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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – NOVEMBER 07: (L-R) Actor Tom Cruise and director Edward Zwick attend the ‘Jack Reacher: Never Go Back’ press conference on November 7, 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Han Myung-Gu\/WireImage)<\/p>\n
WireImage<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>) of his eventual memoir that I didn\u2019t want to end.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s an unfortunate one for those long fascinated by the Hollywood of old.<\/p>\n While the movie industry remains big and rich, they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n About what you\u2019ve read, it\u2019s not a total lament. Progress can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n All this throat-clearing is seemingly necessary as a jump-off to director, producer and actor Ed Zwick\u2019s (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<\/a>. While I haven\u2019t seen all or even half of what Zwick created, he\u2019s long been a successful somebody in Hollywood. As someone who devours Hollywood histories and memoirs, I wasn\u2019t going to miss Zwick\u2019s.<\/p>\n I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t firstly because Zwick has a very interesting story to tell, but I\u2019m also glad because there\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s career choice in 2025 versus 1975 will be speculated on later, it\u2019s no reach to suggest that if graduating from UCLA in 2025, Ovitz would be heading north, or east.<\/p>\n With Zwick, one of the more appealing aspects of his memoir is that there\u2019s an admirably sheepish quality to what he remembers. While he tells the reader up front that he\u2019ll be \u201cdropping a few names,\u201d he refers to Tom (Cruise), Brad (Pitt) and Julia (Roberts) with evident embarrassment? There\u2019s 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\u2019s still appreciated that he recognizes, even after directing so many prominent names, that it\u2019s good to be humble even if on the surface. The surface qualifier comes up because Zwick himself acknowledges the contradiction: he presents himself as \u201ca thoughtful, collegial guy who wants everybody\u2019s opinion while in fact I\u2019m Ahab in a baseball cap.\u201d<\/p>\n Zwick is also fun. While he hides a few names, he\u2019s frequently willing to name names while writing \u201cabout mentors, monsters, and the meaning of friendship.\u201d 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 \u201ca few names\u201d wondering just who some of the people are whose names are being dropped.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s disdain for public or \u201cgovernment\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In Zwick\u2019s case, he writes that \u201cI\u2019ve been work-addicted since childhood.\u201d Translated, Zwick was going places. Though he suffered a boom-bust, alcoholic father, his father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n He writes on p. 1 that \u201cI tell stories for a living,\u201d 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\u2019s end, \u201cI honestly can\u2019t ever remember waking up in the morning and saying, \u2018Shit, I have to go work today.\u2019\u201d What\u2019s funny and true about what Zwick writes is that even if he hadn\u2019t written it, wise readers could have attributed it to him. That\u2019s because you don\u2019t last forty years in an industry as ruthlessly competitive as Hollywood, and get to write memoirs about it, unless you\u2019re energized by what you do. It\u2019s a truth and a lesson that perhaps explains Zwick’s father.<\/p>\n What if he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n Ed Zwick\u2019s 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\u2019re more likely to avoid what interferes with it? It\u2019s 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\u2019ll bet Allen Zwick would have been one of the much more excited, much more focused types had he been born later.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>), was one of Zwick\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because upon moving to Paris after graduating, he was working as Woody Allen\u2019s assistant on Love and Death. Again, he was going places. Upon returning to the United States, Zwick was accepted into the American Film Institute\u2019s (AFI) program for would-be filmmakers, plus Allen connected him to the well-to-do daughter of a Bel-Air ad mogul.<\/p>\n About what you\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s longtime production partner Marshall Herskovitz put it to him in an emotional moment for the both of them, there\u2019s no such thing as \u201ca free pass to a career.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s self-deprecating take that Herskovitz was the bigger talent. Zwick quotes Madame X to explain his decision to work with Herskovitz: \u201cI couldn\u2019t risk becoming your enemy, so I became your friend.\u201d<\/p>\n Zwick describes Herskovitz as technically proficient and a great writer, while allegedly his one attribute \u201cwas the ability to be dropped anywhere in a story and be able to say what scene came before and what beat should come after.