A career memoir from the director of Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall that gives a dishy, behind-the-scenes look at working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
...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 ... The book is at its best when it gently prises the movie-star business away from the business of making movies. Though the two are co-dependent, stardom and storytelling here seem like distinct industries, and Zwick seems as baffled as anyone by the ways in which the movie-star side truly operates. The power dynamics are fascinating ... for all that Zwick reveals, he attempts to give his anecdotes a soft landing, trying to either dull or explain what often reads as rude-to-appalling behavior ... Half the fun of Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is in reading between the lines. If this is the stuff that won’t get Zwick excommunicated from the parties he doesn’t want to go to anyway, then I’d love to know what he left out.
Zwick has seen things and done things, and he’s reached a stage of his career—and, 15 years after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, in his life—where he’s unafraid whom he might offend ... Ultimately, Zwick seems less troubled by the suspicion that his own time may have passed than by the near-certainty that the types of movies he makes — entertainments, but entertainments of weight and substance — have gone extinct, at least at the big studios that funded his.
Not everyone is remembered so fondly, but the author on the whole comes off as humble about his success and charmingly self-deprecating. Writing in an age of superhero franchises and declining theatrical attendance, he observes with a sigh that 'movies for grown-ups on a large scale,' his métier, 'just aren’t being made these days.' There are notable exceptions to that claim, of course, but his memoir still evokes an era of Hollywood that feels different from our own.
