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The thief Gaston escapes the dungeon of medieval Aquila through the latrine. Soldiers are about to kill him when Navarre saves him. Navarre, traveling with his spirited hawk, plans to kill t... Read all The thief Gaston escapes the dungeon of medieval Aquila through the latrine. Soldiers are about to kill him when Navarre saves him. Navarre, traveling with his spirited hawk, plans to kill the bishop of Aquila with help from Gaston. The thief Gaston escapes the dungeon of medieval Aquila through the latrine. Soldiers are about to kill him when Navarre saves him. Navarre, traveling with his spirited hawk, plans to kill the bishop of Aquila with help from Gaston.

• Richard Donner
• Edward Khmara
• Michael Thomas
• Tom Mankiewicz
• Matthew Broderick
• Rutger Hauer
• Michelle Pfeiffer
• 227 User reviews
• 68 Critic reviews
• 64 Metascore
• 5 wins & 7 nominations total

• (as Alessandro Serra)

• Insane Prisoner

• (as Russell Kase)
• Guard on Cart
• (as Don Hudson)

• Cart Driver
• Guard in the Cell

• Guard at the City Gate
• (as Rod Dana)
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• Trivia Spike II, the hawk featured in this movie, worked in the Universal Bird Show until 2000, when she was transfered to the National Audubon society and became an Audubon Ambassador until she died in May 2007. Another hawk was used for flying scenes, and another to sit on Rutger Hauer 's arm. One enjoyed Hauer's company so much it would ruffle its feathers when seated on his arm, making it look more like a chicken.
• Goofs You can hear someone say 'cut' just before Phillipe says, "It's not unlike escaping Mother's womb."

Phillipe : Sir, the truth is, I talk to God all the time, and, no offense, but He never mentioned you.

• Crazy credits With Loving Memory to "Little Pasta"
• Connections Featured in At the Movies: King David/Lady Hawke/Fraternity Vacation (1985)

User reviews 227

• Jul 14, 2004
• How long is Ladyhawke? Powered by Alexa
• What medieval legends could the Ladyhawke plot be based on?
• April 12, 1985 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Der Tag des Falken
• Campo Imperatore, L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy
• Twentieth Century Fox
• Warner Bros.
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $20,000,000 (estimated)
• $18,432,000
• Apr 14, 1985

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• Runtime 2 hours 1 minute

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THEN AND NOW: The cast of 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' 35 years later

• "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" came out 35 years ago in 1986.
• Matthew Broderick, who played Ferris, is married to Sarah Jessica Parker and has continued to act.
• Jennifer Grey, who played his sister, is set to star in and executive produce a "Dirty Dancing" sequel.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories .

Matthew Broderick got his start in theater and even won a Tony before playing the school-skipping Ferris Bueller.

He was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1987 for the role.

Now married to Sarah Jessica Parker of "Sex and The City" fame, Broderick has continued to act.

He starred in Warren Beatty's rom-com "Rules Don't Apply" in 2016, and he has appeared in various television series including "The Conners," "Better Things," and "Daybreak." He most recently starred in the 2020 comedy "Lazy Susan."

He married Parker in 1997 and they have three children together.

Alan Ruck had starred alongside Broderick on Broadway in 1985, and he had only appeared in two films before playing Ferris' hypochondriac best friend, Cameron.

He was 29 when he played the high schooler.

He currently plays Connor Roy in "Succession."

He also starred in the Netflix movie "War Machine" and the musical comedy "Dreamland."

Portraying Ferris' girlfriend, Sloane, was Mia Sara in her second ever movie role.

Her first role was the character of Lili in the 1985 movie "Legend" with Tom Cruise.

She went on to play Harley Quinn in the short-lived drama "Birds of Prey" and Princess Langwidere in "The Witches of Oz."

Her last role was in the short film "Pretty Pretty" in 2013, accoring to IMDb .

Along with Broderick, Ruck, and other cast members, she appeared on Josh Gad's YouTube show, "Reunited Apart," for a Ferris Bueller episode in June 2020.

Jennifer Grey was early into her career when she was cast as Ferris' sister.

A year after "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," Grey starred in "Dirty Dancing," for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination.

She was the season 11 winner of "Dancing With the Stars," and she starred in the Amazon comedy "Red Oaks."

Grey has signed on to star in and executive produce an untitled "Dirty Dancing" sequel. She has also appeared on "Grey's Anatomy" and "The Conners." 

Charlie Sheen played a delinquent at the police station in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

His first major role was alongside Jennifer Grey in 1984's "Red Dawn." He starred in the Academy Award-winning "Platoon" that same year.

He went on to star in a number of successful films. He transitioned to a successful TV career with "Two and a Half Men," but alcohol and drug struggles ultimately led to his contract being terminated.

He has since appeared in "9/11," a drama about September 11, 2001, and the TV series "Typical Rick."

Jeffrey Jones played the uptight principal in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

Before "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Emperor Joseph II in 1984's "Amadeus."

He went on to star in films such as "Beetlejuice" and "Sleepy Hollow."

He also appeared on TV shows like HBO's "Deadwood."

Ben Stein played the economics teacher — whose repetition of "Bueller" has become iconic — as his second acting gig.

Stein graduated from Yale Law School in 1970. Over the years, he was a poverty lawyer, trial lawyer at the FCC, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and an attorney at the White House before venturing into acting.

He has continued to act and do voiceover work, and he served as a panelist on "Cavuto on Business."

Stein is also a vocal conservative commentator.

Edie McClurg played the sweet assistant to the principal in "Ferris."

McClurg made her film debut in the 1976 horror movie "Carrie."

McClurg has more than 100 credits to her name, including voiceover work in "The Little Mermaid," "Frozen," and "Zootopia."

She most recently lent her voice to an episode of "Family Guy" and will voice a character in an untitled "Cars" television series in 2022.

Cindy Pickett was largely known for her TV roles before she played Ferris' mom.

Pickett was a cast member of the soap "Guiding Light" and medical drama "St. Elsewhere."

She's since appeared in shows including "Burn Notice" and "The Mentalist."

She also starred in the 2018 sci-fi drama series "Age of the Living Dead."

Lyman Ward had mostly appeared on TV before he played Ferris' father.

He had small roles on shows like "Laverne & Shirley," "One Day at a Time," and "Battlestar Galactica."

He's continued to act, playing a secret service agent in "Independence Day" and a teacher in "Not Another Teen Movie."

He most recently appeared in an episode of "Transparent."

• Main content

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, kenny ortega, matthew broderick, charlie sheen, jeffrey jones, photos & videos, technical specs.

Ferris Bueller is a popular high school student living in an affluent Chicago suburb. After convincing his parents that he is truly sick, Ferris calls on his friend Cameron to join him for a day of hooky from school. Cameron agrees, reluctantly, because it means taking his father's prized classic 1961 red Ferrari 250 GT convertible. They pick up Ferris's girlfriend and head for adventure in downtown Chicago -- all the while trying to outsmart and outrun the dean of students who has become wise to Ferris' plan.

John Hughes

Bennie dobbins.

Jennifer Grey

Larry flash jenkins, joey garfield, john rozman, edward lebeau, lee ann marie, debra montague, louie anderson, brendan babar, kristy swanson, paul manzanero, eric edidin, gail tangeros, jonathan schmock, miranda whittle, edie mcclurg, kristin graziano, dick sollenberger, jason alderman, polly noonan, scott coffey, joel prihoda, joey d. vieira, tom spratley, bridget mccarthy, heidi meyer, dee dee rescher, richard edson, annette thurman, richard rohrbough, stephanie blake, sunshine parker, dave silvestri, lisa bellard, tiffany chance, max perlich, bob parkinson, robert mckibbon, cindy pickett, tricia fastabend, virginia capers, vlasta krsek, paul abascal, greg agalsoff, pamela alch, carl aldana, jane alderman, james alexander, terry allen, michael amundson, james m anderson, shelley andreas, feargal andrews, arthur baker, elinor bardach, the beatles, adam bernardi, boris blank, barbara siebert bolticoff, wilbert bradley, gretchen brown, valerie bulinski, michael chinich, alf clausen, terri clemens, ken collins, john w corso, tracy cutts, jim m davis, martin degville, tom elliott, jerrie fowler, john frazier, tak fujimoto, milt gabler, gilbert gabriel, mauri syd gayton, michael germain, joe gilbert, stan gilbert, james giovannetti, david gonzales, tarquin gotch, dennis grisco, conrad w. hall, scott e hart, billy higgins, paul hirsch, janet hirshenson, marcia holley, john hudacek, tom jacobson, jane jenkins, daniel s. jimenez, wingate jones, david joyner, bert kaempfert, frank kearns, lisa kearsley, randy kelley, george kohut, peter kuttner, gary ladinsky, nick laird-clowes, rick lefevour, stephen lim, robert j litt, bill lowman, paul mansfield, jack m marino, johnny marr, steve maslow, eddie matthews, melton c maxwell, ronald e maxwell, eoin mcevoy, phil medley, dieter meier, hugo montenegro, laurel moore, ira newborn, charles j. newirth, wayne newton, armand paoletti, jeff passanante, ronald w payne, bruce pearson, adam peters, jennifer polito, cynthia quan, tracy rosenthal, p scott sakamoto, silvio scarano, arne l schmidt, kurt schwabach, wayne sheehy, wylie stateman, john michael stewart, richard stone, tom f thomas, larry troutman, zapp troutman, elliot tyson, marilyn vance-straker, jane vickerilla, edmund villa, david wakeling, ben watkins, jeanne weber, kay h whipple, neil whitmore, linnea wicklund, john williams, jerry wills.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Miscellaneous Notes

Released in United States Summer June 11, 1986

Released in United States on Video April 1987

Released in United States 2011

Completed shooting November 22, 1985.

Began shooting September 9, 1985.

Released in United States 2011 (Community Screenings)

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Ferris bueller's day off: the actors who almost played ferris.

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While Matthew Broderick’s portrayal of Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has become iconic, there were other actors who could have gotten the part. Released in 1986 and written and directed by John Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is one of the most iconic movies of the '80s. Broderick brought the character of Ferris Bueller to life; the film could have been very different if Hughes had cast another actor.

Broderick's Ferris Bueller is one of the most iconic characters from the '80s; Ferris Bueller is a great friend , he is relatable while still cool, and he is endlessly endearing. Broderick imbued his performance with boyish charisma and charm.

Related: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Soundtrack: Every Song In The Movie

Hughes reportedly claimed that he never had anyone else in mind but Matthew Broderick for the role of Ferris Bueller, but there’s some dispute on that point: Matthew Broderick himself says that Hughes considered other actors for the role (via Chicago Sun-Times ), and Alan Ruck, who played Ferris’s friend Cameron, stated in an interview that other actors had been offered the role of Ferris before Broderick was cast (via AV Club ).