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Zwick didn\u2019t waste time making his way up. The cancelation of a television show James at 15 led to Zwick\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The same Zwick who\u2019d 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 \u2013 no one knows anything!) meant that within a year Zwick had ascended to showrunner; all of this by the age of 27.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s not a dig. It\u2019s a comment once again that you don\u2019t get to where he did by being unassuming. He had to have had a certain something, and perhaps it was his father\u2019s 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\u2019s house along with Sidney Poitier and Charlton Heston. For a wife to whom he\u2019s 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\u2019s projects. These things don\u2019t just happen to anyone. Interesting as Zwick is, to read him is to think that he\u2019s more of a presence than he lets on.<\/p>\n The good news is that Family prospered, and as Zwick recalls, \u201cit was the second best thing that happened to me.\u201d What was the first? The cancelation of Family, which led to Zwick and Herskovitz\u2019s production of television movie Special Bulletin. Written by Herskovitz and directed by Zwick, the film about a terrorist group\u2019s threat to detonate a nuclear bomb in Charleston, SC proved a ratings and critical winner. Zwick and Herskovitz were showered with Emmys, Directors\u2019 Guild, Writers\u2019 Guild, and other awards. They were both inside and thriving, which is arguably a bit of a redundancy.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The production duo pitched it to producers based on the view that \u201cwe didn\u2019t recognize anyone on television who looked or sounded like us.\u201d But as Zwick isn\u2019t afraid to say, they and those who acted out Zwick, Herskovitz, and their wives sounded like \u201cwhiny,\u201d invariably \u201cself-absorbed\u201d people.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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<\/a>), there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Funnily enough, there was no box set of Thirtysomething\u2019s 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 \u201cendlessly peevish conversation that we call marriage\u201d (the late P.J. O\u2019Rourke) 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.<\/p>\n In making it, Zwick writes of how they crafted the dialogue, that in real life \u201cthere\u2019s talking and waiting to talk.\u201d More powerfully, Zwick adds about the making of the show that \u201cthe strain on our marriages would have been intense enough had the four of us [Zwick, Herskovitz, Godshall, plus Susan Shilliday, Herskovitz\u2019s wife] not been writing for the show.\u201d 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\u2019s hard to read about.<\/p>\n Just the same, the quality of the show is confirmed in the \u201cfamily tree\u201d that prospers to this day. Zwick notes that Ken Olin, Timothy Busfield and Peter Horton are big-time showrunners, Melanie Mayron \u201cis booked as a director every week,\u201d Polly Draper \u201cwrites and directs her own movies,” Mel Harris has \u201can IMDb list of credits longer than my arm,\u201d and on and on.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cdingy L.A. apartment reading scripts for other directors.\u201d<\/p>\n The incredibly rare \u201cseen\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cdingy L.A. apartment,\u201d 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 clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s important. It is because Zwick is an unabashed left winger. While he thankfully keeps much of his memoir free of politics, it\u2019s at least somewhat evident where he stands? Much time is spent on this simply because Zwick doesn\u2019t hide from how hard it was to get where he was, and is. He quotes Leonard Goldberg as saying, \u201cYou pay to get paid.\u201d So very true.<\/p>\n That it\u2019s true raises a question: why is Zwick a left winger in consideration of the left\u2019s frequent disdain of the rich, its desire to make the rich pay their \u201cfair share\u201d (it\u2019s no reach to say that Zwick has paid more in taxes than 99.9999% of Americans), and in consideration of Hollywood\u2019s not infrequent characterization of the rich as bad the bad people?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s first term as president, his second term with the deportations, the tariffs, the purchases of \u201cGolden Shares\u201d 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n It’s a long way of asking why Zwick isn\u2019t 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\u2019s evident that he doesn\u2019t care what goes on in other people\u2019s bedrooms. At this point, it can confidently be said that the Democrats are only good on social issues, but even there they\u2019re still authoritarian as evidenced by their support for the sick and pointless lockdowns that Donald Trump panicked into imposing in 2020<\/a>, lockdowns that seriously harmed the American poor, brought over 200 million of the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n