SciFi Movies & Edward Zwick Hollywood Director AZ TRT S05 EP09 (224) 3-3-2024  What We Learned This Week Ed Zwick Hollywood Director & Producer with 40 years in the industry ILM - Industrial Light & Magic is the premiere special fx company created by George Lucas SciFi Movies predicted the Future – what has become reality? The Internet & Choice – How the Martix movie showed us a new reality of virtual worlds that seem too real AI Man vs Machine – Blade Runner and The Terminator movies give terrifying scenarios of AI run amok     Guest: Edward Zwick, Hollywood Director ED ZWICK BIO (FROM TRIBUNE.CA)   More Bio Info from IMDB: HERE         Ed Zwick first hit the Hollywood radar screen as the producer/writer/director of the award-winning drama series Family, starring James Broderick (Matthew Broderick's father). Zwick landed the job after his short film, Timothy and the Angel, won first place in the student film competition at the 1976 Chicago Film Festival, catching the attention of the Family producers. He began as a story editor, then moved on to become a director and producer of the show, which ran from 1976 to 1980. Zwick went on to work on other critically-acclaimed series, including thirtysomething (for which he won an Emmy), My So-Called Life and Once and Again. In 1984, he won an "Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Specials" Directors Guild of America award for the TV movie Special Bulletin.   His first venture into feature film directing came with About Last Night (1986), starring Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, then received a Golden Globe nomination for "Best Director -- Motion Picture" for the Academy-Award® winning Glory (1989) starring Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington. He has also directed the major motion pictures Leaving Normal (1992), Legends of the Fall(1994) starring Brad Pitt and Courage Under Fire (1996) starring Meg Ryan and Denzel Washington. Zwick worked with Washington yet again in The Siege (1998), then directed The Last Samurai (2003), starring Tom Cruise.   In 2006, Ed directed the Oscar-nominated Blood Diamond and followed that up with the 2008 drama Defiance, which also earned an Oscar nomination. Two years later, he helmed Love and Other Drugs.   In 2014, Ed brought the story of American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer to the screen in Pawn Sacrifice. Ed's latest film reunited him with Tom Cruise. The men worked together on Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016). Ed was also executive producer of the TV series Nashville from 2016-2018.   As a producer of the 1999 Best Picture winner Shakespeare in Love, Zwick won an Academy Award®. He is also the recipient of the American Film Institute's Franklin J. Schaffner Award, a Lone Star Film & Television Award Best Director award, the Humanitas Award and a Writers Guild of America award.     ABOUT ED ZWICK AND HITS, FLOPS AND OTHER ILLUSIONS: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood   This heartfelt and wry career memoir from the director of Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall, About Last Night, and Glory, creator of the show thirtysomething, and executive producer of My So-Called Life, gives a dishy, behind-the-scenes look at working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.   "I'll be dropping a few names," Ed Zwick confesses in the introduction to his book. "Over the years I have worked with self-proclaimed masters-of-the-universe, unheralded geniuses, hacks, sociopaths, savants, and saints."   He has encountered these Hollywood types during four decades of directing, producing, and writing projects that have collectively received eighteen Academy Award nominations (seven wins) and sixty-seven Emmy nominations (twenty-two wins). Though there are many factors behind such success, including luck and the contributions of his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz, he's known to have a speci