Anthony Michael Hall

Anthony Michael Hall appears to have come closer than anyone else to getting the role of Ferris Bueller. Having already worked with Hughes on Sixteen Candles , The Breakfast Club , and Weird Science , he would have fit right in with Hughes’ style. Hall reportedly suspected that Hughes originally wrote Ferris with him in mind (via Vanity Fair ). According to Alan Ruck, Hall was offered the lead role but turned it down. It’s believed Hall wanted to avoid being too typecast in the type of role he’d played previously in John Hughes movies.

Johnny Depp

In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio , Johnny Depp claims he was offered the part of Ferris Bueller , but had to turn it down due to scheduling conflicts. Most likely, this would have been due to the movie Platoon , which also came out in 1986.

Eric Stoltz

Already well-known for not making it as Back to the Future 's Marty McFly, Eric Stoltz  is another name rumoured to have auditioned for the part of Ferris Bueller, but ultimately fell short. Stoltz would land a role in another John Hughes film:  Some Kind of Wonderful  in 1987.

Jim Carrey was a relative unknown at the time, as his only major film role at this point was the moderate success  Once Bitten  (1985); his breakout roles didn't happen until the early '90s. Given how different Jim Carrey is from Matthew Broderick, it’s hard to imagine just what his version of Ferris Bueller would have looked like.

Michael J. Fox

Already riding high on making Family Ties and Back to the Future , Michael J. Fox was considered for the role of Ferris Bueller. Considering how packed his schedule was, it’s unlikely he would’ve been able to do the movie, even if he’d wanted to.

John Cusack

Having appeared already in Sixteen Candles , John Cusack had a working relationship with John Hughes that could have easily translated to Ferris Bueller. Instead, his big breakout role had to wait until 1989 with Say Anything .

Robert Downey Jr.

In 1985, Robert Downey Jr. appeared in Weird Science , giving him an existing connection with John Hughes. Instead of playing Ferris, however, he appeared in Back to School , the Rodney Dangerfield movie that actually beat Ferris Bueller at the box office the week it opened.

Tom Cruise wasn’t well known at the time, as Legend wasn’t a commercial success and Top Gun was released just a month before Ferris Bueller came out. Had Cruise been cast as Ferris, the career trajectory probably would have looked much different for the acclaimed action star .

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Breaking news, directing tom cruise, denzel, and dicaprio: ed zwick, the man who knew all of hollywood.

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While directing Tom Cruise in the 2003 epic “The Last Samurai” on location in New Zealand, Ed Zwick had just one take to film a scene where Cruise said goodbye to the son of a man he had killed.

If they didn’t nail it on the first try, they would lose their light.

Zwick knew Cruise would give his all to produce the reaction Zwick sought.

But that was also what Zwick feared — that the actor’s portrayal would feel forced because of his natural intensity.

So Zwick decided not to give the superstar any direction at all.

Instead, he called Cruise over right before the shot and said simply, “Tell me about your son,” referencing Cruise’s then-8-year-old, Connor.

“He looked at me, surprised,” Zwick, a veteran producer, director, and screenwriter, writes in his new memoir, “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood,” (Gallery, Feb. 13).

“I knew Connor had just returned to L.A. and Tom wouldn’t be seeing him for a while,” Zwick writes. “For a moment Tom was quiet. And then he began to talk…I watched as he looked inward, and a window seemed to open up and his eyes softened.”

Cruise nailed the scene with, Zwick recalled, “the depth of feeling I had loved in his best performances.”

After the shot, as the light quickly faded, Cruise walked past Zwick and mouthed, “Thank you.”

Zwick’s accomplishments include the television series “Thirtysomething,” which he co-created with longtime partner Marshall Herskovitz, and directing movies like “About Last Night,” “The Siege” and “Blood Diamond.”

As a producer, he was nominated for Best Picture Oscars for “Traffic” and “Shakespeare In Love,” winning for the latter film.

Beginning his career as an assistant to Woody Allen and attending AFI film school, where David Lynch was the program’s “strange young man,” he has worked closely with the biggest stars in Hollywood.

He got into screaming fights with Brad Pitt on “Legends of the Fall,” watched a young, little-known Matt Damon go toe-to-toe with Denzel Washington on “Courage Under Fire,” got Anne Hathaway to finally cry in “Love & Other Drugs” by telling her she wouldn’t have to cry, and found Leonardo DiCaprio so dedicated to analyzing his “Blood Diamond” character that his redundancies made Zwick want to “tear my hair out.” 

Directing the film “Glory,” he found it a nightmare to work with Matthew Broderick, who, he writes, was so nervous about starring in the film that he subjected the script to countless rewrites, even bringing in his mother, Patsy, to argue on his behalf.

“Patsy was a brilliant woman, a painter and playwright [who never received] the recognition she felt she was due,” Zwick writes. “Although I’m sure she was capable of warmth and charm. I was never treated to that side of her.”

Patsy, Zwick writes, was “contemptuous, demeaning, and volatile,” questioning every one of Broderick’s lines in the film, and trying to change the plot so Broderick’s character was convinced to take action by his mother.

“‘One of her choicer comments was to describe my writing as ‘limp as a penis,’” Zwick writes.

Planning for “Shakespeare in Love,” Zwick had originally lined up Julia Roberts, then 23, to star.

The producer and the A-lister bonded on a flight to London, where Roberts, after several glasses of wine, talked passionately about falling in love with co-stars from ex-fiancée Kiefer Sutherland to Liam Neeson, and how that related to her film choices.

By the end of the flight, Roberts revealed that she wanted Daniel Day-Lewis to play Shakespeare.

The producer knew, however, that Lewis was committed to “In The Name of the Father.” 

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But Roberts told him, with supreme confidence, that she could get Day-Lewis to star in the film.

The next day, Roberts was an hour late for a casting session for the film’s male lead when she called Zwick to her luxurious hotel suite, where the director found her “flushed and giggly.”

She told him that Day-Lewis had agreed to do the movie and that he should cancel the casting session.

“I was speechless,” Zwick writes. “I tried not to envision what happened [the previous night]. Had she really managed to beguile him in that Olympian hotel room?”

It was little surprise, then, when Day-Lewis called Zwick later that day, asked to meet, and confirmed that he couldn’t do the film.

Roberts read with a who’s who of acting talent over the next few days including Hugh Grant, Russell Crowe, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Sean Bean, and Ralph Fiennes, but her enthusiasm was shattered, her famous smile “nowhere in sight” as she found fault with every actor. 

She dropped out of the film soon after.

While his dealings with A-list stars caused him stress over the years, it was all part of an unusually complex relationship that only A-list directors can truly relate to, and that gave him a career of cherished memories and exhilarating creative output.

“To be a director is to be a changeling,” Zwick writes. 

“I have played both good cop and bad, psychoanalyst, flirt, camp counselor, drug counselor, scourge, tutor, BFF, coach, con artist, confidant, and co-conspirator. Also, a heartless son of a bitch.”

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Oscar-Winning Filmmaker Dishes on Matthew Broderick and Harvey Weinstein

Edward Zwick has won accolades directing the likes of Denzel, Leo, Matthew Broderick, and Tom Cruise. And now he’s telling all.

Lloyd Grove

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty

In his new book about life in the movie biz, director Edward Zwick recounts a series of nasty confrontations over the screenplay of 1989’s Glory with, of all people, Matthew Broderick ’s mother.

“From the moment we met, she was contemptuous, demeaning, and volatile,” Zwick writes in Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood —an epically entertaining memoir of sex, lies, and celluloid.

At the insistence of Matthew and his bullying superagent, Mike Ovitz, Patricia Broderick was flown every weekend by private jet to the production in Savannah, Georgia, in order to give unwelcome notes on Zwick’s script (mostly that Matthew, as Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw leading a regiment of Black soldiers, wasn’t getting enough screen time), while her son, the star of a film that would ultimately win three Oscars (including Best Supporting Actor for Denzel Washington ), “sat in opaque silence” during his mother’s tirades.

“Patsy was relentless in her criticism, and I fought her at every turn, doing my best to ignore her profanity and insults,” Zwick writes. “One of her choicer comments was to describe my writing as ‘limp as a penis.’” Highlighting what he calls “Matthew’s role in the theater of cruelty,” Zwick writes that his narrative provides “an unvarnished account of the shit he pulled.”

At one point, he writes, Broderick and his mother stormed out of a private screening and demanded to completely re-cut the nearly finished film.

Matthew Broderick in Glory, 1990

Collection Christophel / Alamy

“It was so traumatic for me,” Zwick tells me. “and it was so revealing of how the Hollywood power structure worked at that moment—Mike Ovitz calling Jeff Sagansky [the president of Tri-Star, which financed the movie], and this bigfooting that was happening. When I finally had that conversation with Ovitz [in which Zwick laughed off the young actor’s demand to re-edit the movie], I just felt that they’d picked on the wrong hippie.”

Patricia Broderick died in 2003 . “Matthew has no comment,” the actor’s longtime publicist, Simon Halls, emailed me, adding, “While recollections may vary about what happened all those years ago, I find it bewildering and sad that a director who has enjoyed such a lovely career would stoop to such nastiness to sell a few books.”

More than three decades later, Zwick claims to have let go of his anger and forgiven the actor, who long afterward, the director writes, apologized for his behavior.

“Matthew was in a difficult moment in his life,” Zwick tells me. “Things had happened to him that were hard [the untimely death of his actor-father James, and a fatal car accident in Ireland, in which he was seriously injured]. He’d also become a star [owing to the classic 1986 John Hughes comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ]. People don’t understand what it’s like when they put that kind of responsibility on the head of a 24-year-old kid. And I’m not sure that they want it. At any point in a movie star’s life, they’re surrounded by people who are whispering in their ears about what they should do and who they should be, and who they should work with—and to some degree, I understand.”

If Zwick sounds philosophical, maybe it’s because he’s now a 71-year-old cancer survivor with a four-decade-long marriage (to former actress and screenwriter Liberty Godshall) and more than 15 feature films and 200 hours of television to his credit as a writer, director, and producer—in some cases, all three. Among the movies he directed are 1994’s Legends of the Fall (starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins), 1996’s Courage Under Fire (Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan), 2003’s The Last Samurai (Tom Cruise), 2006’s Blood Diamond (Leonardo DiCaprio) and 2010’s Love and Other Drugs (Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal); as a producer he won the Best Picture Oscar for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love .

Zwick’s television credits–alongside his longtime writing and producing partner Marshall Herskovitz–-include the iconic late-’80s series about angst-filled baby boomers, Thirtysomething , which struck alarmingly close to the bone for this sixtysomething reporter.

“This is about passionate people, often reactive people, often very young people, in very intense situations, coming together in a business that has always been ungoverned,” he says about his book.

