Darryl F. Zanuck

Producer

  • Born: September 5, 1902
  • Birthplace: Wahoo, Nebraska
  • Died: December 22, 1979
  • Place of death: Palm Springs, California

American film producer

As the head of production at two major Hollywood studios, Zanuck was the youngest, fiercest, and most flamboyant of the tycoons who controlled the American film industry.

Areas of achievement Film, business and industry

Early Life

Darryl F. Zanuck (ZAN-ehk) was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, a town of two thousand inhabitants, thirty-five miles west of Omaha. His mother, Louise, was the daughter of Henry Torpin, the owner of Wahoo’s only hotel, and was a descendant of the legendary English outlaw Dick Turpin. His father, Frank Zanuck, a former Iowa farm boy of Swiss heritage, worked as a night clerk in the Wahoo hotel.

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Zanuck’s father had a problem with gambling and alcoholism, which drove Louise away from him. She moved to the area around Los Angeles, where she remarried. At that time she invited her seven-year-old son to join her. Zanuck alternated living with his mother and stepfather (with whom he did not get along) in California and with his grandparents in Nebraska until he was able to pass the Army physical examination. He passed on September 4, 1916, one day before his fourteenth birthday, having lied about his age.

Zanuck’s career in the Army lasted two years. He was shipped overseas after the United States entered World War I. Zanuck was sent to the front lines but was saved from actual combat by the armistice. He returned to Nebraska, but he stayed only a few days. Zanuck wanted to be a writer and thought that California was the place to start.

While continuing to write short stories, which he hoped to sell to pulp magazines, Zanuck tried an assortment of odd jobs eighteen in one year in the Los Angeles area. After several of his stories were sold, Zanuck realized he could make more money by writing screenplays for motion pictures. He found work as a gag writer for several Hollywood comics (including Mack Sennett, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin) before teaming up with director Mal St. Clair to make two-reelers for the Film Booking Offices of America (which later became RKO) and Universal Studios.

Zanuck and St. Clair, both of them young and ambitious, happened to see a German shepherd named Rinty in Where the North Begins (1923). Thinking the dog wonderful but the film terrible, they convinced the film’s producers, Jack and Harry Warner, that they could do better. The result was a six-picture contract at the Warner Bros. studio for both screenwriter (Zanuck) and director (St. Clair), which led to a series of hits starring the dog, renamed Rin Tin Tin.

The Warners’ studio, which at the time was approaching bankruptcy, was badly in need of someone like Zanuck. He could write scripts faster and better than anyone else around, and he was a source of new ideas and new energy at the studio. In 1924, Zanuck married Virginia Fox, an actress who had appeared with Buster Keaton. He was on his way up in Hollywood.

Life’s Work

By 1925, Zanuck was earning one thousand dollars a week as the top screenwriter at Warner Bros. When the studio’s head of production was fired that year, Zanuck knew the job would be his. He demanded a salary of five thousand dollars a week and got it.

At age twenty-three, Zanuck was the youngest head of production in Hollywood. He looked even younger than his age: He stood only five feet six inches, and was slim and trim at 140 pounds. To look older, he grew a thin mustache and took to smoking large cigars. Always self-confident, Zanuck became even more self-assured in his new position. There was a distinctive air of authority about him, enhanced by a swaggering walk and a sawed-off polo mallet swinging in his hands. His voice retained the nasal Nebraska twang of his youth, but it was a voice that commanded respect and attention.

As head of production, Zanuck ultimately was responsible for all motion pictures released by Warner Bros. He did not take this responsibility lightly, and he plunged himself into all aspects writing, casting, directing, editing, and more of dozens of films each year. He is credited with introducing numerous innovations.

For example, when The Jazz Singer (1927) was in production, it was Zanuck who urged the use of spoken dialogue, not only singing, in the film. The result thanks also to A1 Jolson’s dynamic screen presence was a hit that ended the era of silent pictures. It was also Zanuck who started the cycle of gangster films at Warner Bros., with Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931); it was Zanuck who was credited with creating the grapefruit-shoving scene in the latter film.

Zanuck was about to start a new cycle of musicals beginning with 42nd Street (1933) when he quarreled with Jack Warner about the necessity of salary cuts during the Depression. He resigned his post as head of production on April 15, 1933.

A person of Zanuck’s talent, however, could not remain idle for long. Joseph Schenck, a longtime Hollywood producer, offered Zanuck the position of production chief at a new studio called Twentieth Century Films. Zanuck accepted. Two years later, when the new studio merged with the failing Fox Films, he was named vice president in charge of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, a position he would hold until 1956.

In his first years at Twentieth Century-Fox, Zanuck was not as bold as he had been at Warner Bros. Shirley Temple was the studio’s biggest star in the 1930’s, and Zanuck dared not alter the formula that had made her Hollywood’s biggest box-office attraction. Zanuck also produced so many costumed romantic epics that the studio earned the sobriquet “Sixteenth Century Fox.”

By 1940, Twentieth Century-Fox was on solid enough ground for Zanuck to try more challenging productions. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941) were two films that some people had thought too radical for a major Hollywood studio.

In 1942, Zanuck was commissioned a colonel in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was sent overseas to make films for the war effort. He took part in the invasion of North Africa before resigning his commission in May, 1943. He returned to Twentieth Century-Fox and embarked on an even more adventurous program of filmmaking.

