In Hollywood, the rarest of people — not a score settler or a tattletale, just a mensch (2024)

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions
By Ed Zwick
Gallery Books, 304 pages, $29

Ed Zwick opens Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions, his engaging and panoramic memoir of 40-something years as a writer and director for television and film, by laughing at himself – and the inherent paradox of the job.

Here he is, a “mere mortal behind the camera watching the drama of gods and goddesses…then wading into a sh*tstorm where he presumes to tell everybody what they’re doing wrong.” He imagines himself as a mensch, he writes. But knows that he’s just Ahab in a baseball cap who wants what he wants and wants it now.

Zwick’s tone is self-aware and funny, using humor to inch toward the serious and, occasionally, profound observations about directing, acting and the evolution — or is it devolution? — of Hollywood between the years of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Wonder Woman (2017).

While other directors concocted fantasies about superheroes and superheroines, Zwick pursued humanist dramas (and the occasional comedy) inspired by heroes of the real-life kind. For instance, the African-American unit that fought Confederate soldiers in his Civil War epic Glory. And the Nazi-killing Jews hiding in the Belarus forest in the World War II thriller Defiance. And the Big Pharma hucksters peddling Viagra in Love and Other Drugs.

Zwick was the guy who saw possibilities in Marc Norman’s satirical script Shakespeare in Love, and recruited Tom Stoppard to amp up the humor and poignancy. It attracted Julia Roberts, then 23, to come aboard before abruptly jumping ship. After spending $6 million in preproduction, the studio could not find a bankable replacement. Harvey Weinstein acquired the property — and dealt Zwick out of the directing job. Fortunately, the now-disgraced mogul was unable to deal Zwick out of his producer credit. Thus, he won an Oscar for Best Picture. It’s worth noting that as Hollywood blockbusters swelled to colossal proportions, Zwick’s films remained human-scaled.

From his first triumph in episodic television with longtime partner Marshall Herskovitz) through films such as Legends of the Fall and Love and Other Drugs, he has balanced his interest in group dynamics with the place of the individual within the group. In other words, he has specialized in movies for adults. A bonus of the memoir is at the end of almost every chapter, there is an instructive and entertaining list of wisdom that Zwick has gleaned over the years.

Writing a script is one thing. Bringing it to life is another. Here, Zwick’s book distinguishes itself from Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman who wrote from the perspective of a screenwriter who believed that the script was sacrosanct. He railed against directors, ungratefully accusing them of being “script-killers.” Zwick writes from the consciousness of both writer and director, immensely grateful for what actors, crew members and happy accidents bring to the game.

He is practiced at creating recognizable situations and dialogue in his scripts and getting them onscreen. And he’s the first to admit that sometimes his best scenes emerge from a serendipitous moment on set.

Take Glory, the first of three films he made with Denzel Washington. With Washington and Morgan Freeman on the set, Zwick remembers, “the actors discovered implications and nuance” of which Zwick the writer had been oblivious.

“Sometimes,” Zwick discovered, “Shutting up is the best direction of all.”

Or, take the example of Courage Under Fire, where Meg Ryan plays Gulf War medevac officer, Capt. Walden. While rehearsing the part of the squad leader, fatally wounded when shot during a rescue mission, a crew member begs her to lie down. Gritting teeth, Ryan ad-libbed, “I gave birth to a nine-pound baby, asshole! I think I can handle it!” Zwick immediately incorporated that line in the script.

Directing Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, Zwick recognized that sometimes the best direction is misdirection. He wanted Cruise to be more “emotionally revealing.” He didn’t want Cruise “to try to make something happen,” he “wanted it to happen.” As the sun was setting and Zwick worried about losing the available light, he turned to the actor. “Tell me about your son,” he said, which turned out to be the key to unlocking the star’s vulnerability. Zwick saw Cruise look inward as “a window seemed to open and his eyes softened.”

Love and Other Drugs, which got the green light the same day Zwick was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, could have been a case of a script hitting too close to home. The film about a pharmaceutical salesman (Jake Gyllenhaal) enamored of an artist fighting early-onset Parkinson’s (Anne Hathaway), reflected both the negative and positive sides of the drug-industrial complex.

Each actor initially stumbled through an emotional scene at the film’s finale. Gyllenhaal delivered his dialogue first, and it was Hathaway’s off-camera tears that helped him find his feet. When it was Hathaway’s turn for the close-up, she couldn’t cry. After a few unsuccessful attempts, Zwick put his arm around her. He reassured her that she was terrific in the film, and that there was absolutely no reason to cry in this scene. Instantly she burst into tears and Zwick called “Action.” Direction by misdirection, instinct, or serendipity?

Zwick is neither a tattletale nor a score-settler. Still, his memoir does not lack for dish. Consider two scenes from the making of Blood Diamond, about the civil war in Sierra Leone during the late 1990s.

When the production, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connelly, left the tiny village in Mozambique where they had shot some scenes, Zwick was surprised by the sight of heavy earth-movers. Someone had arranged for the digging of a new well. In the belief that every location should be left in better shape than the production found it, DiCaprio had quietly arranged it.

But, rather than nominate the actor for canonization, Zwick relates a contrasting anecdote. One morning the director walked into the makeup trailer to discuss the day’s work with his actors. DiCaprio was leafing through a Victoria’s Secret catalog as artists prepped Connelly for the camera. Surprised by his male star’s reading material, Zwick asked what DiCaprio, then between girlfriends, was doing.“Shopping,” deadpanned Connelly.

Blood Diamond made a $40 million profit. Over lunch studio chief Alan Horn told Zwick that he loved the film — but it would be the last of its kind the studio would make. “$40 million doesn’t move the needle on the stock price,” Horn said.

“I have come to understand that there are four ways to measure a movie and the first three don’t count,” he writes. “Box office is a false accounting, critics no longer matter, and awards are forgotten within days. Time is the only measure.”

By Zwick’s own metric — and the staying power of so many of his films — time is on his side.