Hits, Flops and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick memoir review
The TL;DR distillation of veteran screen storyteller Ed Zwick’s candid new memoir, “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions,” doesn’t come until Page 242 of a 289-page book.
“My hope as a Hollywood filmmaker who at times has chosen to dramatize provocative subjects,” Zwick observes, “is to reach beyond the natural constituency for such subjects. I’m betting some 18-year-old will walk into a multiplex in pursuit of a good movie with great actors, maybe even some action, and be surprised to find himself thinking deeper about something he might never have encountered otherwise. Maybe he’ll someday watch a documentary about it, or God help me, read a book.”
For anyone looking to (God help them) read a book on how The Industry has changed in the half-century since a fresh-out-of-Harvard Zwick first entered it as an assistant to — there’s no way to sugarcoat this — Woody Allen, this name-dropping but also rewardingly name-naming look back from the director of 1989’s “Glory” and other consequential films is a surprisingly strong choice. Surprising, I say, because its author is not quite an auteur. While objections to the Auteur Theory are well-known and well-founded, cinephiles like me can’t seem to stop thinking of the movies we love as the product of a single and singular genius: a Wilder or a Kubrick, a Kelly Reichardt or a Jordan Peele.
Not a Zwick, whose 13 feature films as director from 1986 to 2018 are varied and generally strong, but do not cohere into a consistent aesthetic or worldview the way our most-remembered filmmakers’ oeuvres tend to do. I’d thought of the director of “About Last Night” (an adaptation of David Mamet’s play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” shorn of its salacious title) and the (first) Iraq War drama “Courage Under Fire” as a reliable but unexciting company man in the vein of Ron Howard. His memoir convinced me that my assessment was unfair — not that Zwick is pleading for anyone’s approval.
In addition to co-creating (with his lifelong creative partner Marshall Herskovitz) three TV shows that channeled the zeitgeist of their eras — the late ’80s yuppies-have-feelings-too ABC drama “thirtysomething,” then the shorter-lived “My So-Called Life” and “Once and Again” — Zwick cast the gone-too-soon Andre Braugher and the stayed-too-long Josh Gad in their first film roles. He butted heads with Matthew Broderick and Brad Pitt on (respectively) “Glory” and “Legends of the Fall.” He directed Denzel Washington in three films (including “Glory,” which brought Washington his first Academy Award) and Tom Cruise in two, of which 2003’s “The Last Samurai” was the more notable. For anyone wondering how, exactly, one directs stars of such herculean charisma and power, Zwick supplies anecdotes that essentially boil down to him knowing when these titans need a small obstacle to push against, and supplying that obstacle.
Zwick punctuates his chapters with palate-cleansing lists: “Nine Thoughts on Assistant Directors,” wherein he praises the sacrifices made by filmmakers whose names the public seldom knows; “Ten Tips from Long Lunches with Sydney,” wherein he shares wisdom cribbed from his longtime friend and mentor, the filmmaker and character actor Sydney Pollack.
One of the liveliest chapters recounts how Zwick’s dreams were dashed when Julia Roberts abruptly pulled out of the version of “Shakespeare in Love” he was set to direct in 1992, taking the entire production with her. Retaining a producer credit on the version that got made, Zwick would be elbowed out of the way at the podium by the justly reviled Harvey Weinstein when the John Madden-directed “Shakespeare in Love” took Best Picture at the Academy Awards seven years later. (Gwyneth Paltrow won Best Actress in what would have been the Roberts role.) As the person who realized Tom Stoppard was the man to alchemize Marc Norman’s solid-but-earthbound script into the magical document it became — and who talked the legendary playwright into taking the assignment — Zwick does deserve our gratitude. (He also takes credit for prodding Stoppard to put more sex into the script.)
The point is that Zwick has seen things and done things, and he’s reached a stage of his career — and, 15 years after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, in his life — where he’s unafraid whom he might offend.
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In rare instances this comes off as arrogance. His 1998 action drama “The Siege” imagined the U.S. Army enforcing martial law and interning American citizens of Middle Eastern descent after a series of terrorist attacks in New York City. When the film became the target of protests organized by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Zwick responded with a New York Times op-ed, which he reprints in full. Without elaborating on his 1998 sign-off (“So, I’m sorry I offended anyone. But I’m really not.”), he recalls how the weeks after 9/11 found him moonlighting awkwardly as a TV talking head.
Ultimately, Zwick seems less troubled by the suspicion that his own time may have passed than by the near-certainty that the types of movies he makes — entertainments, but entertainments of weight and substance — have gone extinct, at least at the big studios that funded his. He recalls an incident following the release of “Blood Diamond,” his Leonard DiCaprio-headlined drama about Sierra Leone’s civil war. Warner Bros. chief Alan Horn told Zwick he was hanging the film’s poster in his office, because he was proud of the movie, and he knew he’d never make another like it. This somber, brilliantly acted film, sans superheroes or merchandising tie-ins, had been nominated for five Oscars and earned a profit, but not enough of one. “Forty million doesn’t move the needle on our stock price,” Horn told the author.
“Blood Diamond” came out 17 years ago.
Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions
My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood
By Ed Zwick
Gallery. 289 pp. $27.99
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