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Toward the end of his revealing and warm-hearted memoir, journeyman director Ed Zwick quotes a friend whose words, he says, should be tattooed on the arm of every director:

“Working in Hollywood is a series of small humiliations interrupted by bigger ones.”

Zwick claims to know a bit about humiliation. Since his first real job in his late 20s as a writer-director with the Emmy-winning ABC drama Family, he has been axed by studio execs, bullied by agents and lied to by stars.

He has also written, produced or directed almost 30 TV series and theatrical movies. This makes him, at 71, a survivor (even more so since being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 16 years ago).

He is still best known as the creator, along with his longtime production partner Marshall Herskovitz, of the influential late ’80s TV drama thirtysomething.

The pair followed this Emmy winner with the short-lived cult TV favourite My So-Called Life, starring a teen-aged Claire Danes. Later came their under-appreciated domestic drama series Once and Again.

Meanwhile, in his solo career as a director, Zwick has helmed such successful films as the 1989 Civil War drama Glory, the 2006 international thriller Blood Diamond and the 2016 action flick Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

“No matter how much good fortune I’ve had,” he writes in Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions, “I always feel I’m never more than a big failure away from movie jail.”

This modest but enjoyable book details a life in the trenches of showbiz, replete with its victories and losses.

Zwick started it in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which put the kibosh on his and Herskovitz’s TV reboot thirtysomethingelse.

Instead of penning a standard opening chapter about his boyhood and family background, he begins with his first day on a film set, as an assistant to Woody Allen (“yes, the name-dropping begins”) on the 1975 comedy Love and Death.

He details later, in asides mostly, how he grew up with two younger sisters near Chicago in a chaotic Jewish-American household led by a narcissistic and alcoholic father.

“That I should choose a life pursuing intimate relationships with movie stars is almost comic in its Freudian implications,” he writes.

“It’s possible it accounts for a certain love-hate relationships I’ve always had with them.”

He downplays his undergraduate years at Harvard, never fully explaining how a youth from his modest background reached the Ivy League in the first place, except to say that he has been “defined by a work addiction since the second grade.”

He documents his career chronologically. Most chapters end, as a concession to commercial publishing fashion, with a gimmicky list: “Ten Things They Tried to Teach Me in Film School” or “Ten Things Every Director Needs to Know,” for example.

These irony-laced inserts pay homage to novelist and screenwriter William Goldman’s 1983 memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, still one of the best insider accounts of how Hollywood actually works.

“There was no point transcribing his brilliant and laugh-out loud observations into my notebooks; there were simply too many,” Zwick writes. “Better to buy several copies and wear them out.”

It becomes clear in his telling that Zwick has worked with or met everyone who’s anybody in American film. He is unfailingly generous toward them, notably actors Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise. But he also tells unflattering stories about some, including actors Matthew Broderick and Julia Roberts.

His biggest humiliation might have been when he was shut out of directing the Miramax-produced 1998 Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love.

This was a project Zwick originated and spent six years on, hiring and working with British theatrical genius Tom Stoppard on the script, before being betrayed by the notorious producer Harvey Weinstein.

“Weinstein’s depredations are public record, but little has been said about his extraordinary displays of enthusiasm and powers of persuasion,” says Zwick, who held on to a producer’s credit on the film.

“At the risk of wearing out a metaphor, Richard III’s seductive prowess comes to mind.”

Zwick comes across as a model of constancy in a fickle business. He and his wife, Liberty Godshall, a writer and social activist, have stayed married for more than 40 years. They have two adult children.

Zwick and Herskovitz, meanwhile, met in an American Film Institute director’s course almost 50 years and still work together.

Like his many mentors — the late Tootsie director Sydney Pollack might be the most important — Zwick hires the same film editor, cinematographer and composer film after film.

He remains friends with the ensemble cast members of thirtysomething, the heavily autobiographical TV drama that defined yuppiedom in the late 1980s.

“What distinguishes the show is the absence of anything but a close examination of the characters in it,” he notes. “Radical at the time, old hat today.”

Experience has taught him there are four ways to judge a film’s success. But the first three — box office, reviews and awards — “don’t count.”

“Time,” he writes, “is the only measure.”

Zwick’s book could have used an index, as well as another pass by copy editors to patch a few butchered sentences. Take this clanger about his father: “No longer the life of the party as much as the subject of embarrassed whispers and sidelong glances, as his jokes grew louder and his drinking reached critical mass, so did my shame.”

But, overall, movie buffs will not regret the time they spend with this thoughtful showbiz memoir.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.