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A review by gluckenstein
Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick
hopeful
lighthearted
fast-paced
4.0
"Every night I would lie in bed, sleepless, trying to devise original ways to stage men killing each other. It was downright ghoulish."
The book is a little rough around the edges — when Zwick tries to infuse his writing with pathos, especially when talking about music or chastising the current era of content (also, he curiously criticizes the glut of serialized fiction as «engendering conversation, not catharsis» mere pages after congratulating thirtysomethings for being politically impactful), his prose can get a little purply; his little epigrams about work in Hollywood situated at the end of each chapter are simply too numerous and start to run together after a while; and his praise for his collaborators, actors most of all, at its least inspired can sound very close to the stuff one says, and probably was said by him, in promotional interviews — but still the book is a very smooth ride. As is probably mandatory in any biography there’s a smidge of shrink-y self-diagnosis. A lot of actors stories. Acquiring of friendships and connections, and arising health issues get more attention than specifics of working out of script problems and technical intricacies of setting up shots, which is probably true to director’s day-to-day existence in Hollywood.
The book is a little rough around the edges — when Zwick tries to infuse his writing with pathos, especially when talking about music or chastising the current era of content (also, he curiously criticizes the glut of serialized fiction as «engendering conversation, not catharsis» mere pages after congratulating thirtysomethings for being politically impactful), his prose can get a little purply; his little epigrams about work in Hollywood situated at the end of each chapter are simply too numerous and start to run together after a while; and his praise for his collaborators, actors most of all, at its least inspired can sound very close to the stuff one says, and probably was said by him, in promotional interviews — but still the book is a very smooth ride. As is probably mandatory in any biography there’s a smidge of shrink-y self-diagnosis. A lot of actors stories. Acquiring of friendships and connections, and arising health issues get more attention than specifics of working out of script problems and technical intricacies of setting up shots, which is probably true to director’s day-to-day existence in Hollywood.
The feeling the book leaves you with is that, for all his faults, Zwick is an interesting figure in film, a big-scale historical drama/literary adaptation/message movie director, very scant now when all but few seem to be presented with a choice between samey overblown multi-million dollar entertainments and under-20 million dollars idiosyncratic festival play.