Speaking of which, Zwick’s close encounter with his Shakespeare in Love co-producer Harvey Weinstein —currently serving a 23-year prison sentence for multiple rapes—is one of the book’s dramatic flashpoints. Zwick spent several painstaking years developing the movie from scratch, persuading a reluctant Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay and signing Julia Roberts to star before she abruptly dropped out and the project fizzled (a rollicking chronicle of Hollywood insanity that was first published as a stand-alone chapter last year in Air Mail ).

Harvey Weinstein arrives at the Manhattan Criminal Court, on February 24, 2020 in New York City.

Angela Weiss/Getty

Zwick writes that once Weinstein acquired the rights and tried to cut him out of his producer credit—after hours of love-bombing him with fulsome praise—Zwick had his lawyer, the redoubtable Bert Fields, send Weinstein a demand letter. Here is his account of their subsequent phone conversation as Zwick’s father lay dying in a hospital room:

“You think you can sue me, you prick? You don’t know who you’re dealing with. I’m going to ruin you!”

“Hello, Harvey.”

“I’m going to make sure you never work again!”

“It’s midnight, Harvey. My father is sick. It’s not a good time.”

“Oh, you’re sensitive! I’ve hurt your feelings…”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll kill your whole family, you little fuck.”

“Nice talking to you, Harvey. See you in court.”

Weinstein ultimately avoided the lawsuit by reversing course and offering Zwick a tearful apology. “Like any bully, when you punched him in the nose, he backed away. I gotta say, until that moment I had never encountered anybody like that in my life,” says Zwick, who thinks of himself as “a nice suburban boy” from Chicago. “It revealed to me something about Hollywood, or even modern life: When somebody is unsocialized and desublimated, and aggressive and big and loud, that can get you a lot. And it did. It got him a lot–until, finally, there was just too much revealed.”

Unlike Weinstein, another problematic Hollywood figure—Woody Allen—played a pivotal role in Zwick’s early career, hiring him fresh out of Harvard to be his assistant on the Paris production of Allen’s 1975 comedy Love and Death .

Woody Allen on the set of the film 'Love And Death' in Europe, November 1974

Ernst Haas/Getty

“I’d hover as close to the camera as the scowling French crew would allow, pestering him with the kind of clueless, impertinent questions only an entitled twenty-one-year-old would dare ask,” Zwick writes. “That he always responded patiently and with generosity is a kindness for which I will always be grateful.”

Five decades after his filmmaking apprenticeship, I ask Zwick if he believes Allen’s blanket denials that he never in 1992 or at any other time sexually molested Dylan Farrow, the then-7-year-old adopted daughter he shared with former girlfriend Mia Farrow. (An investigation of Mia Farrow’s disturbing claims yielded zero criminal charges.)

“I do not consider myself a scholar of the facts there. I haven’t read voluminously about it,” Zwick answers. “But I don’t think it’s been proven to me enough that he’s the monster he’s been made out to be. On the other hand, I would have to acknowledge it all begins with some significant lack of judgment having to do with what has become the real relationship with Soon-Yi [Allen’s Korean-born wife of 26 years with whom he began having sex when he was 56 and she was 21; saved from the streets of Seoul, she grew up as the adopted daughter of Farrow and her then-husband André Previn]. But, nonetheless, already there was that shadow cast over all of it. And I think that didn’t help.”

Zwick’s memoir, not surprisingly, is rife with gimlet-eyed observations concerning the various egomaniacs, narcissists, and occasional psychopaths—a few of them world-famous—who have populated his professional life. Nor does he spare himself. In an especially memorable anecdote, he describes being bodily ejected from Woody Allen’s black-tie New Year’s Eve party by Tom Brokaw and (possibly, he can’t be sure) Bill Bradley after he drunkenly grabbed and screamed profanities at his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend who, as he’d discovered from reading her personal journal, had been sleeping with other men.

Yet his book is also full of admiration for such actors as Washington (whom he has directed in three movies), Morgan Freeman ( Glory ), Daniel Craig ( Defiance ) and Liev Shreiber ( Defiance and Pawn Sacrifice ), DiCaprio, Hathaway, Gyllenhaal, and especially Tom Cruise (whom he directed in one of the Jack Reacher movies as well as The Last Samurai ).

Cruise’s evangelical devotion to the cult of Scientology “was never a factor with me,” Zwick says. “Directors all talk to each other–there’s honor among thieves–and we talk about actors and studio heads and other directors. And I remember Cameron Crowe telling me that if you were to suggest to Tom to try a scene standing on his head, his first response is ‘yeah, I’ll try that,’ and if he doesn’t like it, he’ll tell you, and he’ll have ideas about the script and his character and the other characters, but never in a way that is anything but respectful. He is joyous about movies and joyous about his privilege. You’d be surprised at the number of people who aren’t.”

Zwick, a former longtime board member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, seems nonplussed by the recent flap over director Greta Gerwig’s lack of an Oscar nomination for Barbie .

“Let me do a quiz now, ok? Who won for best director last year? Who won for best director the year before?” he asks me.

“I have no idea.”

“Exactly. That’s my point. I’ve been on both sides of it. I was on the board of the Academy for many years. It is an organization dedicated to its own self-aggrandizement, as we all are. We take a period of time in December and January—which other people call the holidays and we presume to call it ‘award season’—and it’s meant to get people to go to movies. Now, if you create a controversy, does it make more people go to see movies or less people go to see movies? I find it a little bit absurd that we even presume to judge one piece of art against another piece of art and decide that one is a winner… It’s just not why we should be making movies.”

Zwick, who has several movie and television projects he hopes get produced, acknowledges his great good luck in having made Hollywood movies during the time before the dominance of streaming, TikTok, video games and other attention-sucking distractions, when audiences actually had to leave home to see his creations in theaters. He isn’t surprised that the annual Oscars telecast—once a touchstone of popular culture—has suffered from ever-declining viewership (a fate that might also befall this year’s March 11 show).

Notwithstanding the box-office successes of such outliers as Barbie , Oppenheimer , and Top Gun: Maverick , “I think there has been a fractionalizing of the audience in so many ways,” Zwick says. “There is much more niche viewing, and to try to find some picture that would be the consensus winner that would draw big numbers seems increasingly difficult—and that’s not even counting the numbers of people who are watching YouTube and doom-scrolling MSNBC.”

He adds: “The centrality of movies in the culture is diminished. They are no longer the central cultural artifact, when movies drove the music business to some degree, and drove a lot of things in the culture. They just don’t anymore. The game business—which is several times larger—puts the movie business to shame. It’s a reflection of where movies are in the cultural imagination.”

And yet, as Zwick’s book surely proves, movies can still provide some very entertaining stories.

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Matthew Broderick, the teen movie idol turned Broadway star now known as ‘Sarah Jessica Parker’s husband’

After cinema success in the 80s and 90s, the actor shifted to the stage and now has a lead tv role in ‘painkiller’ and a guest appearance in ‘only murders in the building’.

In Sex and the City , Sarah Jessica Parker’s main love interest was a man known as Mr. Big. In real life, her one and only love is actor Matthew Broderick, her husband of 26 years. It may surprise some that when they fell in love, Parker was an unfamiliar face, while he was already one of the most well-known actors of his generation. Matthew Broderick has played a wide range of roles, from summer blockbusters and indie films to teen movies, action, comedy and voice-over work (adult Simba in The Lion King ). He is also a highly acclaimed Broadway star who continues to work in film, recently co-starring in No Hard Feelings with Jennifer Lawrence. In August, he will guest star in Hulu’s third season of Only Murders in the Building. In Netflix’s Painkiller , a fresh take on the opioid crisis, Broderick plays Richard Sackler, the billionaire businessman and physician who headed the pharmaceutical company responsible for the largest public health emergency in recent U.S. history.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter , Broderick revealed that he had personal motives for taking the Painkiller role. “I had a mom who had cancer and was on those pills. She was in absolute agony, and they helped her a great deal. So I’ve seen both ends of it. I know how bad they are. And I know what a miracle [they can be].”

Even though his parents were actors, Broderick originally dreamed of playing professional football. A knee injury dashed his hopes and he found himself pursuing a different path. Everything changed when The New York Times praised his natural and spontaneous performance in one of his first acting roles.

That brief mention of Broderick’s portrayal of a gay teenager in Torch Song Trilogy , the 1981 stage production of Harvey Fierstein’s play, jumpstarted his acting career. “I had some agents telling me to be careful. I just thought it was a hilarious part and never worried about it,” he said . “And to be totally honest, I hadn’t gotten any other jobs, so it was a really great job to get. When someone would mention to me, ‘But it’s a gay character, blah blah blah,’ I was like, ‘Fuck you.’ That play was a huge deal when it opened. It was one of the most exciting times of my career.”

A few years later he portrayed his friend, playwright Neil Simon, in Brighton Beach Memoirs and became the youngest Tony Award winner at the age of 21. He says theater brought him great joy, but television also came calling. He was offered the role of Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties (1982-1989), but Broderick wasn’t interested in long-term commitments and declined the offer. Michael J. Fox embraced the role, which propelled his own career to new heights. Despite initial reluctance, Broderick accepted the offer to immerse himself in the world of Galaga (a fixed-shooter arcade video game) for two months to prepare for the lead role in the War Games (1983). The movie revolves around a tech-savvy teenager who unintentionally gains access to the U.S. defense system.

Broderick became so popular that he was the highest-paid cast member in Ladyhawke (1985), earning $700,000, more than lead actors Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer. Despite these impressive numbers, he hadn’t quite reached superstar status... until that fateful role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Pursued by the likes of Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp and Rob Lowe, the role propelled Broderick to stardom. It became a cult classic in teenage cinema, solidifying his image as the ultimate high school charmer, even though he was 25 by then.

The accident that changed everything

While filming Ferris Bueller , he fell for Jennifer Grey, who portrayed his impulsive younger sister in the movie. Just weeks before the highly anticipated premiere of Dirty Dancing , Grey’s defining role, the two were involved in a tragic accident on an Irish highway. Broderick, driving a rented BMW 316, swerved into the opposite lane and crashed head-on into Margaret Doherty and her daughter, Anna Gallagher, who were both killed instantly. Broderick spent four weeks in a Belfast hospital with a broken leg, two broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a concussion. Grey only suffered minor injuries. Broderick told authorities that he had no recollection of the accident and didn’t know why he swerved into the opposite lane. “I don’t even remember getting out of bed in the morning. The first thing I remember is waking up in the hospital with a very strange feeling in my leg,” he said. He was charged with reckless driving and fined a mere $175, which the family of the victims called “a travesty of justice.”

