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Darryl Zanuck
May 26, 2005
  Fox's master storyteller was a hands-on mogul.
By Stephen Galloway The headline seems almost routine: "$5,000 Weekly to Zanuck by Warners," it reads, followed by an article informing readers that then-Warner Bros. production chief Darryl F. Zanuck was getting a $1,500-per-week raise, from his previous weekly salary of $3,500. But the date, Dec. 15, 1932, shows how far from routine this was. As America was mired in the Great Depression, Zanuck, at only 30 years old, was earning a salary most of his compatriots could barely dream of. More important, he had the power to go with it. If Hollywood lore has singled out Irving Thalberg as its boy wonder of choice, the young Zanuck was no less of one. (Ironically, Zanuck would become the first recipient of the Academy's Thalberg Award, years later.) Hired by Warners as a writer for Rin Tin Tin in the 1920s, after serving in World War I, Zanuck had begun his career as a Yuccatone hair tonic salesman. He quickly rose to become the Burbank-based studio's head of production, playing a part in the era's single greatest revolution -- perhaps the greatest revolution in the history of film -- the shift to sound, when he supervised Warners' biggest gamble, "The Jazz Singer." It was Zanuck whose gritty realism helped define the gangster film, which gave Warners its singular identity with pictures from "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" to "Public Enemy" to "Little Caesar." And it was Jack L. Warner's recognition of it that led to the pay raise reported in this paper, one of the very first references to Zanuck in the fledgling trade press. In giving him his raise, perhaps Warner wanted to ensure that Zanuck would not jump ship; if so, he failed. Two years later, Zanuck exited Warners when it refused him an ownership share, forming a new entity, 20th Century, which would later merge with Fox to become 20th Century-Fox. By the mid-'30s, before the merger had even taken place, Zanuck was so successful that the numbers in The Hollywood Reporter had risen from the thousands to the millions. "Two Million Profit to Date for Zanuck," reads a headline from March 1934. At 20th Century-Fox, Zanuck would go from being a mere success to a legend. During the next four decades, headlines would chart his reign as he oversaw movies from "The Oxbow Incident" to "How Green Was My Valley" to "All About Eve," in each case taking a hands-on involvement in their production that made him almost unique among studio executives. He briefly left the studio to become an independent producer in the late 1950s, experiencing a succession of flops before he scored a giant hit with "The Longest Day," then returned when Fox was on the verge of collapse in the early 1960s after the $44 million "Cleopatra" nearly killed it. As the 1960s got under way, Zanuck's position became more fragile. At one point, in a bid to preserve himself, he even fired his son Richard (later an Oscar-winning producer), whom he had hired to supervise production. He in turn was ousted when his golden touch seemed to wane at the dawn of the 1970s, the last of the moguls who had bridged the silent era into sound. If Thalberg remained quintessentially a man of the shadows, Zanuck was out there in the spotlight, and his flamboyance has made him the very archetype of a studio chief, a man for whom the word "mogul" seems to have been invented. Small in stature, he seemed forever accompanied by a large cigar, not to mention a retinue of some of the world's most beautiful women. His firmness was the stuff of legend. It gave Robert Evans the title of his autobiography, "The Kid Stays in the Picture," when Zanuck insisted that the then-actor remain in "The Sun Also Rises" after his co-stars had objected. And it also gave rise to that possibly apocryphal line, used as the title of a biography by the late Mel Gussow: "Don't Say Yes Until I Finish Talking." What made Zanuck distinct, though, was more than his larger-than-life personality. It was a sense of story that earned him the respect of many creative players who worked for him. His penchant for strong tales led him to make such bold movies as "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Gentleman's Agreement," the Oscar-winning exploration of anti-Semitism that the other studio chiefs -- all Jewish, unlike himself -- were afraid to touch. And it was this story sense that Orson Welles noted at Zanuck's 1979 funeral. "Many are hailed as leaders and giants of this industry," he said. "Few have deserved that description, and none deserves it more than Darryl Zanuck. ... His first commitment was always to the story. To Darryl, that is what it was to make a film -- to tell a story. God bless him for that."
More coverage:
 The first moguls: Hollywood's studio pioneers
Harry Cohn
Walt Disney
Carl Laemmle
Louis B. Mayer
Jack Warner
Darryl Zanuck
Adolph Zukor
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