means you have to have a touch of the madness in terms of perseverance. You know I have movies that have a touch of madness in terms of perseverance. You know I have movies that have taken me six months to make and I have movies that have taken me 10 years to make. You know it took Spider-Man, which is not my movie. It took Spider-Man 25 years to get to the screen, wow. But so what?

Speaker 3:

But that resilience and just going for it where does that come from? I really admire that quality.

Speaker 1:

I think you're having a good time doing it and you believe in it. You don't have a choice. All the movies that I haven't developed in my whole life including the ones I have now, which I'm just as excited about as the ones I had my first day or my first job I see them in my mind and it's like a disconnect. I see them and I have to then make them. So they come to life. The characters become friends of mine in my head and I couldn't imagine not doing it. I couldn't imagine not waking up and doing it. The same way, I couldn't imagine not waking up and calling my family or playing with my dog. It's if you love it, you want to do it. You don't think, oh, I got to call him. You say I can't wait, and if people say no to me which they do all the time I'm convinced they're wrong.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I know that's arrogant, but I'm not arrogant to them think everyone isn't right and you do it again, because you just can't wait to do it, you can't wait to make it, you can't wait to see it. I think you gotta love what you do. In terms of making progress, though. So I love what I do, but I keep having piles of notepaper everywhere and loads of ideas every night. My notes on my phone is full of them. How do I get a fish here done?

Speaker 1:

I think that's a great question. I I go through that all the time, every you know. Maybe three to six months I look at all the movies and shows that have development. I say, okay, do I still love them? Let's just check on this, what's right? And then I sort of prioritize them. Like, for example, recently literally last night I was talking about this I have two movies that are a little smaller than my other movies and I thought, you know, I don't want to make smaller movies and so I figured, can I make them bigger by changing them a little bit, or I'm not going to make them because that's really what I want and that's what I'm doing. So I think if you take all your piles I have piles of notes everywhere too If you take all your piles and say, what is my number one priority?

Speaker 1:

Let's just forget all the other priorities. What's my number one priority? All the stuff that doesn't fit into your number one priority. Let's say you have three priorities but it doesn't fit into your number one. Get rid of them and just focus on the number ones. Bring things into focus and all of a sudden you think, oh yeah, I don't think this one isn't right and that's what you do. You got to be a little bit ruthless about editing, I think.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think that's a good one being ruthless about it. Do you much on spirituality?

Speaker 1:

Several years ago I read a book by a kind of revered Zen master Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh and I loved the book and I thought what do I do with this peaceful monk? And I thought, you know, he'd be a great inspiration for this character I had in mind for Mortal Kombat, and so you know the two are very at odds with each other monks in Mortal Kombat. But I called him anyway and I went to meet him, but it was different than I expected. After two hours I forgot about the movie and I felt like I'd been on vacation for a week and I said what's your secret? He said no secret practice. And he gave me one of these little wrist things to just remember to breathe. I mean, I can learn how to feel like this. And then he goes, yeah, and I became really good friends with him.

Speaker 1:

I saw him all over the world. He asked me to do a documentary on mindfulness, which I did, called Mindfulness Be Happy Now, which is on Amazon, and so I believe in that because I think he has a great message peace in yourself, peace in the world. You're not going to solve the world's problems, but if you find peace in yourself, you'll be nicer to the barrister, your coffee place and to your spouse, and they'll be nicer to their, and so I believe in that. And then there's IQ and so I believe in that.

Speaker 3:

And then there's IQ. So we could have a score of 100 and I've got 90. You're more clever than me and I could learn more and improve my IQ. And then there's EQ, your emotional intelligence, how you ride things out. And then there's positive intelligence.

Speaker 1:

But the challenge to your question is I don't really pay much attention to any of those scores or things like that. I really have a very binary question in countering people, certainly professionally, which is do they get shit done or don't they? Can they actually get this done or don't they? I mean, you know, my book, a Touch of the Madness, is dedicated to all the great scoundrels, and scoundrel, you know, is an old kind of American slang word for lovable thief. These guys aren't really here anymore.