Broderick’s career was unaffected by the devastating accident. After the success of Ferris Buller’s Day Off , he didn’t shy away from taking acting risks. In 1988, he played the role of Alan, the partner of the protagonist in the film adaptation of Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy . Despite his boyish looks, he began to embrace adult roles. He played the commander of an all-Black volunteer regiment during the Civil War in Glory (1989), and achieved his biggest box office success as a scientist in Godzilla (1998). Although Godzilla fell short of the huge expectations, it was still a notable milestone in Broderick’s career. Another minor disappointment came with Inspector Gadget (1999), a role he won over Jim Carrey and Robin Williams. Critics were also lukewarm about The Cable Guy (1996), a black comedy starring Jim Carrey as a cable TV installer who terrorizes Broderick’s home. He ended the 1990s on a high note with critical acclaim for Election (1999), Alexander Payne’s adaptation of a novel by Tom Perrotta. A political satire set in a high school, the movie showcased the best of Broderick and Reese Witherspoon’s talents.

Matthew and Sarah Jessica becomes Sarah Jessica and Matthew

The 1990s brought Broderick something far more significant than fame and fortune — his life partner. While directing a play for a theater company associated with two of Sarah Jessica Parker’s siblings, he crossed paths with his future wife. She would frequently attend rehearsals, and the precise moment he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her is etched in his memory. “Oh, the first time I met her,” Broderick said. “I saw her walking down the street and thought, ‘That’s it.’” Broderick’s romances with Jennifer Grey and Helen Hunt were over, as were Parker’s brief fling with John F. Kennedy, Jr. and tumultuous seven-year relationship with Robert Downey, Jr.

In 1997, the actor’s sister officiated their civil ceremony held at a Lower East Side synagogue. To avoid arousing suspicion among the 100 guests, Sarah Jessica Parker donned a black dress for what was in fact a wedding celebration. Fast-forward to 2002, their first child, James Wilkie, was born. Then, in 2009, Loretta and Tabitha joined the family through surrogacy.

Following the wedding, Matthew Broderick saw a role reversal within the couple: as his career waned, Parker’s popularity soared to new heights. She had played supporting roles in hits such as Ed Wood (1994), The First Wives Club (1996) and Mars Attacks! (1996), but her film career hadn’t taken off like Broderick’s, so she hesitated before agreeing to a television series. After being persuaded by her agent and Broderick, she took on the role of Carrie Bradshaw in the iconic series, Sex and the City . The rest, as they say, is television history.

Popularity was never a concern for him, as Broderick’s true passion lay in the theater, and Broadway had always welcomed him with open curtains. In 2001, The Producers , a musical based on the book by Mel Brooks, shattered records and clinched 12 Tony Awards, making Broderick the highest-paid stage actor of the year. He and his stage partner Nathan Lane earned a staggering $100,000 per week, plus a percentage of the box office receipts. In 2022, Broderick and Parker performed together in Neil Simon’s play, Plaza Suite, 25 years after their first collaboration. In a city recovering from the pandemic, the play drew large audiences excited to see two beloved actors in action. Their affinity for New York City has played a crucial role in their enduring relationship. “We love living in a bustling city where we can simply step outside, take a leisurely walk down the street, and feel connected to our community,” said Parker. They have also taken great care to keep their personal life out of the spotlight, as much as possible.

Being a celebrity couple, their relationship has naturally faced intense scrutiny by the media. “As usual, days ahead of our anniversary... the National Enquirer is making its annual best effort to fabricate and undermine, this time a blissful 4 days with my husband in London,” said Parker’s social media posts in 2019.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by SJP (@sarahjessicaparker)

Tired of the rumors, she took to Instagram and accused the tabloid of spreading misinformation about her marriage. “Hey, National Enquirer... why not celebrate a marriage of 22 years and a relationship of 27 years? Because, despite your endless harassment and wasted ink, we are nearing three decades of love, commitment, respect, family and home. There’s your ‘scoop’ from a ‘reliable source.’” Parker’s clapback was enthusiastically supported by the couple’s fans.

When they celebrated 26 years of marriage in May, Parker simply shared a photo of a champagne cork and said, “Happy 26th anniversary, my husband. That sure was a nice celebration and a real nice bottle of champagne. And a gorgeous walk home. Oh, the miles we have strolled together. I love you.” As Carrie Bradshaw used to say at the end of every Sex and the City episode, “And just like that...”

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‘Top Gun’ Turns 35: Producer Jerry Bruckheimer on Convincing Tom Cruise to Play Maverick

By Brent Lang

Executive Editor

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Moviegoers had never seen anything quite like “ Top Gun ” when it jetted across screens in the summer of 1986.

The propulsive story of a hot shot group of pilots had dazzling aerial sequences that gave audiences a cockpit view of the action, as well as a star on the rise in Tom Cruise , fresh off his role in “Risky Business.” “Top Gun” would go on to make a then-massive $356.8 million, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year and propelling Cruise onto the A-list, where he has remained for decades. He reprises his role in this fall’s long-awaited follow-up, “ Top Gun: Maverick .”

To mark the film’s 35th anniversary this week, Paramount is re-releasing “Top Gun” in theaters. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer spoke with Variety about the hurdles of bringing “Top Gun” to the big screen and why Cruise was the only actor he considered to play Maverick.

“Top Gun” is still popular 35 years after it came out. Why does it endure? First of all, you have Tom Cruise whose career keeps getting bigger. That’s the magic of movies when you get a young actor like that in one of the first films of his career. Then you have the visual brilliance of Tony Scott. He was iconic filmmaker and his movies just hold up.

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There’s a lot of stuff online about all the actors who were considered for Maverick — Matthew Modine, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn, Matthew Broderick and Tom Hanks. Is that true? Did you think about casting them? It was always Tom. Once we finished the screenplay, he was the only actor we talked to.

Was it hard to convince him? It wasn’t easy. We wanted Tom after we saw “Risky Business” and he kind of hemmed and hawed. So we arranged for him to fly with the Blue Angels at the Naval Air Facility in El Centro, California. He drove up there on his motorcycle and he had just finished a movie with Ridley Scott, “Legend,” and his hair was long and in a ponytail. And they took one look at him and thought, we’re going to give this hippie a ride. They took him up on an F-14 and flipped him and did all kinds of stunts to turn him around and make sure he never got back in a cockpit. But it was just the opposite. He landed and he walked over to a phone booth and called me up and said, “Jerry. I’m making the movie. I love it.” He became an amazing aviator himself. He can fly just about any plane they can make. Was it difficult to get the Navy’s participation? We wanted to make it real. We had to put the actors in real planes with real aviators. We needed them to hang with them and see what it was like. Initially, the admiral of the base where we shot wasn’t a fan of this. He was worried something would go wrong and that would be a black mark on his career.

So Tom and I flew to D.C. and met with the secretary of the Navy, who at the time was John Lehman. He understood what Hollywood could do for the Navy and he gave us his home number and said, “if there’s anything or anyone that gets in your way, you just give me a call.” From that moment on the floodgates opened. But you still had to deal with the navy lawyers about the weight change if you put a camera on a wing or on the cockpit. It was a negotiation process the whole way through. On the new movie, the sequel we just shot, it was completely different because after “Top Gun” came out, the enlistment in the navy went up 500%. They understood that this is a great recruiting tool, so they were even more helpful and they embraced the filmmaking process with us.

Was Paramount enthusiastic about the film when you pitched it? Not at first. There was a TV show about the Air Force that had just come out and unfortunately, it failed, so they figured that aviation is not something that people want to see. But management changed and Ned Tanen came in as motion picture chief. We pitched him “Top Gun” and he loved it and said, “go make it.” That doesn’t happen today. There are greenlight committees and all kinds of hurdles to overcome.

Tony Scott died in 2012. What was he like as a collaborator? He was an adventurer. He was a daredevil. We went on a rafting trip in Colorado right before this. One night we camped next to a sheer rock wall and we look up and he’s climbing it with his bare hands. You looked at “The Hunger,” the movie he made prior to “Top Gun” and you saw how beautifully it was photographed. On “Top Gun,” he shot all this amazing footage that isn’t even in the movie. He shot some sunsets with the planes against it. Just gorgeous stuff.

Did you have a sense before “Top Gun” opened that it was going to be a smash hit? You never know. We had a preview in Houston. The audience was muted and it felt like we had a flop on our hands. When the cards came back, they rated the film with a high score and we couldn’t figure out what happened. How come the audience wasn’t laughing and showing they were enjoying this movie? What we didn’t realize was that this was two days after the Challenger shuttle disaster, and since we were in Houston, a lot of people had friends and relatives involved in that. Long after the movie came out, some critics, including Quentin Tarantino , argued that the film was homoerotic. Do you see that? Not at all. These pilots, when you look at them, they’re really handsome guys. There are reasons they have nicknames like Hollywood and Maverick. It’s something that’s real and that Tony captured. These guys are confident and cool, with amazing hand-eye coordination, otherwise they wouldn’t be top gun pilots. Tony got the flavor of them and their love of life. That’s what Tom is like. Tom is a hard charging, smart, really dedicated actor.

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Every Actor Who Almost Played Ferris Bueller Before Matthew Broderick

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8 Iconic Godzilla Movies Roar Onto a New Streaming Platform in June

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Ferris Bueller was one of the greatest film icons to come out of the 1980s. John Hughes concocted the memorable character as the titular role in the 1986 classic  Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Ferris Bueller is Matthew Broderick's most recognized role, outside of voicing Simba in Disney's  The Lion King . However, Broderick was only one of the countless actors who almost played the Sausage King of Chicago.

While Broderick was a perfect fit for Ferris due to his entertaining humor and youthful charisma, fans can't help but wonder how Hughes' masterpiece would have turned out if a different actor, like Johnny Depp , had gotten the role.

RELATED:  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off's Darkest Theory Adds a Fight Club Twist

Johnny Depp Was Lesser-Known At The Time

Allegedly, Johnny Depp was Hughes' first choice to play Ferris. The   Pirates of the Caribbean   actor and frequent Tim Burton collaborator had not yet starred as titular characters, except for a supporting role in Wes Craven's 1984 slasher film  A  Nightmare on Elm Street.  Unfortunately, Depp was unable to join the cast of  Ferris Bueller's Day Off  due to scheduling conflicts. It must have been disappointing for him since the film became the highest-grossing film of 1986.

Anthony Michael Hall Was A Frequent Hughes Collaborator

Anthony Michael Hall was like Martin Scorsese's Robert De Niro but in Hughes' teenage brat pack films. Hall collaborated with Hughes several times for  Sixteen Candles, Weird Science  and  The Breakfast Club.  The actor turned down the role to avoid being type-casted but shared his most missed out on role "would be Ferris" in a 2021 interview with  Insider .  Although, it's hard to imagine Brian as a school-skipping, party animal like Ferris.

