Darryl F. Zanuck

Darryl F. Zanuck was that relative rarity among the movie moguls, a truly engaged, hands-on studio chief whose involvement with movies grew out of real talent, and not merely an accident of ownership. Though he never directed a movie, as a producer... more

Darryl F. Zanuck was that relative rarity among the movie moguls, a truly engaged, hands-on studio chief whose involvement with movies grew out of real talent, and not merely an accident of ownership. Though he never directed a movie, as a producer and studio production chief, Zanuck contributed directly to the creative content of hundreds of films, many of them extremely important, and remained a major force in filmmaking for more than 40 years, from the end of the 1920s until the outset of the 1970s. He was also one of the very few major players in Hollywood's Golden Age who was not born in Europe -- he was as American as the Nebraska hinterlands where he was born. Darryl Francis Zanuck was born in Wahoo, NE, the product of a wretchedly unhappy marriage that left him abandoned by both of his parents by the time he was 13. In 1917, when he was 15, he lied about his age and joined the Nebraska National Guard, and saw combat in France and Belgium during World War I. His experiences in the First World War would help give Zanuck a special appreciation for and insight into the lives of fighting men that would inform his work into the 1960s. He also did some boxing while in uniform, as a bantamweight, but after returning to civilian life at age 18, he decided to try for career as a writer. Zanuck spent the next few years eking out a living as a drugstore clerk and as a stevedore, among other jobs, and eventually managed to sell some stories to magazines. Zanuck decided to try the movie business and started sending his work to the studios. In 1923, he joined the fledgling Warner Bros. as a staff writer, where he became known for his unusually inventive plots. Among his greatest successes of the 1920s were his scripts for the World War I canine hero Rin Tin Tin. Zanuck wasn't a distinguished writer on a technical level, but he showed a knack for offbeat plots, and also an appreciation for the administrative side of studio work that served him well. By 1928, he'd risen to studio manager, and a year later became chief of production, the most powerful executive position on the lot. He was effectively the management right hand to studio co-founder Jack L. Warner, and helped in no small way to make the studio's gamble with talking pictures in 1927 pay off. Zanuck shepherded Warner Bros. out the silents and into the full sound era, and by the early '30s, he was one of the most powerful and respected men in the movie business, and not yet 30 years old. He produced a few films personally, most notably Noah's Ark (1929), but it was more through the films that he approved, and the talent that he assigned to them, that he made his impact felt. His most important achievements included The Public Enemy (1931) and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), the former a violent gangster movie that made a star out of James Cagney, and the latter a piercing social drama. It was with both of those genres, and the modern musical (spawned under Zanuck's regime in the guise of 42nd Street [1933]), that Warner Bros. would excel and rest its reputation during the 1930s. Zanuck parted company with the studio in 1933, when he realized that he could go no higher within the Warner Bros. organization; he was informed by Jack Warner that, despite his importance to the company and his string of successes, he would never have any share in the company or be more than a salaried employee. Zanuck resigned, and later that year founded the company that would define his reputation and work for the next 35 years, co-founding a new studio, 20th Century Pictures, in partnership with Joseph Schenck. A Russian immigrant 25 years Zanuck's senior, Schenck was more the traditional mogul, starting out in entertainment as an amusement park owner (including Palisades Park in New Jersey) before turning to movie exhibition in the 1910s; he'd been at United Artists as its president before moving into independent film production in the 1920s. Schenck became the president of 20th Century while Zanuck served as chief of production, and with a distribution contract with UA, the new organization had everything it needed except for its own production facilities. That problem was solved in 1935 when 20th Century merged with Fox Studios, which had its own lot but was virtually bankrupt. The company that rose from the merger was 20th Century Fox, with Zanuck continuing as chief of production, overseeing an enormously ambitious production schedule. In the midst of the Great Depression, the movie business was limping along financially, devising ever more elaborate programs -- including double features, and short subjects such as cartoons and newsreels -- to draw people into theaters. Fox Movietone News and the newsreels it generated were no small attraction, but the studio's real appeal lay in its roster of stars. Though the biggest of them, Will Rogers, died in 1935, before the new studio could really benefit from his presence, 20th Century Fox still ended up with one of the major box-office attractions of the day: Shirley Temple. Seven years old at the time of the formation of the company, Temple proved the biggest star of the decade in terms of