Hollywood Horror Stories by Ed Zwick

“[Studios]look at it as something that has to be pre-tested, satisfied and accepted before it happens,” Zwick says. “There are demographers and marketers who are examining this. The legacy of this is to create something more homogeneous and acceptable. Movies were more willing to be disturbing and unsettling.

Technology is also a factor, he adds. “You could only see movies once in a theater. That was an ephemeral experience. Once you had the ability to have that movie and start and stop and watch it in your home while you were checking email or going to the refrigerator, it became a different experience. And it was the intensity of That’s different. It’s become confusing for YouTube or gaming or any number of competing things.

Zwick’s work might look different if it were restored today, too. In one sweet anecdote, Russell Crowe expressed interest in playing a Japanese character in the film The last samurai. This would have been a surprise in 2003, when the film was released. Today this could cause a full-blown diplomatic incident.

Compared to other Hollywood memoirs, Zwick’s memoir is refreshingly light on the meandering back story. It is mostly a chronological anecdote told through his projects, interspersed with lists of anonymous advice and gossip.

We learn the basics of Zwick’s early life in Chicago. His mother, Ruth Ellen, loved the theater. His father, Allen, was a serial entrepreneur who went bankrupt “not once, not twice, but three times,” he writes. He was also a narcissist and a womanizer, which helped lead to a messy divorce. Zwick went to Harvard for his undergraduate degree, avoiding Harvard Law School and attending film school in Los Angeles, which angered Allen. He wonders if his love for actors has anything to do with the absence of a father.

“There was something elusive in his interest, even in his love,” Zwick writes. “Choosing a life of seeking intimate relationships with movie stars is almost comical in its Freudian implications.” This could be the reason for a certain love-hate relationship I’ve always had with them.

Zwick took a break from writing family, a television drama on ABC. He says he had two great marriages. There’s his actual marriage to Liberty Godshall, an actor-turned-writer, with whom he has two adult children, Jesse and Frankie, both of whom ended up working in the business as well. There is also his creative partnership with Marshall Herskovitz, which continued throughout his life.