By Tom Ryan
CINEMA
Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood
Ed Zwick, Gallery Books, $49.99
The COVID lockdown that hit California on March 19, 2020 meant that producer-writer-director Ed Zwick had to call a halt to what he was doing. Production was set to begin that day on a 30-years-on sequel to thirtysomething, the brilliant relationship series that effectively launched his career and his longtime partnership with Marshall Herskovitz.
The reboot – it was to be called thirtysomethingelse – was going to be about, in his words, “how it felt to be the parents of children who were now the same age as we were when we made the show”. The news that the project now appears to have been permanently shelved is a major disappointment.
Ed Zwick was hindered during the making of Glory by Matthew Broderick’s mother, who wanted her son’s character built up.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
However, there was a silver lining to the COVID cloud. The stay-at-home orders meant that Zwick would now have the time to put all the notes he’d been keeping about his productions over the years into a workable order. And the result is this hugely enjoyable, often laugh-out-loud funny memoir about his adventures in the screen trade and his battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (he’s now in remission).
Zwick makes his intentions clear from the start. “I tell stories for a living,” he writes. “And while I’d like to think I’ve been at least as hard on myself as I am on others, I’ll admit that some names have been omitted while others have been kept. In certain cases, this is so as not to be hurtful; in others it’s payback, pure and simple.”
Tracing the arc of his career, Zwick’s story takes us behind the scenes of the numerous films and TV shows he’s been involved with, many of them in collaboration with Herskovitz, whom he met at film school and who always has his back. “I never had a brother. Now I do,” Zwick enthuses. “He would take a bullet for me. Like, in the leg or something.”
It was Herskovitz who introduced him to Frank Capra’s classic It’s A Wonderful Life and led to them naming their production company Bedford Falls, after the town that James Stewart’s troubled idealist calls home in the film.
Zwick declares the “parental pride” he feels at watching many of those with whom he worked on thirtysomething making their way in the business. Many of the actors in the series began their careers as writers and directors under his and Herskovitz’s guiding hands and went on to work on series such as My So-Called Life, Grey’s Anatomy, Breaking Bad, This Is Us and New Amsterdam.
“It’s more than their felicity in staging or their skill with actors,” Zwick writes. “There’s an ineffable humanist signature common to each show they do that feels like a legacy of what we started.”
He also reflects at length and with acute insight on the differing approaches taken by some of the leading actors he’s worked with over the years. They include Denzel Washington (on Glory, Courage Under Fire and The Siege), Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins (Legends of the Fall), Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back), Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond), Daniel Craig (Defiance), Meg Ryan (Courage Under Fire) and Anne Hathaway (Love & Other Drugs).
Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) and Hope Murdoch Steadman (Mel Harris).Credit: MGM
On the other hand, there was Matthew Broderick, whom he directed in Glory and whose mother went to extraordinary lengths to try to undermine the production. Hindrance disguised as assistance. For Zwick, her nagging about how he should go about building her son’s character in the film spoke of the frustrations of her thwarted career as an artist. Then there was the problem of producer Harvey Weinstein, with whom he seriously fell out after becoming involved in the initial preparations for Shakespeare in Love, although the convicted rapist has probably heard a lot worse said about him.
He gratefully looks back on those who assisted him along the way, such as Woody Allen, for whom he served as production assistant on 1975’s Love and Death. And Sydney Pollack (The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor), who became his much-valued mentor, providing good advice about how best to approach his craft: “Listen, kid,” he remembers Pollack telling him, “Plot is the rotting meat the burglar throws to the dogs so he can climb over the fence and get the jewels, which are the characters.”
Daniel Craig as he appeared in Ed Zwick’s 2008 film Defiance.
Zwick has spent his life making some of the better films and TV shows of the past 40 years, and Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions reveals him to be an astute observer of the creative process and the workings of Hollywood. He takes his work seriously, although it has been a constant battle to make it the way he wants to.
“Throughout history, popular storytellers have always been the default moralists of their time,” he writes. “To abjure that obligation in the name of creating mindless ‘entertainment’ is to surrender a kind of sacred duty. It’s not enough to make films that drown out the growing sound of screaming in the world beyond the Hollywood bubble.”
He regards that bubble as a problem place. “Deliberately or not,” he notes scathingly, “a studio will do anything to make a script more ‘accessible’.” And he has little patience with those in charge, borrowing a couple of sharp quips to explain why: “I remember Cameron Crowe describing an executive as someone who claims to know the way, doesn’t have a map, and can’t drive a car. As Steven Soderbergh once told an executive, ‘You confuse having an opinion with having an idea’.”
Full of tips for those who’d like to be doing what he is and insights for those interested in his impressive body of work, Zwick’s book is perceptive, illuminating and entertaining. He says that, without his wife, soulmate and creative collaborator, Liberty Godshall, it and his life might have followed a very different course. He adds apologetically that he can’t find the words to thank her enough, although he knows what her response to that line would be: “Try.”
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