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Book excerpt: “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions” by Ed Zwick
Gallery Books
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Writer, director and producer Ed Zwick, co-creator of the TV series “thirtysomething,” and who was behind such films as “Glory,” “Legends of the Fall,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “Blood Diamond,” recounts four tempestuous decades in the business in his entertaining new memoir, “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” (Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster).
In the excerpt below, Zwick discusses the creation of his Emmy Award-winning TV drama “Special Bulletin,” which was presented as a fake newscast in which a terrorist group’s nuclear device is detonated in Charleston, S.C. Not everyone at the network was thrilled about it.
Don’t miss Luke Burbank’s interview with Ed Zwick on “CBS News Sunday Morning” March 3!
“Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions” by Ed Zwick
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From Chapter Three: The Year of Loving Dangerously
The year I turned thirty everything happened at once. Love, illness, success, tragedy. Throw in marriage, friendship, pregnancy, and therapy and you begin to get the picture. The problem about opening yourself to the improvisation of life is having to admit you aren’t in control. Especially when life is coming at you head-on like a speeding truck in the wrong lane and there’s no way to avoid the collision.
I almost forgot the fatal car accident. That happened too.
It was 1982. My career was going nowhere. After the ridiculous good luck of getting the chance to produce a network TV series at twenty-seven, I had spent the next four years writing scripts no one wanted to make and directing TV that wasn’t worth seeing. It was as if there was this chasm between what I intended and what ended up on the page and screen. No matter how determined I was to be daring and original, the work came out ordinary and inauthentic. In the years since film school, Marshall and I had become inseparable. As we struggled to assimilate what they had tried to teach us in class, we became each other’s scourge as well as best friend. If you find one person in your life who can always be counted on to tell you the truth, you’re lucky. If you can find him in Hollywood, you’ve won the lottery. We were then and remain each other’s first reader. After finishing a new script of mine, he would get this compassionate yet anguished look in his eye, and I knew he agreed that it sucked. To this day, fifty years on, his casually withering criticism occasionally makes me want to murder him. He’ll look up from a page and say, “This part makes me tired.”
Flushed with early success on Family, I had bought a little house I could no longer afford and desperately took whatever work I could to pay the mortgage, such as a low-budget indie about the Kentucky Derby where I never got to attend the race, nor go to Kentucky for that matter. Meanwhile, Marshall wasn’t doing much better writing for such unchallenging fare as CHiPs (California Highway Patrol) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. He finally had to borrow money from his father to write an original script, promising to pay him back with interest, should it sell. It didn’t. Every afternoon, when we could no longer tolerate another fruitless day of writing, one of us would call the other and we would meet at a video arcade and pour quarters into a road-racing game. Afterward we would lie on the living room floor of the house I was about to lose, whining and moaning. During one such sob session, I told him about a terrifying dream I’d had the night before about seeing TV news of imminent nuclear annihilation, and how I woke up, sweating and unable to breathe, still believing it to be real.
“We should do it!” he said.
“Do what?”
“Pitch it as a movie!”
“I’m talking about an anxiety attack, not a development deal!”
“I’m serious,” he said. “What if we were to tell a story on TV but we did it only through what you would be able to see on the news.”
“You mean, like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds?”
“Except not about aliens. We’ll choose something more plausible and terrifying.”
“Like nuclear annihilation, you mean.”
“And we’ll create all the news footage ourselves.”
“Like The Battle of Algiers?”
“Never heard of it.”
And so it began.
I won’t try to describe the labyrinth we had to navigate before getting NBC to agree to pay us for a script. Had they not been languishing at the bottom of the Nielsen ratings, I’m convinced they would never have given us a chance. The moment we began writing, though, it was as if fortune’s wheel had turned, and our names spun to the top. We couldn’t believe our luck. I imagine the movie gods gazing down on our giddy optimism, chuckling, So they want to disrupt the universe? Let’s see how much disruption these two geniuses can handle …
Here are some of the things that happen that year, 1982:
The day after we begin writing, I meet a girl in the parking garage of the old Santa Monica mall. My battered car is in the shop. I’ve borrowed a friend’s car and can’t remember where I’m parked. She is driving a beater from Dave Schwartz’s Rent-A-Wreck and can’t remember what it looks like. We chat as we wander from one level to another. I manage to get her number before she finds her car (which has a copy of Pascal’s Pensées on the front seat).
