Studio head In April 1933, Zanuck left Warner Bros. over an industry salary dispute when studio head
Jack L. Warner refused to comply with the
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' decision to restore salary cuts. A few days later, he partnered with
Joseph Schenck to form
20th Century Pictures, Inc. with financial help from Joseph's brother
Nicholas Schenck and
Louis B. Mayer,
president and studio head of
Loew's, Inc and its subsidiary
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, along with
William Goetz and
Raymond Griffith. 20th Century released its material through
United Artists. During that short time (1933–1935), 20th Century became the most successful
independent movie studio of its time, breaking
box-office records with 18 of its 19 films, all profitable, including
Clive of India,
Les Miserables, and
The House of Rothschild. After a dispute with United Artists over stock ownership, Schenck and Zanuck negotiated and used their studio to bring the bankrupt
Fox studios in 1935 to create
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. Zanuck was
Vice President of Production of this new studio and took a hands-on approach, closely involving himself in scripts,
film editing, and producing.
World War II When the U.S. entered
World War II at the end of 1941, he was commissioned as a
colonel in the
U.S. Army Signal Corps, but was frustrated to find himself posted to the
Astoria studios in
Queens, New York, serving alongside the spoiled son of Universal's founder,
Carl Laemmle Jr., who was chauffeured by limousine to the facility each morning from a luxury
Manhattan hotel. Appalled by such privileged cosseting, Zanuck stormed down to
Washington, DC, and into the
War Department, demanding a riskier assignment from
Chief of Staff,
General George C. Marshall. Since American forces were not yet fighting anywhere, Marshall had Zanuck posted to
London as chief U.S.
liaison officer to the
British Army film unit, where he would be studying army training films while under
Nazi bombardment by
Hitler's
Luftwaffe. He even persuaded
Lord Mountbatten to allow him along on a secret coastal
raid across the
Channel to occupied France. The daring nighttime attack on a German radar site was a success. Zanuck, sent his wife in
Santa Monica a package of "Nazi-occupied sand", writing her "I've just been swimming on an enemy beach" – not allowed to tell her where he had been, or that they had been under Nazi gunfire and helped the wounded back to the ship. While Zanuck was on duty, 20th Century-Fox, like the other studios, contributed to the war effort by releasing a large number of their male stars for overseas service and many of their female stars for
USO and
war bond tours — while creating patriotic films under the often contentious supervision of a fledgling
Office of War Information. Jack L. Warner, whose studio lot happened to be next door to a
Lockheed factory, was made a colonel in the
Army Air Corps without ever actually having to leave the studio, or on a uniform. Not so Zanuck, who pleaded with the War Department, as soon as American troops were posted for action in
North Africa, and was rewarded with the assignment of covering the invasion for the Signal Corps. Director
John Ford, a longtime adversary of Zanuck despite the latter's having shepherded Ford's
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) past the
censorious Hays office into production, had been making films as a commander in the U.S. Navy even before the U.S. entered the war, and he was horrified to discover himself drafted into Zanuck's Africa unit. "Can't I ever get away from you?" he growled. "I bet if I die and go to heaven, you'll be waiting for me under a sign reading 'Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck'." Ford's chagrin turned to real outrage when Zanuck, after three months, took all their footage from
battles in
Tunisia, most of which Ford had shot, and hastily assembled it into a picture that went into American theaters without Ford's name appearing anywhere. The movie, released as
At The Front with Zanuck credited as producer, was poorly received in the States, called amateurish, dull, and even lacking in realism, prompting the affronted Zanuck to counter in
The New York Times that he had resisted the temptation to stage events for a more convincing film. Unfortunately, this controversy landed Zanuck into a
Senate subcommittee headed by Senator
Harry S. Truman, investigating "instant" colonels who were popping up and concentrating on famous Hollywood names. Unlike Col. Warner, most colonels from the studio system — Col.
Frank Capra, Col.
Anatole Litvak, Col.
Hal Roach—were actually doing their cinematic jobs, often, like Zanuck, under enemy fire. Nonetheless, when Col. Zanuck was named in this investigation in 1944, the usually combative mogul uncharacteristically and abruptly resigned his commission and left the Army. Biographer
Leonard Mosley suggests this to be because of an inadvertent security leak when Zanuck had mentioned a top-secret, brand new, massively powerful bomb the size of a "golf ball" to a fellow officer from his Hollywood world. Whatever the reason, despite having published his own first-person account of his wartime adventures (
The New York Times critic
Bosley Crowther actually liked this book better than the film), he resigned.
