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.