I tell Marshall about the girl in the parking lot, rhapsodizing about her beauty, wit, and intelligence and that I think I could fall in love with her. He says, “What else is new? You say that every other week. Let’s get back to work.” The next day I call her, only to learn she is living with someone else. I have no choice but to get back to work. Days later, Marshall learns his now-wife Susan (yes, they had gotten back together, for now, at least) is pregnant with their first child. He’s too distracted to work. The following week, the girl from the parking lot, whose name is Liberty, calls to tell me she has left the man she’d been living with. Now Marshall and I are both too excited to work. We all spend an idyllic summer watching Susan’s belly grow. I ask Liberty to marry me. She says yes. Marshall and I finish a first draft.
In September we hear the network likes it. The next day Marshall gets a call that his father has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. The prognosis isn’t good. He flies to Philadelphia to see him. Afterward, he joins us on Liberty’s farm in rural Pennsylvania to be my best man. The day of the wedding we hear the network wants us to come to NYC to observe NBC News. After the ceremony, Susan returns to L.A. while Liberty, Marshall, and I head to Manhattan for our honeymoon. The next morning, we begin observing at NBC News.
By mid-November, the rewrite is done. Two weeks later, the network gives us the go-ahead, and everything speeds up. We begin prep in L.A., casting unknown actors since the premise only works if the audience doesn’t recognize them. (This is how we first get to know David Clennon, later to become the infamous Miles Drentell on thirtysomething.) During rehearsals, I operate the video camera myself as if I am the news cameraman in the scene. When I review the footage, for the first time in my life the work is exactly as I imagined it. That night I am too excited to sleep, believing I might have a future as a director. The next day at the production office, my sister calls to tell me my mother has been killed in a car accident. I collapse in Marshall’s arms.
That night I fly home to Chicago to help my sisters prepare for the funeral. Their lives had already been buffeted by my parents’ messy divorce, but now they are shattered. I’d like to be able to give them the support they need, but the truth is, I am a wreck myself. On the morning after my mother is buried, I fly to Charleston, South Carolina, to meet Marshall and scout locations, burying my grief in work, not the last time that charming habit will serve me. We begin production in January. It’s a grueling shoot with challenging material made even more emotional by the tumultuous events in our lives. On the first day of shooting, something is wrong with the lead actress. Whether it’s nerves or a medical condition, she has a vocal problem that makes her sound nothing like a professional news anchor. Marshall and I huddle in a corner. We realize we’re going to have to fire her. I’ve never fired anyone in my life. So, while I continue shooting, knowing everything we do will have to be redone, Marshall is on the phone with the casting director frantically looking for a replacement. We decide on Kathryn Walker and send her a script at 7 p.m. She reads it by 9 p.m. Arrives on set the next morning at 4:30 a.m. Goes on camera at 6 a.m., letter perfect and brilliant. Kathryn Walker is a goddess.
When we finish production, the network informs us they need our movie— now called Special Bulletin—on the air in six weeks. There is no such thing as a video editing system that allows for the kind of elasticity used in film editing, nor are there any film editors trained on video editing systems. That means we must cut the movie online, with little help from a news editor unfamiliar with narrative. Marshall and I hunker down in a facility in Burbank, essentially making final decisions about each sequence, one cut at a time, in sequence. And then tearing it apart when it doesn’t work and beginning again. Midway through the process, Susan goes into labor. Two days later, sleepless beyond recognition, the proud father of a baby girl, Marshall stumbles back into the editing room to do the offline cut of the “news packages” to be dropped into the final cut I am finishing.
The show is due to air in two weeks, but before that can happen, Reuven Frank, the head of NBC News, insists on seeing the movie and goes berserk. He calls Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC, demanding that it not be aired, fearing the depiction of a nuclear event, shot as if it were really happening, would not only cause widespread panic but also bring the news division into disrepute. When we get word that the network is seriously considering not putting it on, we call Howard Rosenberg at the L.A. Times and John O’Connor at the New York Times to tell them what the network is thinking of doing. They ask to see the film. Following Werner Herzog’s adage to ask forgiveness and not permission, we send it to them without the network’s consent. All hell breaks loose. The controversy plays out on the front page of every entertainment outlet in the country. Everyone wants to see the movie the network won’t air. Tartikoff has no choice; he must air it. But to pacify the news division, he agrees to run a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen coming out of each commercial break. We aren’t happy about it, but nobody seems to notice them when they air because they were too busy raiding the refrigerator during the commercials.
The velocity of events is relentless. Rave reviews are followed by six Emmy nominations, including best movie, writing, and directing. Two days before the ceremony, Marshall’s father dies. He returns from the funeral in Philadelphia barely in time to put on his new tuxedo and accept an armful of Emmys. Days later, Liberty tells me she is pregnant. I am undone with happiness, but also stupefied. Dazed after yet another acceptance speech—it could have been the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, the Peabody, we won them all—Marshall and I find ourselves sitting on the curb outside the Beverly Hilton, clutching our little statuettes. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I turn to Marshall, or maybe it was Marshall turning to me, and affecting a comic Yiddish accent, “So, nu … ?”