Speaker 1:

But a scoundrel is someone who comes to town, takes you out for the weekend. You have the time of your life, you just have the best time you can imagine. And Monday morning when they left, you realize they were using your credit card. So you're still at a great time, but they were using your credit card. That's a scoundrel. But they got stuff done and that's how I grew up in the movie business, learning from guys like that. So to me, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, I don't care. You know I have fortune, I have a great education, but I don't care whether they went to school or not, whether they did this or not, how they did the test or not. It's a question of are we getting stuff done and that's it. That's my thing.

Speaker 1:

I cannot tell you the amount of people we encounter every year in all walks of our business who are talented. I can tell if someone's talented in the movie business in 30 seconds, if they have the perseverance to get stuff done. I can't tell the only time I can tell. So the answer is for me Tegnata, for example. He walked the walk. Whatever he preached, he did so he got it done and he would never go anyplace. He was invited to all kinds of places, to the Senate, unless he could. That's it, that's my one test. And if they do, great, and if they don't, I don't care.

Speaker 3:

Do you have ambitions to teach yourself when you get to that kind of level of age and wisdom?

Speaker 1:

No, I don't think. You know, I do stuff like this which I enjoy. I'm hired to give speeches, which I enjoy because it's one speech and I meet people, but as a teacher I'm just not great. I don't have the patience. I think I'm too. What I just said get stuff done. I don't think that goes well in today's world.

Speaker 1:

You know, a friend of mine is the Dean of a big film school here. Well, the Dean, she's the chairwoman of the big film school here, and so I used to go into the class every semester and I would mock interview the seniors. You know, like, okay, what do you want to do? You want to be a director? I'll interview you for five minutes and the class will vote on whether or not you want to do it. And you know we should hire you and then you can learn. And you know you'd get a kid who said what do you want to do? I want to direct movies. What kind of movies? Horror movies? What are your favorite horror movies? Oh, I don't watch horror movies. Like if someone says that when I'm doing it I say I would eliminate you right there, but then eventually other teachers would say no, no, you're being too harsh on them. We have to hug them more and it's just not much more of like. But here's how you get it done in real life. Yeah, and so no, I, I. There's so many people who I know who I think are so much more qualified to teach than me. I love talking for an hour and we have interns every semester, so I have like five interns. But, as actually teaching, being a professor not my gig, I go crazy.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, where did you grow up, larry? I grew up in Boston, in the northeast of the United States, and when I was a really little kid, my dad took me to see a James Bond movie and when we left I said, okay, I want to be a spy, but what was that guy? Who said the producer, what does that guy do? And my father explained it and that was it. And I said, well, how am I going to do this? And so I was a really little kid and in Boston there's only two schools like this in the United States. There's one in New York. They're like public-private schools. It's called the Boston Latin School and it's the oldest high school in the country. Benjamin Franklin went there and you have to take a test to get in and if you do well on the test, you can go for free. And so since I was a little kid, I was like I'm going to get into that, I'm going to take that test.

Speaker 1:

And I got in and then the school was like going to school in like the 1800s. It was horrible. I mean, I hated it, but it had, in those days, the biggest track record of getting kids into either of these schools in the country. So if I get into a good school, I'll meet people One way or another. I'll meet people and I got to get into Aladdin school, then Aladdin school, I got to get into a good Ivy League school and then I got to get into a good business school. I went to Wharton and then through that I got internships and that's how I got my job. So it worked. But I've been plotting this since I was, like you know, 11.

Speaker 3:

Yeah Well, I've just got one more.

Speaker 1:

and finally that crazy wonderful. Everyone thinks you're nuts. You can't believe they're going to let you do it idea.

Speaker 3:

That's the one go for it. Thanks for coming in. That was a mind-blowing conversation. It was really entertaining and insightful. We shall see you again on the success nuggets. My pleasure. Join david and his incredible guests next time on the success nuggets podcast and to find out more, visit one goldenGoldenNuggetcom.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening.