The Calendar section in the Los Angeles Times used to be thick Monday through Saturday, and then near book-length on Sundays. So many ads promoting released and soon-to-be-released films, and so many articles about the movie industry that has long animated business activity in Los Angeles.
The Calendar section, and surely Variety to a smaller but much more substantive collection of industry insiders, fed Hollywood and broad excitement about it. It was in Calendar sometime in the early 1980s that I was introduced to Michael Ovitz as the most powerful person in Hollywood. It sparked a lifelong fascination with Ovitz, and a review (here) of his eventual memoir that I didn’t want to end.
Notable about Ovitz is that while at CAA he morphed from agent to advertising maven to investment banker. In modern times, Ovitz has taken his talents to Silicon Valley where he invests in and mentors the technology visionaries of today and tomorrow. Which is kind of the point. And it’s an unfortunate one for those long fascinated by the Hollywood of old.
While the movie industry remains big and rich, they’re getting much richer up in northern California. One reason is that in seeding a golden age for television most notably, Silicon Valley has so minutely segmented audiences (while making information consumption an online endeavor) that the days of big network television shows, major movie releases, and thick Calendar sections/Variety issues are largely in the past.
Quick: name five famous directors today. Five producers. Except for the film stars essentially grandfathered (directors and producers too) into the segmented present, name several modern male and female movie stars.
About what you’ve read, it’s not a total lament. Progress can’t be lamented, and this is progress whereby something better replaces the past. The number of movies and television shows that entertain a wide range of audiences anytime and anywhere is surely bigger than ever. Still, it’s hard not to miss the grandiosity of the Hollywood of old, of the studio executives, producers, directors, actors and actresses that so many were so familiar with, along with the relentless efforts by their would-be replacements to take their spots at the top.
All this throat-clearing is seemingly necessary as a jump-off to director, producer and actor Ed Zwick’s (Thirtysomething, Glory, Shakespeare In Love, Under Siege, My So-Called Life, and many more) excellent and insight-driving new memoir, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years In Hollywood. While I haven’t seen all or even half of what Zwick created, he’s long been a successful somebody in Hollywood. As someone who devours Hollywood histories and memoirs, I wasn’t going to miss Zwick’s.
I’m glad I didn’t firstly because Zwick has a very interesting story to tell, but I’m also glad because there’s a case to be made that audience segmentation will render the Hollywood memoir much less of a thing in the future. If segmented audiences shrink the household names and those close to it, what will be the purpose of memoirs or publishing of same? Better yet, won’t the shrinking of the bold-faced names in front of and behind the camera cause more than a few of the ambitious to skip Hollywood altogether? While Zwick’s career choice in 2025 versus 1975 will be speculated on later, it’s no reach to suggest that if graduating from UCLA in 2025, Ovitz would be heading north, or east.
With Zwick, one of the more appealing aspects of his memoir is that there’s an admirably sheepish quality to what he remembers. While he tells the reader up front that he’ll be “dropping a few names,” he refers to Tom (Cruise), Brad (Pitt) and Julia (Roberts) with evident embarrassment? There’s no critique here. First-name references of celebrities are obnoxious even if the person (like Zwick) knows them quite well. That Zwick can drop names is plainly a part of the appeal of his memoirs, but it’s still appreciated that he recognizes, even after directing so many prominent names, that it’s good to be humble even if on the surface. The surface qualifier comes up because Zwick himself acknowledges the contradiction: he presents himself as “a thoughtful, collegial guy who wants everybody’s opinion while in fact I’m Ahab in a baseball cap.”
Zwick is also fun. While he hides a few names, he’s frequently willing to name names while writing “about mentors, monsters, and the meaning of friendship.” You will recognize the people written about, and perhaps savor the fact that you care to read about the stars, producers and directors. If the whiny laments at the opening of this review have any validity, increasingly segmented audiences will have readers of scarce future memoirs that drop “a few names” wondering just who some of the people are whose names are being dropped.