Michael J. Fox Lost Many Jobs To Matthew Broderick

Michael J. Fox was another huge teen icon during the '80s for his role as Marty McFly in the  Back to the Future  film trilogy. Considering how busy Fox's schedule was with  Back to the Future,  it would have been pretty impossible to fit in another film. Ironically, the actor revealed he was "always losing jobs to Matthew Broderick" and that they originally wanted Broderick for Fox's role in  Family Ties.  The pattern continued for  Ferris Bueller's Day Off. 

RELATED:  Back to the Future’s Real-Life Drama Explains One Character's Sequel Absences

Eric Stoltz Later Starred In Hughes' Some Kind Of Wonderful

Eric Stoltz is widely recognized for being the initial choice for Marty McFly in the  Back to the Future  film series. Although, Michael J. Fox later replaced the actor after merely six weeks of production . Although Stoltz didn't make it past the audition phase for  Ferris Bueller,  he later appeared as the lead role, Keith Nelson, in Hughes' 1987 romantic drama film  Some Kind of Wonderful. Back to the Future  star Lea Thompson also joined the cast.

John Cusack Didn't Make It Big Until Say Anything

John Cusack was another actor reportedly in the running for Ferris. Cusack had previously appeared in a supporting role in Hughes' 1984 film  Sixteen Candles,  so it only made sense for him to star in another one of the director's masterpieces. The actor didn't receive his breakthrough role until he played Lloyd Dobler in the classic 1989 teen rom-com  Say Anything..., which made everyone wish someone would be outside their window with a boombox.

Jim Carrey May Have Been Too Outlandish To Play Ferris Bueller

It's hard to imagine a world where Jim Carrey would be a relatively unheard-of name. However, that was exactly the case when he was in the running to play Ferris . The eccentric actor didn't strike gold until 1994 when both  Ace Ventura  and  Dumb and Dumber  were released. He also lost roles to actors like Johnny Depp for Edward Scissorhands and Captain Jack Sparrow. Arguably, Carrey may have been too quirky for the role of Ferris.

RELATED: Filming The Grinch Was Torture for Jim Carrey – Literally

Robert Downey Jr. Starred As Weird Science Bully

Many people recognize Robert Downey Jr. for his role as Tony Stark /Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, he was actually an early member of the popular teenage brat pack during the 1980s. RDJ appeared in a supporting role for Hughes'  Weird Science  the year before  Ferris Bueller  released. Downey decided to star as Derek Lutz opposite Rodney Dangerfield in  Back to School  instead of another Hughes film.

Tom Cruise's Top Gun Released A Month Before Ferris Bueller

At the time of the star search for Ferris Bueller, Tom Cruise hadn't become an acclaimed action star yet, considering  Top Gun  didn't release until a month before  Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  If Tom Cruise had gotten the role of Ferris, a different actor would have starred as Maverick. The other actors in the running included Patrick Swayze and even Michael J. Fox again. Luckily, everything fell into place, and most people can't imagine anyone else but Cruise for Maverick or anyone else but Broderick for Ferris Bueller.

KEEP READING:  Top Gun: Maverick Release Date, Trailer, Plot & News to Know

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Painkiller (2023)

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25 Years Later, Alexander Payne’s Election Remains as Relevant as Ever

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Bright Wall/Dark Room November 2016: "This Mass of Conflicting Impulses: A Former Teen Narcissist Watches 'Margaret'" by Lauren Wilford

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David Lynch: "Sammy. I never talk about themes."

I sure do miss David Lynch movies. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when he appeared as Jack Dall, the CBS late-night talk show producer and relative of his FBI man Gordon Cole, on a couple episodes of "Louie," and again when I read this piece by Roger Ebert about movies and meanings, featuring the fantastic interview clip (from the Japanese DVD of "Mulholland Dr."), below. Lynch hasn't made a movie since his deeply disturbing internal epic "INLAND EMPIRE" in 2006. Lynch works in multiple media, and in 2011 released his "debut solo album" with the delightful title of "Crazy Clown Time," the title song for which accompanied by a hellish video that would not have been out of place in "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" (the Road House after-party, perhaps), "Lost Highway" or any number of other Lynchian nightmares.

Far Flungers

The tale of two cetis.

We know that "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982) is the best of all of the "Star Trek" movies. I am not stating anything new here. The rest of the series of films struggled to repeat the mastery of this film, and the reboot has also fallen short, thus far. I did, however, watch Star Trek 2 recently to see if the overlooked "Star Trek: First Contact" was able to take the helm as the Best of the Treks. In the process, however, I realized that Star Trek 2 is a much better movie than I remembered. I invite everyone to watch this movie again to appreciate how great it really is. This is a great movie. It is exciting. It is complex. It is emotional and philosophical. It is one of the great adventure movies.

#120 June 20, 2012

Marie writes: As some of you may know, it was Roger's 70th birthday on June 18 and while I wasn't able to give the Grand Poobah what I suspect he'd enjoy most...

Siskel & Ebert fight over a toy train (1988)

#85 October 19, 2011

Lesson for the day: How to have fun while wasting time... Marie writes: welcome to DRAW A STICK MAN, a delightful Flash-based site prompting viewers to draw a simple stick figure which then comes to life!  Ie: the program animates it. You're given instructions about what to draw and when, which your dude uses to interact with objects onscreen. Thanks go to club member Sandy Kahn who heard about it from her pal Lauren, in Portland Oregon.Note: here's a screen-cap of what I drew; I've named him Pumpkin Head.

#79 September 7, 2011

Marie writes: I've always found the ocean more interesting than space and for invariably containing more delights and surprises. Case in point, discovering the existence of an extraordinary underwater museum...

#74 August 3, 2011

Marie writes: I love illustrators best in all the world. There's something so alive about the scratch and flow of pen & ink, the original medium of cheeky and subversive wit. And so when club member Sandy Kahn submitted links for famed British illustrator Ronald Searle and in the hopes others might find him interesting too, needless to say, I was quick to pounce; for before Ralph Steadman there was Ronald Searle... "The two people who have probably had the greatest influence onmy life are Lewis Carroll and Ronald Searle."-- John LennonVisit Kingly Books' Ronald Searle Gallery to view a sordid collection of wicked covers and view sample pages therein. (click to enlarge image.) And for yet more covers, visit Ronald Searle: From Prisoner of War to Prolific Illustrator at Abe Books.

Ebert's live-tweet archive: 2010 Academy Awards

Live-tweeted from Los Angeles:

John Hughes: In Memory

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‘it happened in hollywood’ podcast: why tom cruise photoshopped himself into a picture of david fincher and cameron crowe.

'The Last Samurai' director Ed Zwick shares the story on the season 5 premiere.

By Seth Abramovitch

Seth Abramovitch

Senior Writer

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Filmmaker Ed Zwick — whose new memoir Hits, Flops and Other Illusions has just come out — joined The Hollywood Reporter ‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast for the show’s season five premiere.

Zwick has directed some of Hollywood’s biggest stars in films like 1989’s Glory (starring Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick), 1994’s Legends of the Fall (with Brad Pitt) and 2006’s Blood Diamond (with Leonardo DiCaprio).

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“We’d been in Japan for a couple of weeks — we shot at a beautiful monastery for about two weeks,” Zwick recalls. “Then, we came back to Warner Brothers, and we built this whole stage. And you know, word gets around when the interesting things are happening. People were going to look at this old Hollywood recreation of the [19th century Tokyo] street.

“And at one point, I happen to turn around. And it’s almost like a joke — you know, there’s Cameron Crowe. There is Steven Spielberg. There’s David Fincher. And I’m sitting in my [director] chair, and they’re like, all behind me. It’s like, ‘Oh — hey. I didn’t want to feel too self-conscious about this. But whoa ,” he continues.

The men “had all come to see Tom, for various reasons, because Cameron had made a couple of movies with him. I think Fincher was going to and then didn’t, and Spielberg later did — he made War of the Worlds with him [in 2005],” says Zwick.

“The great part of the story is that the unit photographer saw us all together and said, ‘Hey, can I just take your picture?’ So there’s a picture of all of us — except Tom had been called away to do something. And then he heard about the picture later, and he saw it. And he said, ‘I want to be in that picture!’ So we shot Tom, and then photoshopped him into the picture.”

Listen to that anecdote and many others on the latest episode of It Happened in Hollywood below — and subscribe today for weekly tales from the Hollywood trenches.

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Undie Film Movement

Tom Cruise slid into stardom Aug. 5, 1983, thanks to a brief encounter in 'Risky Business'

Senior Writer

At face value, Risky Business is a comedy about a college-bound prepster who turns his parents’ house into a brothel and along the way gets involved with a sweet, no-nonsense hooker. But as far as its place in movie history is concerned, it’s a one-minute short of Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear.

Before the film’s release Aug. 5, 1983, Cruise was merely an up-and-coming 21-year-old actor who had delivered standout supporting performances in films like Taps (1981) and The Outsiders (1983). But it was the role of boyishly ingenuous Joel Goodsen in Business that gave the star a natural showcase for his white-toothed cockiness; by the time he slid across the screen dancing to Bob Seger’s ”Old Time Rock & Roll” wearing an oxford shirt, tube socks, and tightie-whities, Cruise had arrived. As Business writer-director Paul Brickman puts it, ”He was off and running.”

In hindsight, the actor’s self-assurance and leading-man quality were always evident. ”Tom was really thinking on his feet,” recalls Brickman of Cruise’s audition. ”He stopped himself in the middle of the reading and said, ‘You know what? I can do that better.’ And he started again in a different direction. I thought, There’s a guy that’s confident. That impressed me.”

It impressed moviegoers as well. Business grossed $63.5 million and earned Cruise It Boy status. The Washington Post said he possessed ”the sulky appeal of Matt Dillon [and] the nice-boy nice of Matthew Broderick.” In weeks he’d landed features in PEOPLE and Interview . But his instant popularity was perhaps best measured by the sales of the Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses he sported in the film: They vaulted from 18,000 pairs in 1981 to 330,000 in 1983.

Sixteen years later, Cruise is again making headlines for cavorting while undressed, in Eyes Wide Shut. Meanwhile, Brickman, burned by Paramount’s insistence that he reshoot Business ‘ ending (originally, Joel was rejected by Princeton), took an extended leave from moviemaking, returning only to direct 1990’s Jessica Lange drama Men Don’t Leave. As for Seger’s rollicking tune, it’s become the second-most-popular jukebox request behind Patsy Cline’s ”Crazy,” according to Seger, who has a plaque from the Recording Industry Association of America to prove it. Says the singer, ”Now, at every gym class for 4-year-old girls, they play ‘Old Time Rock & Roll.”’

