Betting a Career on a Touch of the Madness
There’s a version of this story where a 25-year-old kid at his first real job reads a script about the Vietnam War, falls in love with it, and gets told by his boss that if the movie fails, he’s fired. Most people would pass. Larry Kasanoff didn’t. He greenlit the movie anyway.
That movie was Platoon. It won Best Picture. And the kid who bet his job on it has spent the four decades since producing more than 250 films, including Terminator 2, True Lies, Dirty Dancing, and the entire Mortal Kombat franchise. He told me the story on this week’s episode, and it set the tone for one of the more energizing conversations I’ve had on this show.
Where the phrase actually came from
A few months after Platoon wrapped, Larry ran into the director, Oliver Stone, at a bar in New York. Stone bought him a drink and told him he’d always liked him because he had “a touch of the madness.” Larry spent the next few decades turning that offhand compliment into a philosophy — and eventually a book, A Touch of the Madness, written during the pandemic-era production shutdown when he watched an entire industry get scared of taking creative risks.
His theory is simple, and it applies well beyond film. The current of ordinary life pulls everyone toward the middle, toward the safe choice, toward mediocrity. If you want to make something great, you have to actively swim against that pull. The tool for doing that, he argues, is embracing the part of yourself that everyone else tells you is a little crazy.
Three words, one framework
Larry breaks the philosophy down into three steps: Create, Ask, and Play. Create means finding the version of an idea that genuinely excites you, not the safe version. Ask means asking for what you want relentlessly, from anyone, regardless of how unlikely a yes seems. Play means staying loose and creative even when the stakes are high, because the tense version of yourself makes worse decisions than the relaxed one.
The Ask principle produced my favorite story of the conversation. When Larry was making the animated film Bobbleheads, his team wanted Cher for a voice role. Everyone told him it was a long shot. She’d never done an animated movie before. They called anyway. She said yes, and later told People magazine the reason was simple: nobody had ever actually asked her before Larry did.
He tells a similar story about a Terminator 2 promotional music video. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to appear on one condition, that the video feature “the best band in the world.” His brother-in-law suggested Guns N’ Roses. Larry didn’t know the band, had no relationship with their label, and no clear path to making it happen. He just kept asking, one favor and one connection at a time, until the city of Hollywood let them shoot a fake concert on Sunset Boulevard and the record label rearranged an entire album release schedule around it. The video became the number one fan-voted video of the year.
When the bet doesn’t land
Not every risk works out, and Larry doesn’t pretend otherwise. He talks openly about the movies that flopped and the instincts that were flat-out wrong, and he’s unsentimental about it. His advice: treat every miss as tuition, take whatever lesson is in it, and stop replaying it. He compares it to boxing. You get hit constantly. The skill isn’t avoiding every punch, it’s not standing there stunned after the ones that land.
That mindset gets tested in one of the stranger stories from the episode. Early in his career, his team green-lit Blood Diner, a low-budget horror movie he admits he never fully understood, mostly because he loved the poster art and couldn’t get the tagline out of his head. It made money at the time and then, decades later, resurfaced as a genuine cult favorite, screening at Quentin Tarantino’s theater in Beverly Hills. Larry still doesn’t fully know why it worked. He’s made peace with not needing to.
The audience is the boss
One thread runs underneath every story Larry tells: none of it is really about his own taste. On Mortal Kombat, a room of sixth graders nearly talked him out of a redesign decision by physically reacting to a character missing his signature eye patch. He scrapped his version on the spot. On Dirty Dancing, a producer resubmitted an unchanged song to the same executives who’d rejected it, told them he’d tweaked it based on their notes, and watched them praise the “new” version. It later won the Grammy and the Oscar. Nothing about the song had changed except who was allowed to believe in it.
Larry’s read on that story isn’t cynical, it’s practical. Once you actually know what you have, protect it, and stop taking notes from people who are guessing.
Where to go from here
A Touch of the Madness is available on Amazon, wherever books are sold, and on Audible, narrated by Larry himself. If you want the deeper cut on any of these stories, including the one about a Burmese python and a very unlucky staffer, the full conversation is live now as audio, on YouTube, and right here on Substack.
