Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where they created the widely loved TV show Thirtysomething. His memoir Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions details many of his greatest experiences in the film industry.

"Actors are remarkable teachers. They are often brilliant in their unique way, often not in a way that is schooled necessarily. They often don't have the language some of us who are more academically inclined have, but you underestimate their brilliance at your peril. And, in fact, you are missing an opportunity if you presume that they are just reading words. They are performing a very particular kind of magic in their process when they are great. And they save you constantly. They find solutions to your weaknesses in the words. They help you make implausible situations more plausible in your staging."

"I've, like anyone, always had a fascination with movie stars, an attraction to the romance of who they are, men and women. So I wasn't immune, but what I realized very quickly is that I could acknowledge that and try to take those things that had always drawn me to the movies and provide them to the audience and have them really lift up these stories that I wanted to tell because finally, it was the stories themselves that I was trying to serve. There were ideas in those stories. Some of the ideas were about the characters and personal, but some of the ideas were a larger canvas. They were often about subjects. And the subjects could have been historical, they could have been political, they could have been social, cultural subjects, but they had some other agenda in them. And yet, that's not why people go to the movies. They go to the movies because they want to see relationships. They want to see - whether it's beautiful people or powerful people - they're drawn to relationships. In some sense, you’re creating a kind of stew where you're doing more than one thing at a time."

www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Ed-Zwick/212290077
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001880/

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