Studio head (1944–1956) Zanuck returned to 20th Century-Fox in 1944 a changed man. He avoided the studio and instead read books at home, surrounded by his growing family, and caught up on all the films he had missed while overseas in his private screening room. He did not return to take the reins until
William Goetz, the man Zanuck had left in charge when he went off to war, left for a job at
Universal. Zanuck's tenure in the 1940s and '50s resonated with his astute choices. He first personally rescued a cumbersome cut of
The Song of Bernadette (1943), recutting the completed film into a surprise hit that made a star of newcomer
Jennifer Jones, who won the Oscar. He relented to actor
Otto Preminger's fervent wish to direct a modest thriller called
Laura (1944), casting
Clifton Webb in his Oscar-nominated role as
Gene Tierney's controlling mentor, with
David Raksin's haunting score. Leading theater director
Elia Kazan was carefully nurtured through his first film,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), based on a popular novel. It did so well, he chose Kazan to direct the first studio film on
antisemitism, ''
Gentleman's Agreement'' (1947), with
Gregory Peck playing a
Gentile reporter whose life falls apart due to implacable antisemitism emerging from friends and family when he pretends to be
Jewish for an exposé. After Kazan triumphed in
Tennessee Williams' Broadway hit,
A Streetcar Named Desire, he brought Kazan back to direct
Pinky (1949), another film about
prejudice, this time racial. The scathing theater world of
Bette Davis's aging actress in
All About Eve (1950) went on to win six Oscars at the
Academy Awards; the disturbing questions of a bomber squadron leader
Gregory Peck in ''
Twelve O'Clock High'' (1949) challenged wartime
patriotism. Both showed Zanuck's ability to create box-office hits via brilliant films with unflinching examinations of demanding, hierarchical worlds. Zanuck continued to tackle
social issues other studios would not touch, but he stumbled with
idealistic projects.
Wilson (1944), an expensive picture that was unsuccessful at the box office, and an attempt to make a film of
One World, a memoir by politician
Wendell Willkie of his tour of war-damaged
Europe, a project that was aborted before shooting began.
CinemaScope As
television began to erode Hollywood's audiences in the early 1950s,
widescreen presentation was thought to be a potential solution. The 1950
television set duplicated the near-square shape of the
35 mm format in which all movies were shot—and this was no accident. Standardization of film size meant all theaters everywhere could play all films. Even the projection of film formats—i.e. any attempt to break out of the 35 mm format were under the control of the Hays Office, which limited any wide-screen experiments to the 10 largest cities in America. This severely limited the future of any widescreen format. Zanuck was an early advocate of widescreen projection. One of the first things Zanuck did when he returned to Fox in 1944 was to restart the research on a 50 mm film, shelved in the early 1930s as a cost-cutting measure (a larger-sized film print in the projector meant higher resolution). Impressed by a screening in
Cinerama, a three-
projector widescreen process, unveiled in 1952 that promised to envelop the viewer in a wrap-around image, Zanuck wrote an essay extolling widescreen's virtues, seeing the new formats as a "participatory" form of recreation, rather than mere passive entertainment, such as television. Cinerama was cumbersome, though, and used three (image) projectors simultaneously (plus a 4th projector for sound), potentially a hugely expensive investment. Fox, like every other studio, had rejected Cinerama when the innovative new process was pitched to them for investment. In retrospect, this looked like a mistake, but nothing could be done. Cinerama was no longer for sale. Zanuck now urged the studio to keep the same principle, but find a more feasible approach. He approved a massive investment into a system that would be called
CinemaScope—$10 million in its first year alone. The urgency was increased when an aggressive appliance tycoon and shareholder, Charles Green, began threatening a proxy takeover, claiming the current Fox administration was wasting stockholders' money. He attempted to conspire with Zanuck to oust the New York-based president of Fox since 1942,
Greek-American Spyros Skouras. Zanuck refused; instead, Skouras and he decided to gamble on CinemaScope to save their jobs, and perhaps, their studio. Skouras made a bold announcement in February; Fox not only had a new and vastly more economical and efficient wide-screen process, but all Fox films would be released in CinemaScope—a format which had yet to be perfected.