Zwick attended New Trier outside Chicago, which is the Greenwich, Beverly, Langley, Highland Park (Dallas), San Marino High of the Chicago area. It brings to mind the right’s disdain for public or “government” schools. Many of them are quite good. So many huge successes have emerged from New Trier, which is just a comment that good schools are invariably an effect of the students showing up for school each day.
In Zwick’s case, he writes that “I’ve been work-addicted since childhood.” Translated, Zwick was going places. Though he suffered a boom-bust, alcoholic father, his father’s own ups and downs surely said something about his own ambition. It brings on a speculation that it would be interesting to know if Zwick has already addressed himself.
He writes on p. 1 that “I tell stories for a living,” which is an implied comment that whatever the certain brutalities of the business he chose, Zwick loves what he does. As he writes toward memoir’s end, “I honestly can’t ever remember waking up in the morning and saying, ‘Shit, I have to go work today.’” What’s funny and true about what Zwick writes is that even if he hadn’t written it, wise readers could have attributed it to him. That’s because you don’t last forty years in an industry as ruthlessly competitive as Hollywood, and get to write memoirs about it, unless you’re energized by what you do. It’s a truth and a lesson that perhaps explains Zwick's father.
What if he’d been born when his son was? Opportunity was so much vaster and more wide-ranging in 1974 when Ed Zwick graduated from Harvard as opposed to when Allen Zwick was starting out. The view here is that this matters a great deal.
Ed Zwick’s father was quite the drinker, evidently the son not as much. Except that the son loved his work, and when you love your work you’re more likely to avoid what interferes with it? It’s a long way of suggesting that in the future, alcoholism, addiction more broadly, and most of all indolence will become rarer. Thanks to AI, other machine advances, along with soaring global cooperation among hands and machines, the work of tomorrow will powerfully amplify the skills and intelligence of exponentially more individuals who would have been viewed as failures or layabouts or boom-and-bust types in the past. Zwick was and is excited to go to work each day, but much more interesting will be how excited his grandkids will be each morning. I’ll bet Allen Zwick would have been one of the much more excited, much more focused types had he been born later.
Upon graduation from Harvard, Zwick was already a somebody. He had published in magazines like The New Republic. Publisher Martin Peretz, who similarly wrote a great memoir of recent vintage (my review here), was one of Zwick’s professors at Harvard. The main thing is that The New Republic was no easy feat to be placed in. Zwick must have had something, and he must have networked well while at Harvard.
That’s because upon moving to Paris after graduating, he was working as Woody Allen’s assistant on Love and Death. Again, he was going places. Upon returning to the United States, Zwick was accepted into the American Film Institute’s (AFI) program for would-be filmmakers, plus Allen connected him to the well-to-do daughter of a Bel-Air ad mogul.
About what you’ve read, none of it is to suggest Zwick had it easy. As Brian Grazer wrote in A Curious Mind, Hollywood is the land of no. Even Grazer, who is most know for being Ron Howard’s producer, is constantly being turned down. To make it in the film business, let alone work in it for forty years, is not a story of connections. As Zwick’s longtime production partner Marshall Herskovitz put it to him in an emotional moment for the both of them, there’s no such thing as “a free pass to a career.”
It was at AFI that Zwick discovered Herskovitz, the other way around, or both. They work together to this day, which is inspiring. It would be interesting to know if Herskovitz would accept Zwick’s self-deprecating take that Herskovitz was the bigger talent. Zwick quotes Madame X to explain his decision to work with Herskovitz: “I couldn’t risk becoming your enemy, so I became your friend.”
Zwick describes Herskovitz as technically proficient and a great writer, while allegedly his one attribute “was the ability to be dropped anywhere in a story and be able to say what scene came before and what beat should come after.” Since your reviewer is an economics writer, it will be said that the partnership of Zwick and Herskovitz explains well the genius of free trade: people are never a cost or a burden, just as goods and services from around the world are never a cost or a burden. When we combine production, and in doing so combine varied skills, the end results are much better and much more abundant.
Zwick didn’t waste time making his way up. The cancelation of a television show James at 15 led to Zwick’s writing being sent to the producers of Family, which could lay claim to A-list producers like Mike Nichols and Leonard Goldberg. Even better, upon connecting himself to Family, good fortune shined on Zwick beyond being hired by such a name show: story editor David Jacobs had just sold a pilot (it was Dallas) which led to Zwick being asked to replace him.
The same Zwick who’d been living in a seedy Hollywood motel soon found himself making more money per week than he had in the previous two years. More crew departures from Family to other shows (including one that lasted six episodes – no one knows anything!) meant that within a year Zwick had ascended to showrunner; all of this by the age of 27.
Yet with Zwick, it was always more than that. Or so it seems? While self-deprecating, there must be an ego there. See the Ahab reference. And that’s not a dig. It’s a comment once again that you don’t get to where he did by being unassuming. He had to have had a certain something, and perhaps it was his father’s charisma minus the alcohol? This is asked because amid all this Zwick had scripts that were being read by Michael Douglas, plus he could be found playing tennis at Leonard Goldberg’s house along with Sidney Poitier and Charlton Heston. For a wife to whom he’s married to this day, Zwick found his way to the quite beautiful and smart Liberty Godshall, the daughter of Bucks County (PA) big-wig and gentleman farmer, Ray Godshall; Ray so striking that he routinely made it into Zwick’s projects. These things don’t just happen to anyone. Interesting as Zwick is, to read him is to think that he’s more of a presence than he lets on.
The good news is that Family prospered, and as Zwick recalls, “it was the second best thing that happened to me.” What was the first? The cancelation of Family, which led to Zwick and Herskovitz’s production of television movie Special Bulletin. Written by Herskovitz and directed by Zwick, the film about a terrorist group’s threat to detonate a nuclear bomb in Charleston, SC proved a ratings and critical winner. Zwick and Herskovitz were showered with Emmys, Directors’ Guild, Writers’ Guild, and other awards. They were both inside and thriving, which is arguably a bit of a redundancy.
It all led to Thirtysomething, the show that familiarized me with Zwick and Herskovitz. A college girlfriend turned me onto it, and distant memories tell me that a major part of my interest was rooted in interest in the girlfriend. That's not a knock on Thirtysomething, or the girl.
The production duo pitched it to producers based on the view that “we didn’t recognize anyone on television who looked or sounded like us.” But as Zwick isn’t afraid to say, they and those who acted out Zwick, Herskovitz, and their wives sounded like “whiny,” invariably “self-absorbed” people.
Still, to reduce critically acclaimed and award-winning Thirtysomething (Zwick recalls that Steven Bochco never spoke to him again after it beat LA Law for Outstanding Drama Series Emmy) to a bunch of whiny, self-absorbed left-wingers is to miss the point. It was plainly so much more. While all the yelling in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is to this day cited as a pathbreaking look into the alleged reality of marriage (for a great read of how it became a movie, read Philip Gefter's excellent Cocktails With George and Martha - review here), there’s an obvious case to be made that Zwick and Herskovitz did a much better job of revealing the endless ups and downs of it all.
Funnily enough, there was no box set of Thirtysomething’s 80+ episodes until the 2000s, and what led to it resulted in a Wall Street Journal story. Memory says the story indicated it would soon be available, and it surely is as a streamer now. It would be interesting to watch now as a married person because the guess is that the show would resonate quite a bit more than it did at the time. It was very interesting then, while today it would be interesting and real. Memory of the episodes is slim, but the “endlessly peevish conversation that we call marriage” (the late P.J. O’Rourke) was vivified in it. Happiness followed by anger, misery, frustration, followed by happiness again. The bet here is that the show has aged better than its already sterling reviews.
In making it, Zwick writes of how they crafted the dialogue, that in real life “there’s talking and waiting to talk.” More powerfully, Zwick adds about the making of the show that “the strain on our marriages would have been intense enough had the four of us [Zwick, Herskovitz, Godshall, plus Susan Shilliday, Herskovitz’s wife] not been writing for the show.” Add the intense stress of the latter to the marriage itself all while writing marital troubles into the show, seeing intimate scenes involving your actual husband and wife (Ken Olin was married to Patricia Wettig, but they were married to others on the show), playing a single character (Peter Horton) while in the midst of an actual divorce, getting a divorce while acting out a troubled marriage, etc. It’s hard to read about.
Just the same, the quality of the show is confirmed in the “family tree” that prospers to this day. Zwick notes that Ken Olin, Timothy Busfield and Peter Horton are big-time showrunners, Melanie Mayron “is booked as a director every week,” Polly Draper “writes and directs her own movies," Mel Harris has “an IMDb list of credits longer than my arm,” and on and on.
The early successes clearly established Zwick and Herskovitz. Which brings up an economic and political point. Zwick was accepted to Harvard Law, his father thought him nuts for turning it down (the bet here is that he would not criticize his son today for doing the same thing), but Zwick did just that. What’s interesting is that he suffered his own frustrations in doing as he did. As in he recognized that Harvard Law was the safer path to a nice apartment in the right part of Manhattan, well-taken-care-of kids, and all of this happening while he was living in his “dingy L.A. apartment reading scripts for other directors.”
The incredibly rare “seen” is what Zwick and Herskovitz became, but the much more common unseen is how many Harvard, Brandeis (Herskovitz) and AFI classmates never stuck it out in film and television, or if they did, never made it. Also unseen is how Zwick lived before making it, whereas the seen in Hollywood is the Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood mansions that have at least historically housed the very few successes in what is a competitive industry.
The view here from this right-wing reviewer is that media types along with left-wingers too readily focus on the seen of Beverly Hills splendor, and the allegedly harmful inequality that the latter signifies, while never seeing the towering risks against brutal odds taken by the best and brightest of Hollywood to get to the top, or near it. Had Zwick gone to Harvard Law there never would have been the “dingy L.A. apartment,” but there also likely never would have been the highs of becoming a much-garlanded director, writer and producer. Risk and reward and all that, or insert your cliché.
Still, it’s important. It is because Zwick is an unabashed left winger. While he thankfully keeps much of his memoir free of politics, it’s at least somewhat evident where he stands? Much time is spent on this simply because Zwick doesn’t hide from how hard it was to get where he was, and is. He quotes Leonard Goldberg as saying, “You pay to get paid.” So very true.
That it’s true raises a question: why is Zwick a left winger in consideration of the left’s frequent disdain of the rich, its desire to make the rich pay their “fair share” (it’s no reach to say that Zwick has paid more in taxes than 99.9999% of Americans), and in consideration of Hollywood’s not infrequent characterization of the rich as bad the bad people?
To be clear, this is NOT a call for Zwick to join the Republican Party. As my review of the Peretz book makes plain, I think George W. Bush the worst president in my lifetime, by far. And while a libertarian case can be made for Donald Trump’s first term as president, his second term with the deportations, the tariffs, the purchases of “Golden Shares” in U.S. companies, and the harassing of elite U.S. universities is more than execrable. Throw Trump out, throw the Republicans out, but also throw the Democrats out. They’re awful too. Arguably what makes them most palatable is that at least when they control the White House, Republicans act kind of like Republicans again.
It's a long way of asking why Zwick isn’t a libertarian. Not Libertarian Party, but libertarian as a philosophy. This is asked because Zwick plainly disdains war, loves success, plus from prospering in Hollywood all these years, it’s evident that he doesn’t care what goes on in other people’s bedrooms. At this point, it can confidently be said that the Democrats are only good on social issues, but even there they’re still authoritarian as evidenced by their support for the sick and pointless lockdowns that Donald Trump panicked into imposing in 2020, lockdowns that seriously harmed the American poor, brought over 200 million of the world’s poorest to the brink of starvation, and with Zwick's memoir in mind, led to the quick cancelation of a Thirtysomething reboot. Which means the Democrats are situationally pro-liberty, they increasingly support foreign adventurism even more than Republicans, plus the base at least disdains rich people.
All this, plus Zwick gives indications of frustration with the perpetually offended. I very much share his frustration, but credit must be given to Zwick for happening on this sad state of perpetual victimhood on the left and right back in the 1990s. After releasing The Siege (Denzel Washington, Annette Benning, Tony Shalhoub) in 1998, a film that some credited for its pre-9/11 foresight (Zwick is more circumspect about his vision), Zwick found himself under attack by The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee due to the organization's anger over how Arab characters were portrayed in the movie.
Zwick responded with an excellent New York Times op-ed that resonates a great deal in 2025. He wrote that the feeling of the Committee “is that all one billion Islamic people in the world can be portrayed only in their most positive aspect.” Better yet, and in a passage that every perpetually up-in-arms left and right winger would ideally internalize, Zwick added that “These days, it seems people wake up in the morning not only waiting to be offended, but also hoping to be offended.” Yes! The media, teachers’ unions, Hollywood, universities, the New York Times, CNN, are being “mean” to conservatives daily. Conversely, the rich, Fox News, big business, the Freedom Caucus, sexist, and surely “racist” conservatives are being “mean” to the left each day. Both sides are truly ridiculous, and in their absurdity, they arguably foster even greater division given their unwillingness to allow discussion of anything. Zwick wrote about this too in the op-ed: “To shrink from any subject because it’s hurtful or politically sensitive or politically correct, or Islamically incorrect, is to deny one of the most important functions of art, which is to be provocative.” Amen.
You see, in the op-ed there’s free thinking reason that’s hard to find in Republican or Democratic circles in 2025. Zwick then saves the best for last: “So, I’m sorry I offended anyone. But I’m really not.” Yes! A thousand times. Let’s have more of this. Much more of this. Allowing for my bias, it’s the essence of libertarianism. I’ll wager that if Ed Zwick ever visited with Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane, he would agree with most of what Crane has to say. Figure that Crane and Charles Koch (the other co-founder) were anti-interventionist long before it was cool to seriously disdain foreign adventurism (Cato somewhat uniquely came out against both wars in Iraq), they were for marital freedom long before Democrats and Republicans would touch it, and they were for ending the drug war long before its abject stupidity became more commonplace. In his chapter about the making of the excellent Traffic, Zwick describes the “drug war” as a “clown show.” Yes!
Back to movies and television, Zwick tells would-be directors to not tell an actor what a great take they just had, but to instead just say they look incredible. That’s funny and sounds wise at the same time. What sounds incredibly difficult for the actor and director is the multiple takes. Think of the meaning of this. Zwick writes that “Invariably, one actor needed multiple takes while another lost his spontaneity.” Zwick describes actors as “passionate, reactive, oversensitive,” so imagine the collision of missed takes with his description of actors, and the inevitability that the best takes won’t always include each actor’s best work. It must be nightmarish for all concerned.
How to get movies made? Zwick makes a case for “getting the studio a little pregnant.” He adds that “once you can get them to start spending money its hard for them to stop because they would have to admit they’ve wasted it.” Zwick may or may not know it, but there he’s also describing government spending. Robert Moses said much the same, that he just needed a shovel in the ground to ensure what he started was finished. The view here is that film studios have a better track record than do governments, and they do precisely because it’s very hard to get the studio “a little pregnant.”
As Zwick puts it toward book’s end, “Movies aren’t born. They fight their way to life.” Precisely. What’s routinely recalled in entertainment memoirs is how difficult it is to get films made. No surprise there. There’s real money on the line. These truths first discredit the “easy,” “costless credit,” Federal Reserve narrative that reveals itself endlessly and obtusely among academics, economists and pundits, and they also show the dangers of the left and right’s obsession with increasing the flow of dollars to Washington. Not only does the latter logically (though paradoxically to some, and counterintuitively to others) result in soaring government debt, it means that government is being impregnated with too much frequency, all to the detriment of the creatives in technology, transportation, healthcare, and yes, entertainment.
