Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood

by Ed Zwick

if you make your characters interesting enough, you’ll inevitably have a good plot.

That a single tear appeared and slid down his face, catching the light at the perfect moment, is the magic of movies. But something else was happening at that moment, something that transcended actors and directors, dollies and lenses. We had summoned ghosts. We all felt them among us. If you listen closely, you can hear Cary Elwes weeping off camera.

One thing about movie stars is a certain air of “Fuck it.” They accept your adoration but never ask for it. As needy as they can appear, the best ones don’t really care what you think of them. They’re not apathetic or rebellious, just self-contained. They can often be mistaken as being oppositional, but it’s not so much that as it is an unerring instinct not to have their imagination limited in any way, a ferocious insistence to remain open to the improvisation of life.

After all this time, I have come to understand that there are four ways to measure a movie’s success and the first three don’t count. Box office is a false accounting, critics no longer matter, and awards are forgotten within days. Time is the only measure.

as Preston Sturges put it, “A hit is something you do between flops.” As hard as it is to break in, it’s just as hard to stay relevant. It’s never a question of if you’re going to get knocked down, but when. And most of all, how long it takes you to get up.

In some essential way we are all losers in Hollywood. It’s hard to think of any other bond that distinguishes us as a community. In each of us there is something unfulfilled, some ache or deficiency of character that leads us to fill a hole in our heart with the love of strangers. Or awards.

I remember one late-night dorm-room conversation, where my friends and I decided there were only two kinds of movies: forgettable or memorable. The longer I’ve been in the business, the more I realize we were onto something. What we were getting at was the difference between entertainment and culture.

I did receive a call from Russell Crowe saying he was interested in the role of Katsumoto—the film’s Japanese lead. The mind reels.

At the heart of every story is a sound—something so deep it resonates like a pressure in your chest. It is this feeling that the composer seeks to make heard: to give voice to a movie’s inner life, its soul, if such a thing can be said of film.

But with its insistence on obligatory cliffhangers at the conclusion of each episode, the storytelling in the new age of streaming platforms seems deliberately crafted to create a kind of anxiety artfully designed to induce gorging rather than fulfillment, conversation rather than catharsis, consumption instead of closure. The thoughtful has given way to the marketable, and the complex idea replaced by the fifteen-second TikTok.

One night as we stood in ankle-deep snow, I talked about how much these months in the forest had affected me. After a reflective silence he said, “The forest has always been a place of transformation. Think of the lost children in Grimms’ fairy tales, or the characters in Twelfth Night. And now it has changed you too. Is this perhaps why you made this movie?”

Being sick is like learning a new language for a journey to a foreign country you’ve never especially wanted to visit.

“This,” she says. “This moment right now. It doesn’t matter if I have ten thousand more moments like this, or just this one, because it’s all the same. Yeah… just that. Right now. This moment. I have this.”

“Working in Hollywood is a series of small humiliations interrupted by bigger ones.”

After fifty years of getting their notes, the sum creative contribution from all but a few truly gifted executives might be reduced to four words: “Faster. Dumber. More likable.”

But since when is consensus the best way to judge art? Is homogeneity really the goal? Each year they introduce a crop of new phrases: “edge it up,” “backload it,” “unpack it,” “lean into it.” At such moments I remember Cameron Crowe describing an executive as someone who claims to know the way, doesn’t have a map, and can’t drive a car. As Steven Soderbergh once told an executive, “You confuse having an opinion with having an idea.”

Just how divisive is the sailor’s time at sea? And is it worth the hurt it causes at home?