The Robe (1953), a
Biblical epic, would be its first released feature film. Skouras now began to oversee Fox's somewhat startled research scientists, based on the East Coast and accustomed to Hollywood executives who thought R&D was a waste of money. Then Skouras flew to Paris to meet with a French inventor,
Henri Chrétien, who had created a new lens that just might be suitable. Though Fox shares immediately went up, Green found this an even more damning indication of Zanuck and Skouras's leadership and began readying his proxy fight for the May shareholder meeting. This meant that a CinemaScope process had to be publicly demonstrated to the industry's studios, theater owners, manufacturers, to stockholders and the press—by mid-March, to give them enough time to impress their shareholders with their new product and thus win the proxy fight. With Chrétien's new lens, the Fox engineers pulled it together—a widescreen, Cinerama-like picture projected using only one projector, not three. Zanuck carried out presentations of CinemaScope to the press in cities across the country throughout April, as Skouras and he gathered their forces for the proxy fight. "The enthusiastic response of those who attended these screenings and the laudatory reviews of CinemaScope in the trade press," writes John Belton in his book,
Widescreen (1992), "undoubtedly played a major role in Green's defeat" at the May 5 meeting. CinemaScope's need for a wider screen was because of an
anamorphic lens attached to the camera which, squeezed the image while filming, and another lens on the projector, which reverted the process, widening the image during screening. Implementing this was no easy matter. Directors, cameramen, and production designers were baffled by what to do with all that space. Zanuck encouraged them to spread the action across the screen, to take full advantage of the new proportions. Committed to its all-widescreen slate, Fox had to drop several projects that were deemed unsuitable for CinemaScope—one of them being Elia Kazan's
On the Waterfront (1954), which Zanuck could not visualize being in color and widescreen. (Kazan took the project to
Columbia, which had thus far stayed on the sidelines of the widescreen debate.) The public demonstrations in spring had already included excerpts from
The Robe and
How to Marry a Millionaire (also 1953), a glossy star package with
Marilyn Monroe and
Lauren Bacall. Of the other studios, MGM had immediately abandoned its own attempts and committed to CinemaScope and United Artists and
Walt Disney Productions announced they would make films in the same widescreen process, but the other studios hesitated, and some announced their own rival systems:
Paramount's VistaVision, which would prove a worthy rival, and Warner Bros.'s WarnerScope which vanished overnight. The November 3, 1953, premiere of
The Robe brought Warner Bros. and Columbia around, though Warner's plan had a full slate of
3-D features for 1954 instead. Zanuck began to make compromises, and eventually capitulated. Smaller theaters rented conventional versions of the studio's films; stereo they could live without altogether.
Todd-AO came out in 1955, and after its developer,
Mike Todd, died in 1958, Zanuck invested in the process for Fox's most exclusive
roadshows. Although pictures continued to be shot in CinemaScope until 1967, it ironically became relegated to Fox's conventional releases. Nonetheless, the Battle of the Screens seemed to leave Zanuck emotionally exhausted.
Going independent Following the commercial disappointment of
The Egyptian (1954), in 1956 Zanuck withdrew from the studio and left his wife,
Virginia Fox, to move to Europe and concentrate on independent producing with a generous contract from Fox that gave him directing and casting control on any projects Fox financed. Eventually, in his absence, Fox began to fall to pieces due to the ballooning budget of
Cleopatra (1963), whose entire set constructed at
Pinewood Studios had to be scrapped before shooting even started. Meanwhile, Zanuck picked up a hefty book by
Cornelius Ryan called
The Longest Day, which promised to fulfill his dream of making the definitive film of
D-Day. Flying back to the States, he had to convince a Fox board, staggering under the still-unfinished
Cleopatras $15 million cost, to finance what he was sure would be a box-office hit, as indeed it was, despite skeptics that included his son Richard. He seethed at the $8 million ceiling imposed on him, knowing he would have to dip into his own pocket to finish the film, as he soon did.
Return to Fox Fearing the studio's profligacy would sink his cherished
The Longest Day (1962) as it readied for release, Zanuck returned to control Fox. He replaced
Spyros Skouras as president, who had failed to control perilous cost overruns on the still-unfinished
Cleopatra and had been forced to shelve
Marilyn Monroe's last vehicle, ''
Something's Got to Give'' after principal photography had started, at a loss of $2 million. Zanuck promptly made his son,
Richard D. Zanuck, head of production. Richard quickly displayed his own flair for picking fresh, new hits, helped by his trusted fellow producer,
David Brown. He plucked
Rodgers and Hammerstein's least successful
Broadway show from obscurity and turned it into the highly successful
The Sound of Music (1965), committed to the
science-fiction hit
Planet of the Apes (1968), unleashed maverick director
Robert Altman to create his
antiwar comedy MASH (1970) and hired the little-known
Francis Coppola to write
Patton (1970) into a project for
George C. Scott. However, Zanuck Sr's next all-star World War II film
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) was plagued with production problems from the start. First, director
David Lean pulled out of the
Pearl Harbor retelling, and had to be hastily replaced by
Richard Fleischer; storms destroyed expensive exteriors, closing down production while they were rebuilt; then the Japanese co-director
Akira Kurosawa, miffed by criticism of his early rushes, either really had or merely faked a nervous breakdown before his cast and crew and had to be hospitalized, shutting down production again. When finally finished, the relentlessly authentic film could not disguise its downbeat nature as a chronicle of American defeat, the last thing critics and audiences wanted to revisit at the height of the
Vietnam War in
Asia. As the tumultuous decade wore on, Richard also began to falter with lavish
costume musicals that expensively tanked:
Rex Harrison as the man who could talk to the animals in
Doctor Dolittle (1967),
Julie Andrews in the period film
Star! (1968), and
Barbra Streisand in
Hello Dolly (1969). == Personal life ==