It was more dark than funny, but soon we are laughing so hard that tears pour down our cheeks. Passersby stop to stare at the two bearded guys in ill-fitting new tuxedos doubled over in paroxysms of hilarity and grief. For an entire year, no sooner had we managed to internalize one overwhelming event than we were overwhelmed by another. Was this what adult life would be like from now on? It was Newton’s third law of motion made flesh: For every success there is an equal and opposite trauma. We were learning that in life it is never one thing or another, it is always one thing and another. That phrase would soon become a kind of mantra for our creative lives.
From “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” by Ed Zwick. Copyright © 2024 by Edward Zwick. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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With just a month to go before Election Day, Sabrina German sees herself as an essential worker for democracy. The director of voter registration in Chatham County, Ga., German has found herself in the spotlight as she works to comply with sweeping changes to state election rules in this critical battleground state.
“The first three words in the preamble, it says, ‘We, the people,’ meaning that we, as public servants, we are working for the people to make sure that they have a fair choice and a voice for the candidates that they’re choosing,” German said.
The overhaul in Georgia has many fronts, from the Republican majority on the state election board, to the Georgia legislature, which has made it possible for individuals to file a flurry of challenges to the voter rolls.
German said she had a thousand challenges to voter registrations in just one county.
Attorney Colin McRae, who chairs the non-partisan County Registration Board (on which he has served for two decades), said, “It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the agenda behind some of the challenges,” he said. “In a recent set of names that were submitted to us, it included hundreds of college students. And it didn’t take a lot of research to figure out that all of the college students whose registrations were being challenged, all attended Savannah State University, [a] historically Black university.”
While these issues might seem local, they have a national political charge; and former President Trump has weighed in on the campaign trail, praising Republicans on Georgia’s election board. “They’re on fire,” he said. “They’re doing a great job. Three members. Three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”
“Sunday Morning” reached out to the members of Georgia’s election board praised by Trump. They have long defended their work, and one member told us the controversy over their efforts is “manufactured to suit some other agenda.”
What’s happening in Georgia is just one example of how challenges to the vote are roiling the nation. And the question remains: Are recent changes to state election laws addressing real problems? Or, is it just politics?
David Becker, a CBS News contributor who directs the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C., said, “I’ve been looking and researching the quality of our voter lists for about 25 years now, and there’s no question that, right now, our voter lists are as accurate as they’ve ever been.”
So, what is fueling suspicion of voter rolls? “We see a lot of their claims about the elections driven just by outcomes,” said Becker. “They’re not about the actual process.
“The voter lists are public. They could have challenged these things in 2023 or 2021 or 2019. They’re waiting until right before the election, which tells you that they’re not actually interested in cleaning up the lists. What they’re really trying to do is to set the stage for claims that an election was stolen after, presumably, their candidate loses.”
The 2020 election still casts a long shadow. State officials like Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, are bracing themselves for another contsted election.
On January 2, 2021, Raffensperger got an infamous call from then-President Trump asking if he’d “find” votes so Trump could win. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have, because we won the state,” Trump said in a recorded conversation.
Raffensperger resisted pressure to not certify the 2020 election in Georgia. Asked if he would resist pressure again, he said, “I’ll do my job. I’ll follow the law, and I’ll follow the Constitution.”
Raffensperger will once again oversee and certify Georgia’s elections. Asked whether he believes any of the changes put forth by the election board are necessary, Raffensperger replied, “No. Not one.”
Raffensperger says voting is safe and secure in Georgia. Asked why the election board members keeps making changes to the rules, he said, “I think that many of them are living in the past, and they can’t accept what happened in 2020.”
Bloomsbury
Carol Anderson, an author and voting rights activist who teaches at Emory University, said, “One of the things about voter suppression is that it always looks innocuous, it always looks reasonable, except it’s not. What’s happening in Georgia with voting rights is that, you have a massive change of demography happening. So, you have a growing African-American population. You have a sizable Latino population. You have a sizable and engaged Asian-American population.
“And so, it is a power clash between a vision of a new Georgia and … the vision of the old Georgia, our old ways,” she said.
Chatham County’s Sabrina German said, because of the pressures on election workers, she thinks about leaving every day. German may be weary, but she and Colin McRae say their experience in 2020 has prepared them for whatever comes next.
McRae said he took it personally when Donald Trump asked the secretary of state to “find” 11,000 votes to put him over Joe Biden. “Of course, we took it personally; any criticism of the system is a criticism of the individuals who make up that system,” said McRae. “Again, the truth will come out. The truth will win out.”
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Carol Ross.
CBS News
Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
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