Taking this further, Zwick’s track record as a writer, director and producer means he’s worked with some of the biggest of big names, including Tom Cruise. Zwick and Herskovitz made The Last Samurai with Cruise in 2003, and it’s a very good lesson in how credit and capital flow, or not. Zwick writes that The Last Samurai had a green light from the moment Tom said yes. Think about how rare this is, and how few people can get a movie financed just for saying yes. As Zwick points out, awards season is defined by endless speeches about the years and decades that not infrequently precede the making of a film. Money is never easy.
Zwick lived the above truth up close with Shakespeare In Love. Looked at in retrospect, what an obvious film to greenlight. Except that they’re rarely obvious. Tom Cruise can get films made, but he’s had his duds. So has Steven Spielberg. Tim Matheson chose Spielberg’s 1941 over playing Ted Striker in Airplane!
With Shakespeare In Love, Zwick not only secured the services of Tom Stoppard on the way to making it into a great script, but he had Julia Roberts attached as the lead. Except that Roberts eventually walked. And the film went into “turnaround” and all manner of other Hollywood words. Roberts obviously didn’t know what she had, but she’s in an industry littered with what might have been. No one knew what Zwick had.
Other than Harvey Weinstein. While Zwick plainly views him as a bad guy, he writes that “little has been said about his extraordinary displays of enthusiasm and powers of persuasion.” Weinstein told Zwick he was genius, that he would finance Shakespeare In Love, but changed his mind once he realized Miramax would be on the hook for the $6 million previously spent by Universal.
Zwick didn’t hear from him for years, during which he writes that “I must have show the script, often more than once, to every studio and independent financier with two nickels to rub together. All said no.” Remember this yet again next time conservatives marinating in their victimhood claim Hollywood is full of socialists. They’re ridiculous.
Eventually Weinstein made a trade with Universal to get the rights to Shakespeare In Love in return for King Kong. Zwick suggests it was Gwyneth Paltrow’s interest in the script that lit the fire under Weinstein, but the point of the story is that that movie that was impossible to finance was eventually made. Zwick rated a producer credit, but Weinstein made sure that he did not get the mic when it won Best Picture. It’s all a reminder of what a challenging business it is, but much more importantly in an economic sense, it disproves the trite, childish, “easy money” narrative that animates economists on the left and right. With the possible exception of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the movie industry is easily the most brutally capitalist of all. Look up “movie jail” if you’re skeptical, or much better, read Zwick’s book in which “movie jail” is referenced.
Zwick writes that “there are certain actors so preternaturally gifted it takes your breath away.” Which has to be. These are the Michael Jordans of their craft. Except that there’s plainly more, and Zwick doesn’t hide from it. The looks, except that it’s more than looks. As he puts it, “certain faces let in the light.” Among others, he’s clearly talking about Brad Pitt, whom he first directed (one word) in Thirtysomething, but did so again in somewhat challenging fashion in Legends of the Fall. Some people just demand that you look at them, it seems.
Which may help explain the difficulties with actors on set for reasons beyond their emotional qualities. This comes up most notably in the making of Glory, and the extraordinary difficulties Zwick had not just with Matthew Broderick, but with his mother. It won’t be described here, but wow! It lends validity to Zwick’s later comment that “the best time to work with a movie star is immediately after he’s directed.” Somewhere David Ricardo is smiling.
Zwick quotes colleague Menno Meyjes at book’s end as saying “Working in Hollywood is a series of small humiliations interrupted by bigger ones.” Despite this, the highs clearly outweigh the lows as Zwick’s excitement about his work reveals page after page. Would Ed Zwick in 2025 take the film route that he took in 1975? That’s the question I’m asking in closing this review. That his and Liberty Godshall’s kids got the writing bug suggests that he would do the same thing again, but then the doctors of 1975 are up in Silicon Valley as is Michael Ovitz once again.
Hopefully Ed Zwick would still choose entertainment, but the trend says many won’t. Which means at least in one way, the world will be a little less fun. No memoir entertains like Hollywood, which is why readers should read Zwick’s, and many more.