ticket sales, her movies and their escapist entertainment providing a break from the bleak economy and the worsening news in Europe, and pulling people into theaters by the millions. Over the next few years, the studio began developing a new generation of talent, most notably Tyrone Power, the son of a silent-era star of the same name, who quickly became one of Hollywood's top leading men, able to carry such big-budget movies as In Old Chicago (an effort by Zanuck to produce an epic movie in the manner of Cecil B. DeMille), Suez, and The Mark of Zorro. Fox's directorial stable included such reliable hitmakers as Henry King and John Ford (who was just starting to get ambitious in the kind of films he was making), and on the acting side -- in tandem with Ford -- the studio also cultivated such leading men as Henry Fonda. The same decade, from 1933 onward, also saw such aesthetic developments as the full orchestral score, and Zanuck gave Fox an edge in this area by hiring Alfred Newman, a former music director from Broadway who had written some excellent scores for Samuel Goldwyn, to head up the studio's music department. Fox also began experimenting with such processes as Technicolor in shooting its movies. Zanuck also brought over many of his most trusted hands from Warner Bros., including publicist (and later producer) Milton Sperling, who was Jack Warner's son-in-law. Though Sperling would later return to the Warner fold, at Fox he played a key role in fostering the production of two of the studio's most prestigious 1930s productions, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). But it was Zanuck, with his special knack for understanding the public taste and visualizing the right actor in the right role, who cast Basil Rathbone -- previously known almost exclusively for his villain parts -- as Sherlock Holmes. There were also a pair of female stars, Alice Faye, who came up in musical vehicles in the second half of the 1930s, and Betty Grable, who dominated the field at Fox in the early '40s. Faye was the better actress, but it was Grable, with her wholesome good looks, who became a huge pop-culture fixture as the 1940s dawned, in Technicolor musicals such as Down Argentine Way (1940) and Moon Over Miami (1941). In contrast to most other production chiefs, Zanuck also saw a good reason for continuing to use Technicolor during World War II, despite the austerity of the period and the lack of the European market, and exploited it to the fullest, putting Maureen O'Hara into her first color film, The Black Swan (1942). She'd already proved herself as a dramatic actress the year before in Ford's How Green Was My Valley, but The Black Swan turned O'Hara, with her red hair, into the top leading lady of Technicolor movies for the next two decades. It was during this same period that he made another new actress discovery, Linda Darnell, who would light up the screen and swell the studio's balance sheets through the end of the 1940s. Additionally, Zanuck was also no slouch when it came to recognizing the value of the displaced European talent flooding into Hollywood, and he quickly grabbed up the best of them for a film or two each, including Fritz Lang, who made Man Hunt and The Return of Frank James, and Jean Renoir, who made his hauntingly beautiful, lyrical backwoods drama Swamp Water, all for Fox. Zanuck was even willing to indulge his directors on occasion, on worthwhile and important projects that were nearly certain box-office losers -- that was how William Wellman got to make The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), which, ironically, has probably become profitable from non-theatrical showings in schools in the 60 years since. The same year that he allowed Wellman to make that dark, troubling movie about prejudice and violence in the American past, he also allowed Busby Berkeley to make the lavish patriotic Technicolor musical The Gang's All Here. Amid all of these successes, Zanuck did reveal some flaws, to be sure. He didn't have faith in movie series as a business proposition, dropping the highly successful Charlie Chan films with the outbreak of World War II, and he also stopped making the Holmes films after just two movies (although that may also have been a result of the Conan Doyle estate's wishes, so distressed were they over the wholly original plot used for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, though one suspects that if Fox had it really wanted to keep making the movies, they would have found a way to smooth things over). In the process, Zanuck opened the way for Universal Pictures to produce another dozen Holmes films with Rathbone and his co-star, Nigel Bruce, all of which were extremely profitable and many of which rated among the best releases from Universal during that period. He also had blind spots where certain performers and film properties were concerned; following an argument with Zanuck, actor/director Otto Preminger was barred from work on the Fox lot until Zanuck went off to military service. Preminger then returned, first as an actor and then as director of the movie version of his own Broadway hit, Margin for Error. Preminger later produced and directed Laura, despite Zanuck's misgivings about the project and his dislike of the fey Clifton Webb (making his screen debut) in the key role of Waldo Lydecker. And then there was Zanuck's legendarily libidinous nature -- in an era in which the producer's "casting couch" was a given hurdle for most young actresses to ponder if not endure, he was one of the more rakish practitioners, his antics almost an open secret in that more innocent age. In that regard, Zanuck was merely one of the more honest of the moguls and producers. He was also one of the few production chiefs who actually had experience making movies and was overall a highly respected figure, who took an active and productive role in the making of many of Fox's biggest films, tinkering with scripts and casting, and usually adding at least one very good idea to any movie in production on the lot. Zanuck was also in a unique position to judge what the public was ready for, more so than his mostly foreign-born rivals at the other studios; he'd served in Europe during World War II in a documentary production capacity and recognized better than his rivals that the war was not only a potent subject for movies, but a necessary one, during the war and even after it. While other studios ran from war dramas once the fighting was over, Zanuck embraced movies such as Lewis Milestone's independently produced A Walk in the Sun (1945), and later produced or approved the production of movies such as Twelve O'Clock High (1950) and Halls of Montezuma (1950). Zanuck also discovered an odd advantage that he had over many of his rival studio chiefs, deriving from the fact that he was American-born and a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Where men like Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn, as Jewish immigrants from Europe ever mindful of their uncertain acceptance in America, were unwilling to call attention to their own religious and ethnic backgrounds, and especially avoided Jewish subject matter, it was Zanuck, a Protestant born in Nebraska, who saw that the time was right to make Gentleman's Agreement (1947), which addressed anti-Semitism directly for the first time in a major Hollywood movie (and he produced it over the objections of every Jewish studio head in Hollywood). He took a similar step with Pinky, a movie dealing, however furtively, with racism. In the early '50s, with the arrival of television as competition, Zanuck took up the lead of Fox president Spyros Skouras, who had purchased the rights to a widescreen process called Cinemascope, and, as he had done at Warner Bros. with sound at the end of the 1920s, moved Fox into the first of the widescreen formats, to keep movies competitive. As it happened, the new format didn't fit every production (Daddy Long Legs and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit were especially awkward), and the decision to shoot its films in Cinemascope caused Fox to lose such productions as On the Waterfront. Overall, however, the company's films remained competitive, and the presence of stars such as Marilyn Monroe kept Fox among the top Hollywood studios throughout the 1950s, while rivals such as MGM began to slowly fade away. The early to mid-'50s were also a period in which Zanuck and Fox did more than any other studio to resist the effects of the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist. Not that they were perfect, impervious to pressure, or especially bold, but one finds that Fox, more than any other of the major studios, quietly gave behind-the-scenes employment to figures such as Martin Ritt, Jeff Corey, and others who generally couldn't get work elsewhere. Zanuck left Fox at the end of the 1950s to embark on a career as an independent producer, and made his most celebrated film, The Longest Day (1962), a sprawling all-star dramatization of the Normandy landings on D-day. That movie seemed to sum up all of the war films he'd produced before, back to The Purple Heart in 1944, and was his crowning achievement. He returned to Fox soon after, amid the crisis caused by the enormous cost overruns surrounding Cleopatra, and saw several more years of success at the head of the company (with his own son, Richard, as chief of production). The studio kept abreast of what audiences in the 1960s wanted -- with such diverse titles as The Sound of Music (1965), The Sand Pebbles (1966), and Planet of the Apes (1968) -- and Zanuck remained in place, the last of the moguls to hold power in the movie business, until the dawn of the 1970s, when business reverses resulted in his being forced out of power. Ironically, though Zanuck was never attacked in the 1950s for the few steps he took to resist the blacklist or for some of the potentially controversial movies that he produced then, it was his last production, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), that lit off a political firestorm. An honest account of the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the movie, coming out in the middle of the Vietnam War, was attacked in Washington as anti-American for its depiction of blunders by the United States in the fall of 1941, and led to threats of a congressional investigation. He was forced out of his job at the studio a few months later, after the movie failed at the box office. Darryl Zanuck passed away in 1979 at the age of 77, but his name was so ubiquitous in its attachment to great movies that he remains a relatively well-known figure out of Hollywood's gold and silver ages. His legacy also lives on through the work of his son, Richard Zanuck, who has been a major independent producer for decades. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide less