I was only vaguely familiar with Zweibel before reading this but he has a rich pedigree: an original writer on Saturday Night Live, a man very skilled at doing life stories of top comedians (Garry Shandling, Billy Crystal, Gilda Radner, Martin Short), writer of some of Rob Reiner's least successful films (North, Story of Us), show runner of Ryan O'Neal's Good Sports, dabbler in many forms (novels, theatre, movies, TV).
It's an entertaining book. Good to hear insight about early SNL from a writer, throws in a whole chapter on a film he made with Crystal, skips over some potentially interesting stuff in a sentence (a brief cocaine problem, his wife being robbed at gun point), illuminating sketches on Radner and Shandling, take downs of Ryan O'Neal and Farrah Fawcett, touching account of the backlash to North (less analysis of Story of Us... my take with the problem: it seems it was written by two happily married people), he is refreshingly empathetic about age discrimination in Hollywood.
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