‘I don’t know who yelled first, who swore, or who threw the first chair,’ Zwick writes. He also claims that Pitt’s ‘greatest concern was having make-up applied to his butt’. When Zwick cast him in Legends of the Fall, however, he found that while he ‘seems easygoing’, he ‘can be volatile when riled, as I was to be reminded more than once’. Brad Pitt is usually thought of as Hollywood’s perpetual golden boy, a sandy-haired hunk. The actors who come in for criticism are those with the most wipe-clean public profiles. Billy Connolly was ‘so funny I had to tell him to shut the f-k up’. Many actors get glowing write-ups, including Cruise. On the set of Blood Diamond he walks into DiCaprio’s trailer to find the actor – who famously dates models and who was between girlfriends at the time – sitting with Jennifer Connelly, leafing through a lingerie catalogue. He discloses plenty of things his subjects might have preferred to stay protected by Hollywood’s gold-plated omertà. I didn’t talk about their home lives and romances. The director Sydney Pollack talked about treating movie stars as actors. ‘But I thought talking about it might inoculate it from dishing seeming to be the book’s only objective. My fascination with them predates my familiarity so it was inevitable that I would be aware of what seems at times to be name-dropping. This was the currency, these were the people I was working with. ‘If I was willing to take the p-s out of myself, that earned me the right to do it to a few others,’ he says. ‘I’ve come to accept there’s no way to tell these stories without being falsely modest or pretentiously unpretentious.’ He briefly agonises that his disclosure might stop him being invited to Hollywood parties, before merrily carrying on. ‘Speaking of names, I’ll be dropping a few,’ he writes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given he has made his fortune distilling complex stories into digestible spectacles, Zwick strikes a canny balance between pulling back the wizard’s curtain and spilling over into bitchiness. ‘There has been unanimity about the book, which makes me anxious,’ he admits. He is friendly, but you can imagine you would not want to be late to set. Bearded, with horn-rimmed glasses and a plaid shirt somewhat louchely unbuttoned, a spacious wood-beamed room behind him, Zwick looks every inch the prosperous Hollywood veteran. ‘I’m more accustomed to my films being polarising, frankly,’ Zwick says, over video call from his home in Santa Monica, California. The result is Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood, an enjoyable memoir which canters over Zwick’s many successes, and rather fewer failures. In a reflective moment during lockdown, after a remake of Thirtysomething was put on hold, Zwick, who started his career as a journalist, decided that the time had come to commit some of his stories to paper. If it can go right or wrong in Tinseltown, it has happened to Ed Zwick. Along the way he has battled penny-pinching producers, capricious actors and, in one notorious encounter, Harvey Weinstein at the height of his manipulative, avaricious powers. He helped Denzel Washington win his first Oscar for his role in Glory, an epic about the American Civil War put Brad Pitt into a Western in Legends of the Fall had Leonardo DiCaprio doing a more than passable Zimbabwean accent for Blood Diamond and turned Tom Cruise into a samurai for The Last Samurai.Īnthony Hopkins, Daniel Craig, Jennifer Connelly, Claire Danes, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and countless others have all worked with him. Behind the camera as a director and producer, Zwick has capered around the world with the industry’s biggest stars. As a pioneering TV writer and executive, he made Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. At 71, after more than 40 years as a writer, director and producer, Zwick has seen the best and worst that Hollywood has to offer. To that pantheon of tell-alls, we can now add Ed Zwick. Think of David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon, William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, or Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind. Spilling the tea on Hollywood is a literary tradition.
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