There have been countless books about Hollywood, but few come from inside the machine. The director Ed Zwick – who made Legends of the Fall, Glory and The Last Samurai, among other films – has written a fantastically entertaining memoir that shows the movie business in high definition. It is part how-to guide, peppered with frank lists that crunch hard-won advice into easily digestible bites, and will be useful for young film-makers – but the layperson will inhale it for the gossip and what it reveals about the frankly bewildering systems of power that prop up the entertainment business.
Zwick writes briskly and warmly, with a clear eye to keeping things moving. He admits early on that he is pulled between telling a good story and a desire “not to be excommunicated from certain Hollywood parties that I don’t care to attend anyway”. Happily for the reader, the storytelling wins that battle. Zwick started directing television in 1976 and by the late 80s was undertaking his first significant big-budget studio film, Glory, about the American civil war. To get that film made, the studio needed a “marquee name” and plumped for Matthew Broderick, then riding high on the popularity of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. What followed, for Zwick, was a “nightmare from which there seemed no waking”, and is only the first of what he refers to as “actor horror stories”. There are many more to come.
