Ed Zwick on a Better, More Elegant Age of Filmmaking
Plus: A small-town assignment!
Ed Zwick is perfectly emblematic of a certain type of director: he’s not showy like a Spielberg or a Scorsese, and he’s not instantly recognizable to mass audiences like a Nolan or a Tarantino. But for nearly two decades—from Glory (1989) up through Blood Diamond (2006)—he could get a decent budget to make high-quality middlebrow1 motion pictures that both entertained audiences and had a few ideas nestled within them.
Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Forty-Something Years in Hollywood is a compulsively readable account of Zwick’s time in Hollywood, one chronicling both the grand vistas of a nine-figure Tom Cruise epic and the intimate patios of a network TV show drawn from his own experiences. In it, he shares just enough dirt to keep readers interested but protects more than enough famous names to ensure that he can still field a solid cast should the opportunity arise.
The big question, the question posited by Zwick’s book, is whether that opportunity can arise in the modern age of filmmaking.
Take Blood Diamond (2006), a picture one might call “the sort of movie that can’t be made anymore.” Don’t take my word for it, though. Take former Warner Bros. head honcho Alan Horn’s word for it.
“Blood Diamond did well at the box office, but it didn’t set the world on fire,” Zwick recalls. “Soon after its release I had lunch with Alan Horn. ‘I love this movie,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of it and I’m going to hang the poster in my office. But it’s the last one of its kind we’ll ever make.’ ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Because it cost one hundred million dollars to make and the studio only made a forty-million-dollar profit,’ he said, shrugging.”
Horn—who would go from WB to Disney and then back to WB—understood that the big money was to be made in intellectual property. Two years later, his studio would release The Dark Knight, which grossed a billion dollars. During his tenure at Disney (2012 to 2021), that studio would release another eight or nine movies that grossed more than a billion dollars under the Marvel label alone. A forty-million-dollar profit is the special effects overage on any one of these pictures. And shareholders aren’t interested in high-toned, profitable rounding errors.
Zwick’s career is a complex equation filled with such rounding errors, some of them quite consequential. Would Denzel Washington have become one of the greatest actors in Hollywood without Zwick’s Glory? Maybe, maybe not—the talent is undeniable, though bad luck has derailed just as many careers as any vice—but he certainly got a leg up by being cast in the perfect role at the perfect time on the way to his first Oscar. Would Shakespeare In Love have won Harvey Weinstein his much-desired Oscar if Zwick hadn’t put in the leg work—gotten Tom Stoppard to rewrite the script; gotten that script near Gwyneth Paltrow—to get it rolling? Maybe, maybe not, but the resultant showdown with, and defeat of, Saving Private Ryan arguably changed the world of Oscars politicking forever.
Business concerns aren’t the only reason this sort of movie has fallen out of favor. A fascinating undercurrent in Zwick’s book is his sotto voce effort to acknowledge the ways in which political sensitivities become another enemy hampering the ability of filmmakers like Zwick to make the sort of movies he succeeded with.
“It’s not uncommon these days for people to ask me if I thought a white director would still be allowed to make” Glory, he writes. “I’d like to think so, but just as likely not. In a climate of such overzealous sensitivity, there might even be pushback against any emphasis on Robert Gould Shaw’s role in the story for fear that it might see a white-savior narrative. This would be as much of a left-wing canard as the banning of books about slavery and critical race theory is a reactionary one on the right.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon, precisely; Zwick was dealing with these sentiments even when his movies were being released. When The Siege, his 1998 thriller starring Washington, Annette Bening, and Bruce Willis, came out, it was met with protests from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which decried the film for daring to suggest that Muslim radicals could be terrorists even as it was telling a story about the dangers of stereotyping all Muslims as radical terrorists.
The movie ended up doing okay at the box office, but it was a headache, and studio heads hate those. The result of endless protests against reasonable portrayals of real-world villainy? Big-budget slop featuring villains who don’t have pressure groups that fundraise by complaining about art.
“Movies about aliens and asteroids can’t offend anybody, but neither do they try to hold up a mirror to unattractive aspects of our country,” Zwick writes. “These days, it seems, people wake up in the morning not only waiting to be offended, but also hoping to be offended. Central to any multicultural orthodoxy is the notion that, unless you are offended, you have no ontology.”
After reading that passage, I wasn’t shocked to see Zwick offer up praise for New Republic stalwarts Leon Wieseltier and Marty Peretz. Zwick isn’t just a filmmaker from another era; it almost feels like he’s a liberal from another era as well. Here’s hoping both that style of TNR liberalism and Zwick’s style of mid-budget movies for adults mount comebacks in Hollywood over the next few years.
I have a very important correction to make. I blundered, badly. On this week’s Across the Movie Aisle, I said that the forthcoming film The Fall Guy was an original, non-IP film. Whoops, turns out that it is based on a series that debuted the year before I was born. My bad folks! But is it really a valuable intellectual property if your prime moviegoing audience has no idea that it’s based on anything? Doesn’t it kind of defeat the purpose of pre-awareness? Hopefully you’ll forgive me!
Links!
One thing I didn’t mention in my review above: Zwick’s time with Tom Cruise during the filming of The Last Samurai. I didn’t mention it because Vulture has an excerpt from that section and you should just read the whole dang thing.
This week I reviewed Madame Web, a spectacularly incompetently made motion picture. Bad movie, avoid it folks.
In his newsletter this week, Walt Hickey highlighted a nostalgia-backed resurgence of interest in cassette tapes, and I have to say: this is the dumbest form of nostalgia ever. Cassette tapes are less convenient andsound worse than all the alternatives.
The headline on this poll in Matt Belloni’s newsletter today is that 30 percent of Republicans have a negative view of Disney while only eight percent of Democrats do, but the thing I’d be most worried about if I were Bob Iger is that 26 percent of independents also have a negative view of Disney.
One other thing worth highlighting from that poll: only .3 percent—that is, four of the 1,400 respondents—who are not frequent filmgoers say they stay away because of “wokeness.” The bigger issues are the same issues Hollywood has been facing for years: cost and quality.
Assigned Viewing: Small Town Crime (Freevee)
I talked to the Nelms Brothers for their new flick, Red Right Hand, which comes out next week. Loyal readers/listeners might remember the Nelms brothers as the writer-director team behind Fatman (I discussed it with them here), but their new one calls to mind their neo-noir Small Town Crime. Starring John Hawkes (Deadwood) and Robert Forster (Jackie Brown), Small Town Crime is a great, twisty little flick about an alcoholic cop who tries to solve a murder before the killers wipe out his own family. Check it out before watching their new movie when it hits video on demand.
Some people use “middlebrow” as a pejorative; I am not among them. It’s just solid shorthand for a particular type of entertaining, socially conscious picture.
Cassettes were a marked improvement from 8-tracks.
If Zwick had never made another film after "Legends of the Fall," his legacy as a master of the medium would rest intact; even the first few haunting notes of the soundtrack still bring me to tears. Thanks for this thoughtful piece.