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"Hits, Flops and Other Illusions": Director Ed Zwick on a life in Hollywood

By Luke Burbank

March 3, 2024 / 9:36 AM EST / CBS News

If you were making a movie about Ed Zwick, the Oscar-winning producer and director of various huge films, Act 1 would definitely feature the American Film Institute in Los Angeles as a backdrop. That is where, back in the 1970s, a twenty-something Zwick realized he was out of his depth and had to quickly start learning from his peers.

"It's very hands on; it's very deep-end-of-the pool-right-away," he said. "And your other students, or fellows as we are called here, will in fact become your own teachers."

That's something he hasn't stopped doing over his 40-plus-year career. During that time he's directed some of Hollywood's brightest: Denzel Washington ("Glory," "Courage Under Fire," "The Siege"), Tom Cruise ("The Last Samurai"), Brad Pitt ("Legends of the Fall"), Leonardo DiCaprio ("Blood Diamond"), Daniel Craig ("Defiance"), and almost Julia Roberts, who'd agreed to star in "Shakespeare In Love" before quitting without a word, shutting down the film for years.

It's all recounted in Zwick's new book, "Hits, Flops and Other Illusions" (Gallery Books) – the good, the bad and the ugly of working in Hollywood.

"It's a crucible," Zwick said of filmmaking. "And in a crucible, among artists things fulminate. And there's actually something beautiful about that and often something very good comes of that. But, I wanted to tell it as it was."

Zwick and his producing partner, Marshall Herskovitz, have been in that crucible since the two met as students at AFI, and formed what they call the longest partnership in Hollywood history.

"We love to make epic films, big films," said Herskovitz. "But we also believe that people can achieve the epic in normal life."

Which is what they tried to achieve with their first TV series, "thirtysomething." They didn't think it would last one season, but it went on for four, and won 13 Emmys.

Zwick said, "We were really interested in ambivalence, and the ambivalence of being in a marriage, the ambivalence of being in your job, and you wanna just screw around but you have to work hard. All the contradictions of life. That upset people a lot. People often wanted to have just a very straight-up-and-down depiction of life. But that's not what life is."

While making "thirtysomething," Zwick got his hands on a script about a group of Black soldiers from Massachusetts during the Civil War. "Glory" was a sensation.

But battles on screen were matched by battles behind the scenes with, of all people, Matthew Broderick's mother, whom Zwick says fought for the director to enlarge the role her son was playing, that of the white leader of the African American regiment. It was an early lesson for Zwick in when to compromise, and when to hold your ground.

When asked about navigating the world as a creative and learning when to fight for something and when to realize it's not worth it, Zwick replied, "I don't know if this is fit for CBS television, but there's a poem by e.e. cummings. And the last line of the poem is: There is some s**t I will not eat. But that also suggests that there's a world of s**t that he will eat. And having to make that decision is really crucial."

Herskovitz said of Zwick's films, "People cry in those movies. They are affected by the movie. They remember the movie. But in order to give a profound experience, you have to put a lot of things together. And I think that's what Ed does so brilliantly. You have to have a great story, you have to have an amazing sense of casting. Then, you have to know how to deal with these very special people who are gonna go out there and be the face of this movie. And I think in the book he very eloquently talks about the different ways you have to handle different people."

If the film about Ed Zwick has a villain, it might be Harvey Weinstein, who ended up buying the "Shakespeare in Love" script that Zwick had so lovingly developed, then kept him from getting to the microphone on the Oscar stage when it won best picture.

Watch: Ed Zwick barely gets a word in on the Oscar stage: 

"Only in Hollywood can you end up feeling bad about something you're supposed to feel really, really good about," Zwick said. "But it turned out to be actually very important for me later. It wasn't about fairness, necessarily. It was about hard work and knowing what you've done, and then moving on, that you're gonna get knocked down. There is a cruelty in this business that you have to accept in terms of the vagaries of what happens. And what do you do then? Do you get up? And can you keep going?"

      READ AN EXCERPT:  "Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions" by Ed Zwick The award-winning director-producer recounts four tempestuous decades in Hollywood, which included a fake TV newscast in which he blew up Charleston, S.C.

        For more info:

• "Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood"  by Ed Zwick (Gallery Books), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via  Amazon ,  Barnes & Noble  and  Bookshop.org

      Story produced by Anthony Laudato. Editor: Remington Korper.

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Ed Zwick On Fighting The Urge To Push Harvey Weinstein Off Oscar Stage, Battling Matthew Broderick’s Meddling Mom On ‘Glory’ & Other Memoir Memories: Q&A

The closest comp to Ed Zwick ‘s new memoir Hits, Flops And Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood is William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade , where he posited a definitive piece of advice on the elusive formula for hit making: “Nobody knows anything.” Although he didn’t create the “if you want to send a message, try Western Union” line that has many authors, Zwick spent a career trying to defy that adage, in directing, writing and producing a long list of great and meaningful films and TV series topped by the Oscar winning Shakespeare in Love and Traffic , to Glory, Blood Diamond, About Last Night, Defiance, The Last Samurai, The Siege, thirtysomething, My So Called Life and many others.

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Comparing his book to Goldman sets a high bar. Like the scripter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did, Zwick might fawn over great actors like Denzel Washington , Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise and others who had career highlight moments in his films, but he also doesn’t spare the rod on those who got in his way, or behaved badly in the high stress moments that come with moviemaking. That includes himself. He discusses the challenge of the care and feeding of big stars, and how complicated it can be like when he led Brad Pitt to a strong performances in Legends of the Fall, but not without clashing with a young future Oscar winner trying to harness his craft and prove he was much more than a pretty face. Zwick’s willingness to bare struggles like that makes his book a must read, whether one is an aspiring filmmaker looking to avoid pitfalls or how to handle situations, or movie fans who will revel in tasty backstories of films we all know. Here, he dishes some of the war stories.

DEADLINE: Your approach to your memoir is all in the title, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions . When you’re honest about the people involved in all the twists and turns that go into making as many great films and TV series as you have done, it’s not surprising you end up with a cracking good read. I have to start with Shakespeare in Love . Instead of the well-worn tale of how the film upset Saving Private Ryan to win Best Picture, you write about developing it to direct, and how you once had Julia Roberts and Daniel Day-Lewis as stars, and how that fell apart because she was a young superstar in love for the first time and her professional judgment was upended by … youth. When you directed another movie, Universal let Harvey Weinstein have the property, and he summarily cut you out. When you threaten to sue, he says, “I’ll kill your whole family, you little f*ck.” Later, he cries in apology to you. And then what happens?

ED ZWICK : Well, I find myself on the stage at the Oscars, anticipating some moment of gratitude, or even relief or some ironic statement about coming to this moment. And of course, what he does is bigfoot all of us, give me that hip check and steps forward. And what I do say in the book is that I was faced with an interesting moral choice. I could either commit an act of violence before a viewing an audience of a hundred million people or choose false modesty. I made the wrong choice.

DEADLINE: You wanted to shove him off the stage and into the orchestra pit. We know now that an act of violence at the Oscars gets you banished from the Academy for 10 years. Would it have been worth it?

ZWICK : So maybe I made the right choice. We pay such importance to those moments, in the moment, but these fade so quickly. What you’re left with is something that my friend David Friendly’s father, Fred Friendly, who was Edward R Murrow’s producer, used to say: Who will know? I’ll know. I feel some comfort in the fact that I could write a book, which is, as somebody once said, an opportunity to taste the same meal twice. And I’ve been able to really recall a lot of the pleasures along with the indignities.

DEADLINE: Like how you write that Harvey positioned it so your company logo appears on an image of someone stepping in sh*t?

ZWICK : Yep. The amazing thing is I was treated to the monstrosity that is Harvey, early on. Obviously he’s gotten his due in trials and in prison as well, where he ought to be. But I maintained he should have been put there long before, because his aggression and his unbelievable…the depredations that he brought upon writers and directors and everyone else that he encountered was so horrible, even back then. So yes, that’s one of the insignificant ones among his bill of particulars, I think.

DEADLINE: Your partner Marshall Herskovitz helped the PGA install a rule that you couldn’t just call yourself a producer and take a Best Picture trophy, you had to be vetted. How satisfying was that?

ZWICK : I had never looked at my work before I started to write this book, I wasn’t the kind of person that goes back, and has long retrospective thoughts. And when I did, it wasn’t the work itself, the things that worked, the things that didn’t work. What was so available to me were the relationships and these unbelievable intimacies and dust ups and love affairs and long conversations with all these wonderful people. And that’s what was available and that’s what I found, and that’s why I wrote the book. And it included some of these moments that are a little hard to swallow, but the lesson that I’m left with about a career is, it’s not a question of if you’re going to get knocked down. But rather, when, and what you do when you are knocked down, and how long does it take you to stand up? Look at any list of a director’s career over time, and it’s full of these peaks and valleys. I was blessed to have several people available to me to give a longer view when I was first starting out, these wonderful giants of the business who just took an interest and made themselves available to me. Paul Mazursky and Sydney Pollack and John Frankenheimer and these amazing guys who were generous. And so I was a little bit prepared for what awaited me.

DEADLINE: Also, when you contemplated pushing Weinstein off the stage into the orchestra pit, you didn’t know that while everyone else had been taking cuts, Harvey helped himself in to a first dollar gross position, did you?

ZWICK : Well, even long before that, when he tried to cut me out of everything, I hired Burt Fields, a lawyer I’d met in another circumstance once before, when he was on the other side. And he immediately created a circumstance where Harvey was going to have to be deposed, and that’s when he folded. That’s how you treat a bully. You punch him in the nose right away or else you pay the price. The truth is, it wasn’t until many years later when we did an accounting, that we discovered that he had given himself first dollar gross. And I’m not sure that he was ever held to account for that because he sold the company to Disney and then they sold it to somebody else. I’ve lost track of all of those kind of things. It’s just not my lane.

DEADLINE: Enough of your Shakespearean torture. You have injected so many sharp observations in this book. I want to reflect on one, after you made Blood Diamond with Leo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou. Warner Bros chief Alan Horn said he’d hang the poster in his office proudly, but he would never again make a movie like that. And he told you it cost $100 million to make $40 million in profit. He said, it’s more profitable to lose $75 million on one release and make $350 million on the next. I didn’t understand the math, but I got a 32 on my Trigonometry Regents.

ZWICK : Well, let me help. Maybe I could have explained it better. What Alan said to me, in depth was every slot has a potential value of X. In other words, they’re only given one Christmas slot or two, or one fall slot, competitive with everyone else. Therefore, the potential of that slot is to make several hundred million dollars with a big blockbuster. If they then only make 40, it doesn’t move the needle of the stock price. So they would rather be in that game of multiples where they literally will lose a hundred on one, and then on the other one, they’ll have the potential of a much higher multiple.