Under Zanuck’s leadership, Twentieth Century-Fox became known as a studio that was not afraid to address problems such as anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947), insanity and mental institutions (The Snake Pit, 1948), racial prejudice (Pinky, 1949, and No Way Out, 1950), and the psychological pressures of war (Twelve O’Clock High, 1949).

As a result of a variety of factors including the advent of television, the effect of a Supreme Court decision against the major studios, and demographic changes in the population of the United States the filmgoing audience began to dwindle in the 1950’s. In response, Twentieth Century-Fox produced the first wide-screen film, The Robe (1953). This new process, called CinemaScope, was not, however, enough to stop the inevitable decline of Hollywood’s fortunes.

On March 22, 1956, at the age of fifty-three, Zanuck left his wife and family and resigned as head of production to start his own independent company, DFZ Productions, operating out of Paris. Over the next five years, Zanuck produced only five films, none of them particularly successful. DFZ’s parent corporation, Twentieth Century-Fox, was not doing much better. In 1962, as Zanuck was on his way to developing a big hit, The Longest Day, Twentieth Century-Fox was being forced into bankruptcy by continually escalating costs in its production of Cleopatra (1963). A major battle of stockholders was under way, and Zanuck was in the thick of it. On July 25, 1962, the company’s board of directors ousted Spyros Skouras as president and elected Zanuck as his replacement. Zanuck promptly named his son, Richard, as head of production.

The success of The Longest Day (1962) was sufficient to get Twentieth Century-Fox back on its feet. Under Richard Zanuck’s guidance, other hits followed, notably The Sound of Music (1965) and Planet of the Apes(1968). Zanuck, working in New York as chair of the board, missed the creative side of the studio and perhaps also was jealous of his son’s position. On December 29, 1970, Zanuck fired Richard and took control of the studio. The move, however, backfired. Several major stockholders declared war against Zanuck and on May 18, 1971, he was forced to resign as chair of the board. He kept only the honorary title of president emeritus.

Zanuck was reunited with his wife in January, 1974, on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He was no longer working, and his health declined quickly over the next five years. Following a heart attack in October, 1979, he died of pneumonia on December 22, 1979.

Significance

From the 1920’s through the 1950’s, the American film industry was controlled largely by a handful of individuals who ran the major Hollywood studios with an iron hand: Louis B. Mayer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Jack Warner at Warner Bros., Harry Cohn at Columbia, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox. Of this group of studio heads, Zanuck was the youngest, fiercest, and most flamboyant. Unlike some of the others, who preferred quiet anonymity, Zanuck relished his public image as a big-time Hollywood producer. With his ever-present cigar and a lovely (preferably young) actress at his side, Zanuck became the quintessential Hollywood mogul in the minds of many Americans.

However, there was much more to Zanuck than surface image. He had started out as a screenwriter and knew the motion-picture business from top to bottom. More than any other producer, he was able to immerse himself in all aspects of production; he knew (with a sixth sense) the best way to write, cast, edit, and direct the films released by his studio. He is the only producer to have won the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award three times.

During Zanuck’s reign in Hollywood, there were two major developments in motion-picture technology: sound films in the 1920’s and wide-screen films in the 1950’s. It is not surprising that Zanuck played a pivotal role in presenting both of these innovations to the public. He was fearless, energetic, and intelligent. He used these attributes to make the best films he could during the best years of the American film industry.

The era of the all-powerful movie mogul who controlled the release of several dozen films a year was over. By outliving his rivals, Zanuck was the last of this distinctively American breed: the last of the Hollywood tycoons.

Bibliography

Campbell, Russell. “The Ideology of the Social Consciousness Movie: Three Films of Darryl F. Zanuck.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3 (Winter, 1978): 49-71. Discusses Zanuck’s role in producing The Grapes of Wrath, Gentleman’s Agreement, and Pinky. These three films are seen as epitomizing Hollywood’s concern for social issues.

Custen, George Frederick. Twentieth-Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Not a full-scale biography, but instead focuses on Zanuck’s years at the studio and the intricacies of filmmaking.

Dunne, John Gregory. The Studio. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Dunne spent a year observing all aspects of life (from top executives down to stagehands) at Twentieth Century-Fox. The result is one of the most fascinating and revealing looks at an old-style Hollywood studio.

Guild, Leo. Zanuck: Hollywood’s Last Tycoon. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1970. A breezy, popular biography of Zanuck, but with a fair assessment of his motion-picture career within the larger context of the Hollywood studio system.

Gussow, Mel. Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Written with Zanuck’s cooperation, but (according to Gussow) not an “authorized biography.” Because Zanuck talked to Gussow more than to anyone else, this is an invaluable resource for understanding Zanuck’s point of view.

Mosley, Leonard. Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. This is the most thorough and carefully researched biography of Zanuck to date. Mosley makes a special effort to understand Zanuck’s personality, particularly his competitiveness and his view of women as objects to be conquered sexually.

Schrank, Joseph. “Facing Zanuck.” American Heritage 35 (December, 1983): 40-44. A brief but revealing firsthand account of working with Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox on the film Song of the Islands (1942).

Ziebold, Norman. The Moguls. New York: Coward-McCann, 1969. This history of film tycoons includes a chapter on Zanuck and Twentieth Century-Fox. It emphasizes the fact that Zanuck was a Gentile in a business that was dominated by Jewish immigrants.

1901-1940: 1933: Forty-Second Street Defines 1930’s Film Musicals; February 27, 1935: Temple Receives a Special Academy Award; March 31, 1939: Sherlock Holmes Film Series Begins.

1941-1970: March 30, 1955: On the Waterfront Wins Best Picture.