On a recent Friday night, Jim Belushi walked into a high-rise apartment in Chicago and shouted, “Am I late? Did you talk about me yet?”
Belushi had been invited, as had the other 40 or so people at an event who had come to hear veteran film director Ed Zwick talk about his new memoir, “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood.”
So Belushi shouted, some people laughed and Zwick carried on, saying, “Haven’t mentioned you yet, Jim, but I will.”
Also among the guests that night were Stuart Oken and Jason Brett, the film producing team behind many projects over the years. Their first encounter with Zwick was the film version of the David Mamet play, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” which became “About Last Night” and turned the pair into what Zwick calls “lifelong friends.”
“About Last Night” was Zwick’s first hit film. He directed, and it starred Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Jim Belushi who, Zwick writes, “became my great ally, and his performance was brilliant.”
The Belushi stories are among the book’s best, but it is a fine and honest book. Its first line is this: “I tell stories for a living.” True to those words, the book’s 300-some pages are filled with stories, about the making of such television shows as “Thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life” and nearly two dozen movies, including “Glory,” “Legends of the Fall,” “Shakespeare in Love,” “The Last Samurai,” “Blood Diamond” and “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.”
Zwick is the featured headliner for the fifth annual San Diego Writers Festival, which takes place from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday at two locations in Coronado. More than 90 speakers are booked and there will be more than 40 events. Zwick’s presentation is at 11 a.m. at the Coronado Performing Arts Center. Other speakers are San Diego Poet Laureate Gill Sotu, New York Times bestselling author Matthew Quirk (“The Night Agent”), Dr. Judith Orloff (“The Genius of Empathy”) and Anita Moorjani (“Dying to Be Me”).
Zwick’s memoir is filled with enough bold-faced names for a dozen old-fashioned gossip columns: Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meg Ryan ... and on and on.
“The book was born when COVID came,” said Zwick, who lives with his family in Santa Monica. “It shut down the plans for a reimagining of “Thirtysomething” called “Thirtysomething(else)” and during this down time, I started looking back at some of the work I’d done. I’m not a retrospective kind of person. I am always looking forward. But in watching my movies, I was astonished by the people I had been with, the relationships I had formed.”
His book is a generally sunny trip, in sharp contrast to the recent memoir by another David Mamet, whose recently published “Everywhere an Oink Oink,” lives up to its subtitle, “An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood.”
Zwick knows and respects Mamet and said he’d love to share the stage with Mamet in a discussion of memoirs.
There is no question that Zwick shares some of Mamet’s views about Hollywood and the movie business. His view: “These days, big movies with movie stars and all the bells and whistles tend to be about superheroes and comic books. This isn’t grousing. It is what it is.”
Still he is working on a new film project and is pleased by the reception his book is receiving, praise such as this from The Wall Street Journal: “The author warns early on that he’ll be dropping names, and he certainly does. ... Not everyone is remembered so fondly, but the author on the whole comes off as humble about his success and charmingly self-deprecating. … (A) heartfelt memoir in movies and more.”
In the book, Zwick wrote about how Brad Pitt was sometimes volatile on the set of “Legends of the Fall”; how a demanding Julia Roberts spectacularly quit the movie “Shakespeare in Love” and cost the studio $6 million; how he sued now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein; and how he enjoyed working with Denzel Washington in “Glory” and Tom Cruise in “The Last Samurai.”
The book is punctuated by chapters that offer “tips” and “lessons,” such as “It’s Possible to Make a Bad Movie Out of a Good Script” and “Fall in Love with the Actors: But don’t mistake it as being real. Transfer your fascination with them to the screen. And don’t sleep with them though they are shiny and alluring.”
One thing the book does not provide is much about his personal life. We do learn that he is happily married, has two good kids (both writers) and successfully dealt with a serious health problem. His high school years? Only a bit. His childhood? Not much.
Here is the paragraph that begins Chapter 15: “My paternal grandfather was a tough Jew. I’m named after him; my Hebrew name is Yitzhak. In 1920s Chicago his five brothers (“the Uncles,” as they were known in my family), Dovie, Fat, Zus, Zell, and Jules, were “betting commissioners” (read bookies) for the Capone mob. As a boy I secretly relished my family’s unsavory past.”
Sounds like that might make a good book, yes? What about a movie?
“Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” by Ed Zwick (Gallery Books, 2024; 304 pages)
When: 11 a.m. Saturday
Where: Coronado Performing Arts Center, 650 D Ave., Coronado
Admission: Free but registration required
Register: sandiegowritersfestival.org
Kogan writes for The Chicago Tribune.
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