DEADLINE: Explain how that math relates to today. Streamers provide more places to shop a script like Blood Diamond , but a politically charged film is always going to be far less a priority than a good high concept premise.

ZWICK : Well, it’s implicit in your question, Mike, that grownup movies are not being made, which is to say grownup having to do with a certain amount of either political content or complexity. They’re not being made in the same numbers. They’re being made occasionally, but they seem to exist as tithes. We’ll do one movie like that amidst a portfolio of something very, very different, but also those movies are not being made in the same kind of scale as I had opportunity to make.

If I think about The Last Samurai , or The Siege , or Courage Under Fire , these are movies where the scale is also part of your palette. Those movies are not being made either. There are wonderful movies being made about interesting complex themes. They’re made independently. Some of them are being made for the streamers, but they don’t seem to have the same, what’s the word? They don’t seem to have the same traction in the culture, given the same kind of marketing support you need in that space to actually dig in. But there’s another reason for that. The movies themselves have been somewhat diminished in the cultural landscape, competing with games and YouTube and all of the other things that are now vying for the attention of entertainment.

(L-R) Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou in ‘Blood Diamond’

Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection

DEADLINE: About Blood Diamond , you wrote something that is gutting but true. You talk about Africa and the Civil War in Sierra Leone, and you write that historically when anything of value has been found in Africa, locals die in misery. Sons become child soldiers, and daughters sex slaves, when ivory, rubber, oil, gold and diamonds are found. The diamond maker De Beers bitched about your movie and wanted disclaimers about violent exploitation practices depicted in Blood Diamond , which Alan Horn refused to grant. You’ve made a bunch of movies that told compelling stories but also spotlighted injustice. What impact do these movies actually have on changing abhorrent things in the world?

ZWICK : You never can know. We do what we can with what we have. What I’d like to believe is that a paradigm shift takes place over time, and it only comes as a result of adding your voice to what becomes a rising chorus that eventually reaches a tipping point. I can point to certain examples. I can say that same-sex marriage obviously would not have happened in the United States had it not been given that set of images in the culture on television, in movies that had found its way into the living rooms of America. I know that the creation of the concept of blood diamonds and the Kimberley process has had an affect on people being willing to ask about the pedigree of their diamonds when they buy them. It certainly has not brought down the De Beers Corporation. I’d like to think that it’s brought about certain reforms in the way that they deal with certain Third World countries. But unfortunately, I see the same thing happening now in the Congo with cobalt and all the precious minerals that go into our cell phones and into our computers. So I’m afraid that that resource curse that I’m describing still exists.

DEADLINE: Alejandro González  Iñárritu said he did not care for superhero movies, even though he won an Oscar making a satire of one. He said the closest thing people who fantasize about superheroes saving the world have in the real world is their governments. And they are often corrupt. Glory , and several other of your films put forth admirable heroic characters, without superpowers. How do you feel about this?

ZWICK : Hero is a very interesting word because we know that the heroes in our culture are unsung, and whether they’re doctors or lawyers or policemen, they exist in an unheralded way, but I do believe that there are heroes. They just tend to be more complex. I know that when we wrote Defiance that these were people who did remarkable things, and yet they themselves were flawed. I know that when we talked about Robert Gould Shaw in Glory , that this is a young callow man who was not necessarily prepared for the things that he did. In Pawn Sacrifice , was Bobby Fischer a hero holding up the flag of the United States even though he was batshit crazy? I guess I’m more interested in the reality of what that word means than I am in the blown-out people wearing odd leotards and things.

(L-R) Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington in ‘Glory’

TriStar Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection

DEADLINE: Shaw was played by Matthew Broderick in Glory , and you write in great detail about the good and bad in that memorable film. The good included the performances by Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher in his very first film role, Morgan Freeman and Jihmi Kennedy. Explain what that was like to observe and how, when magic happens in front of you, what do you do as a young director who’s trying to put your stamp on things?

ZWICK : That’s a really good question because as a young director, your temptation is to overdetermine things. Control is something that somehow seems very important in that authority role. And then you encounter something that is so magnificent, so beyond your ability or understanding. You’re confronted with this moment, and it’s a teachable moment where you grow and you suddenly say, in giving up some control, in humbling yourself what you can get back is a different order of magnitude. And that’s what happened, because I saw these guys who were bringing not just their A game, but the representation that they felt for their history and their relatives. And their obligation to signify something there that I…was able to get something not for that movie, but for an entire career. There are times when the best thing you can do is fuck all nothing, to step back and allow something to happen. There’ll be plenty of time for you to impose yourself on a process, and you’re going to get the blame or the credit anyway. And so that was an amazing moment in my life.

DEADLINE: Denzel Washington’s single tear moment, face rimmed with rage and pride and humiliation as he is being whipped…it is one of the great moments in cinema and small wonder he won an Oscar for that portrayal. How did you help get that to happen? Do you motivate him? Do you leave him alone? Do you shoot it over and over again? And where are you after an onscreen scene like that?

ZWICK : I don’t think there’s ever been a single foot of film that I’ve shot with Denzel Washington that wasn’t usable. He is never somebody you say, oh God, how am I going to get this performance? The performance is there, and it’s always interesting and the more you get to know each other, it becomes even more unspoken. Where he knows somehow what I intended, because we know each other and done research together, or we’ve just been in each other’s presence long enough. But that particular moment was so full of feeling. We were just miles away from the caves where they had kept slaves in chains in Savannah Harbor. There were ghosts everywhere, and all of us were feeling it. And here you see a man in chains walked out, a black man to be whipped by a white man.

So it didn’t take a genius to know that this was going to be a special moment on film. Did I do the things that a director does? Did I arrange for the shot to be done in such a way as to arrive at that closeup at the moment that I felt right? Yes. Did I manipulate things to a certain degree, asking John Flynn to maybe take some of the control away from Denzel because he expected it to be this many whips, and it became more so that he was having an experience that was real as opposed to a fake? But he’s incapable of a fake experience. And the first time we shot that, it was great, but I felt there was the possibility of more. And the magnificence of Denzel is not just what he did, but that as he felt it happening, he knew what was being done.

He was smart enough as a director too, to see that this was some manipulation, some exploitation of him in this moment for the sake of a thing that he also wanted to accomplish. And he’s capable of somehow keeping in mind those two contradictory feelings, some legitimate pain from the whip and some awareness of the performance moment, the camera, the rage that he feels based on what he has learned over time in his own life, the humiliation of this moment of it happening in front of all these other people. All of those things come together. And what does he do? He gives over completely to the moment. And what happens, happens. And that’s a remarkable description of an actor in a moment that is unique, and for which he was utterly prepared and present.

DEADLINE: From what I’ve heard about Denzel, you say cut and he goes back to his trailer as though it was just another day on the job. And then you look at the dailies, and what are you left feeling at that moment?

ZWICK : There are certain moments like that, and I’ve had a few of them. For me, when you see something in dailies…and back then, you waited for Stevie Rosenblum has been my editor since film school, and he sits next to me, and we just look at each other. And whether you say it or you just feel it, you say, oh fuck, I have a movie.

DEADLINE: What other times have you felt that?

ZWICK : I remember up in those mountains with Leonardo and Djimon at that moment when he hands that stone to him at the end. And there’s another Denzel moment, when he goes and tells the kid’s parents that he’s been responsible for the kid’s death in Courage Under Fire . Oh, there’s Lev Schreiber beginning to be Boris Spassky and doing an entire scene in Russian where the other Russian actors are convinced that he’s Russian. And seeing him play chess and tell us the entire story silently as if I’m making a silent movie with John Barrymore. There have been a lot of those moments when you realize you’re in the presence of something truly, truly fine and truly genius. I could go on and on, and that’s actually one of the reasons I wrote the book because along with all these appalling moments, there are these moments that absolutely compensate for it.

DEADLINE: In an example of the latter, Matthew Broderick made you feel insecure in the way he tried to undermine you, through orders issued by his agent Mike Ovitz. First you learn that behind your back, he tried to get Bo Goldman to rewrite your script. You find out when Goldman calls to tell you, and he gracefully turns it down. Then they insist that Broderick’s playwright mother Patsy, who compared the writing of your script to “a limp penis,” fly to set each week at the production’s expense, to script doctor. You knew her because one of your first TV jobs was on the series Family , which starred Matthew’s dad, James Broderick. What the hell happened there, and what did you learn?

ZWICK : I try to write fairly about Matthew at that moment. He was 24. He had gone through a very difficult time with a car accident not long before. As often happens to young actors, they’re surrounded by people who whisper, and whether that’s agents, managers, hair and makeup, or trainers, they are susceptible. I’m sure that they were saying to Matthew, what are you doing with this guy? I was not much older than him, and what had I done? I’d done a movie about kids in Chicago and sex in About Last Night . I’d done a talky television show about whiny 30 year olds. You should be working with Sydney Pollack or whoever is hot at the moment. I think he was anxious, and I think his mother and others decided to step up for him and protect him.

The only thing for which I blame him, but not a lot, is that he was passive and he allowed that to happen. He didn’t do anything that was malfeasant. He was malfeasant. And that’s often the way of movie stars. They let other people do their dirty work for them. And in this case, I didn’t want to damn him because the work he does in the movie is brilliant. But I was determined when I wrote this book that I was going to be authentic, that I was going to tell the truths that are really beautiful about people that I respect and have come to love and to also show a little bit of dirty laundry.

DEADLINE: His agent, Mike Ovitz, was a fearsome figure back then. And when he tells you, “Matthew saw the film, and he wants to do his own cut.” What are you feeling inside when you say no, and what it might cost you in your career?

ZWICK : When you’re that deep into a movie? The stakes feel so personal. I had shown that movie to people by then, and I’d seen how it played. I knew what I had, and in some way probably felt that my career depended much more on that movie and its perception than it did on anything that Mike Ovitz could ever do to me. Maybe that’s a strategic calculation. And the truth was that after that conversation, Mike Ovitz went back about his life and did things in business with me for many years thereafter. It was just a day’s business for him, protecting a client. For me, it was my entire life. So it was no choice.

DEADLINE: If you’re going to fail, let it be on your terms?

ZWICK : Exactly. It may be shit, but it’s my shit.

DEADLINE: You developed Traffic with Steve Gaghan with the intention of directing it, and handed it off to Steven Soderbergh who knocked it out of the park. I read the original script, and it ended with the daughter of the main character played by Michael Douglas, climbing out the window late at night to find drugs. Meaning, this ugly cycle the film put us through was not over. The ending we saw was more hopeful. Why did you guys decide to go that way?

ZWICK : My position as a producer was to try to be the ideal producer that I would’ve wanted, which is to say I fought very hard and I was able to get more money from Barry Diller for the budget of the movie. And I was able to sit there and sit in the screenings and give Steve my ideas. But at the end of the day, every decision about that was going to be his, so I just can’t speak for him. Wonderful film.

