The Filmmaker Ed Zwick Likes Books He Can’t Imagine as Movies

What books are on your night stand?

A night stand couldn’t possibly hold them all. Piles of hardcovers gather dust on the floor by my bedside. Some I’ll read, others I’ll never get around to as they’re buried under newer, shinier ones. That said, I just finished “The Letters of John le Carré.” David Cornwell’s private life turns out to be as engrossing as his spy fiction. Today, I’m lost in Jonathan Rosen’s “The Best Minds” — a moving account of a brilliant young man’s schizophrenia and his childhood friendship with the author that’s also a lament for the struggle toward mental health reform.

How do you organize your books?

I wouldn’t know where to begin. My overflowing shelves reflect my literary tastes: chaotic, promiscuous and shallow.

Which books (fiction or nonfiction) best capture Hollywood as you know it?

William Goldman’s “Adventures in the Screen Trade” is the accepted gold standard, while Mark Harris is, by my lights, the most switched-on, sympathetic writer in today’s Hollywood.

From days of yore, Christopher Isherwood’s “Prater Violet” — a romantic yet stinging mix of the personal and the professional — is a longtime favorite, while Moss Hart’s “Act One,” although about a life in the theater, epitomizes every young artist’s journey from innocence to experience. Maurice Zolotow’s biography, “Billy Wilder in Hollywood,” despises the man while admiring the artist and overlaps with Otto Friedrich’s “City of Nets,” about German and Austrian émigrés lost and disoriented in 1940s L.A.

Most recently, Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye” rivals Lillian Ross’s “Picture” in its detailed account of the making of a single movie, while David Niven’s “The Moon’s a Balloon” remains an innocent celebration of the sheer joy and privilege of moviemaking.

You’ve made movies based on a Civil War monograph by Lincoln Kirstein (“Glory”) and a Lee Child novel (“Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”). What do your choices have in common?