DEADLINE: I think it was the right creative choice Soderbergh made. In the course of your adventures, you write about surviving non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and an African tick bite that left you hallucinating and almost killed you. You said you always ingratiated yourself with cast like a mensch, but you believe you really are Ahab in a baseball hat. And when your daughter at school was asked what you do, she said you yell at people all day. Who really is Ed Zwick and can one be a nice guy and a great filmmaker?

ZWICK : I’d like to think that the majority of the time, I am in fact nice. It’s just that we are also passionate and so self-absorbed in those moments that you’re capable of behaviors that you didn’t think possible in yourself. At a certain point, you just do what needs to be done. And whether that’s being a confidante or whether it’s being seductive or whether it’s being confrontational or whether it’s being a passive or whatever it is, it’s about being present in that moment and feeling what you feel and honestly trying to connect in a way that you will get the thing that you want because it only has to happen once and be in focus.

DEADLINE: You talked about teachable moments, like when you were complaining to Tom Cruise about The Last Samurai budget, about being behind schedule and in trouble with the studio. He shrugged and said, huh, and walked away. And your partner says to you, no negativity. You write that you were trying to be, as you call it, a good boy to the studio. What did you learn about the importance of not deflating your crew and cast by showing your insecurities to these people who are killing themselves to realize your vision?

ZWICK : That they don’t care about your anxieties. They don’t want to know about those things. They want an authority figure to represent them and to be leading that charge. I think what Tom was actually doing was giving me a gift because he’d been there before a lot many more times than I had been, when the shit is raining down and people are threatening to do this and that about the budget. And he knew that it was going to be fine, and that was his gracious way of telling me, just surf with it. In fact, no one said a word about that with the problem we were having and the overage because they were in for making the movie, they were committed and because he has the most ridiculously supreme self-confidence.

Tom Cruise in ‘The Last Samurai’

Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection

DEADLINE: Beyond confidence, what do you think is his superpower, that lets him hang off skyscrapers and the sides of jets, when most men his age like me get off the couch after a long sit and go, wow my hip hurts, do I need a new one?

ZWICK : I’ve actually thought about this question, and I got nothing. I’m not even sure it has to do with superpower or religion or upbringing. I actually think it has to do with joy. I think that he is so capable of experiencing this exhilarating, this unbelievable upsurge of joy, that it’s like an endorphin rush, that it’s like it just totally can give him this energy to rush forward at things and to do them. And it’s infectious, to the other actors, to the crew, to the director he is working with to the studio, getting them to come on board to do these nutty things.

DEADLINE: You write about the big stars in your films, and there’s Leo and there’s Denzel, Liev, Daniel Craig, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. I remember Jamie Foxx once telling me that after working with Cruise and Will Smith, he understood the superstar. He said, you have to accept they’re always the biggest alpha males in the room and they will find a way to beat you at everything because they are the most competitive people ever. Talk a little bit about those guys and what they have in common and maybe how some of them veer from that.

ZWICK : They’re all actually very different to some degree. The one quality that I could point to, how profane can I be here, Mike? If you think of the great stars that you loved, whether that was Steve McQueen or Paul Newman, they share something with these guys here, which is they just don’t give a fuck. There’s a quality of saying, you know what? This is what it’s going to be and this is how I’m going to be and this is who I am, and I’m not going to be trying for or wanting your approval. I’m not going to want to please, and I’m going to just own this moment, and myself. Not every great actor is that way, but the ones that you’re describing have that. And one other thing, and I use this phrase, I think it was somebody else’s phrase that I’m sure I’ve stolen. It’s about having a stomach brain. What that means is they may not have the same language that I have, they may not have studied as hard in school for that kind of intellectual approach. But what they have is an intuition and a feeling that can’t be taught and can’t be learned. That drives them, and then that prepares them. Some of them, I think about Russell Crowe and Denzel, they each have a certain amount of rage in them that they can access easily. That’s there. I think about Tom Cruise and Matt Damon, and they have an extraordinary amount of joy that’s in them that they can touch. There’s just these things that are available. But there’s one other thing which is, and it, your whole life I’m sure has been around many more of these guys even than I have. What is that charisma? How do you describe the fact that like a car, a sports car on a day when you see the sun, how they shimmer, almost like a mirage. There’s some force field. Then you want to be warmed by that. How do you describe that?

DEADLINE: That’s true, and the camera doesn’t love everybody. There are many men who are handsome and women who are gorgeous, but they are flat onscreen. Others are not perfect, but they just pop. How do you explain that?

ZWICK : That’s the eternal question you’re asking. But I think it was my wife, or was it [ Legends of the Fall cinematographer] John Toll who talked about movie skin and said that there are some people who let the light in and that it can almost penetrate that skin. But the other thing obviously, is that the eyes reveal an inner life and that inner life is a thing that whether that’s Uta Hagen or Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg…they talk about that inner process, but that inner process has to be visible. You can’t choose to make it visible. It either is visible or it isn’t. But when we see it, we just lean in because we’re just so taken by it.

DEADLINE: When I interviewed Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon , he said his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker will call him to the machine and show him something Leonardo DiCaprio did that he was unaware of. “Look at his eyes, look at what he just did, you have to use that.” It turns them both into kids on Christmas morning.

ZWICK : And it could be eight frames, just this thing and also this thing that happened for the first time. And that’s why I love film so much. It wasn’t something that an actor prepared. It wasn’t something you knew was going to happen, or Marty thought he saw on this, and then he looks at it. He goes, what is that?

DEADLINE: I’m a movie guy, but I gotta ask something about your TV exploits. That medium, it’s always easier to hit the zeitgeist. You write that you almost felt a little guilty about scoring a hit with thirtysomething, basing it on what was happening in yours and your friend’s and coworkers’ yuppie angst-ridden lives. How does that show play back for you?

‘thirtysomething’

Everett Collection

ZWICK : I am a little embarrassed by the wardrobe, but I actually find that the moments there have held up for me. I know that because I have a 36-year-old son and a 30-year-old daughter, and I watch them going through things which are not the same things we went through, but they are very analogous. The world is very different and the things that they’re addressing that face them, whether they’re economic or whether they’re cultural, are different. And yet those rites of passage, having children, losing friendships, dealing with your aging parents, your dreams and trying to confront the fact that maybe they’re confronting a downward mobility right now that their parents didn’t, any number of things are familiar to me. So we were onto a thing, which I think is cyclical, and we weren’t the first ones to whom it had happened. I remember my parents looking at us thinking, yeah, well, so what? You’re going through this. Only, we made a television show about it.

DEADLINE: The creators of Friends apologized for not having meaningful recurring Black characters. It wasn’t the priority it is today. How do you feel about that when you look back?

ZWICK : I mean, look, we were trying to be honest about our lives, and I am a white man married to a white woman. My partner is white, and this was about people who were in relationships and the other person is someone’s cousin from the same background, and their best friend. And did that make it all white? Absolutely. That was the truth. But I do want to say literally while I was making 30 something, I was also making Glory. So it wasn’t a racial decision. I think it was just holding up a mirror to a culture as it existed at the time.

DEADLINE: The way you wrote about making Defiance , it’s clear this was an awakening for you as a Jewish man about what your roots meant and what happened in Europe and what happened when this group just basically fought back and would not go to their deaths at Nazi hands without a fight. What did you take away from that? What happened after the October 7 invasion of Israel has been terrible, but is also has showed you don’t have to scratch far beneath the surface to find antisemitism. How does that movie play back for you?

ZWICK : Every now and then in a career, you have gained a certain amount of capital to want to do a thing that you want to do that maybe is less available, less interesting to a financier. That’s where I was having made Blood Diamond. I wanted to make this movie about my grandfather, about people that I knew, these tough Jews and about antisemitism and the war. I did want to talk about a different kind of heroism. These were not obvious heroes. And the thoughts that I’ve had since then are that the dialectic that movie describes between two brothers, really the leads, one of whom wants to enact vengeance on those who have done this to whom him. And the other is more measured, wanting to think about saving people and saving their culture.

There’s a contemporary metaphor to that right now in the world, in the response to what the attack by Hamas was. Is it the obligation to take all the vengeance you have, or is the obligation to try to find a way to preserve the society, to preserve some kind of status quo? So it’s interesting how you make a movie 15 years ago or more, and suddenly you find another relevance for it this much later. Same was true of The Siege. We made the movie before the 9/11 attack, and yet it became a different movie after that happened.

Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in ‘Defiance’

Paramount Vantage/Courtesy Everett Collection

DEADLINE: Two more for you. Sure. You mention some pictures that you always wanted to make. There was a Stephen King novel with JJ Abrams, The Mayor of Mayor Castro Street with Tony Kushner, the Siege of Khe Sahn with Bill Broyles, a noir with Odenkirk. Is there a holy grail project that you must make before hang it up?

ZWICK: Every project is the Holy Grail while you are trying to make it, and was it Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan who said you never make a shot you don’t take? The great baseball players, guys who are in the Hall of Fame, they hit for a lifetime average of .340 or .350. Meaning you struck out, popped out, grounded out, or fly out seven out of 10 times. And the key to being a great baseball player is the ability to forget the last at bat and go up there and do it again. And that’s what you deal with, these things that you love. You lose sometimes and you just have to keep driving on.

Yeah, there are a couple things that I’m working on. There’s a very interesting thing that we’re hoping to do that’s very political, and then there’s something that we have written that’s an original that we’re going to now try to put together with a star.

DEADLINE: Last one: you met Marshall Herskovitz when you guys were rubbing nickels together to eat. Why have you endured so long that we could call you an old married couple?

ZWICK : Mike, you’d be a better historian for this, but it’s not just that we’re probably the longest running act in Hollywood now, but we may have been the longest of all time. It’s getting close to 50 years and it’s meant everything. We have been best friends as much as we have been collaborators from a very early moment. I found his willingness to watch my back as I was willing to watch his, and I was able to learn from him things that I needed to learn. And I don’t just mean things about writing and making movies, I mean things about life, about having children, about marriage, about being a boss, about being a good man. There are things that he has meant to me as a friend that I can’t even describe. Mostly it’s having that person that you who can tell you what he really feel, in a town where people are loath to tell you the truth. And at the same time, laugh when it’s all going down, when it’s not going, someone who can find the absurdity and keep you buoyant and with whom you can share the darkest humor about it. It’s not been having a partner or a collaborator. It’s been like having a brother.

(L-R) Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz

DEADLINE: The only other partnership I can put up against yours would be the Imagine duo or Ron Howard and Brian Grazer…

ZWICK : I think they began a year or two after us. I remember, because I met Brian when I went to Tristar, and I don’t think he and Ron had yet partnered up. I think we’ve got ’em by a year or two. So let’s just see who lasts.

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