Word: zanuck
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...when Jack Valenti was named the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the studio system was largely intact. Industry pioneers like Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck were still running the companies they had founded. Old lions like Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Charlie Chaplin continued to make pictures. Jerry Lewis, Doris Day and Elvis were starring in their two anodyne movies a year. Virtually all income came from box office receipts and showings on broadcast TV stations. There were no home computers, cable networks, videocassettes or DVDs. No four-letter word had been spoken...
...return to the studio system of the '30s and '40s, when the front-office men were first-generation shtarkers, fresh from the rag trade, who ran movie production like an assembly line, up to 50 features each year, and never took no for an answer. (The biography of Darryl Zanuck, production chief at Warners and then 20th Century-Fox, was titled Don't Say Yes Until I Finish Talking.) Today's executives must look back on that so-called Golden Age with the lost-Eden ache of an antebellum plantation master or ball club owner from the days before free...
...Godard movies, Richard Linklater is not a film snob. He just likes to make movies. "I would have loved to have been a '40s studio director like Vincente Minnelli. You ended up with a real diverse career," says Linklater. "Now you don't get a call from Darryl Zanuck saying, 'Come do this movie on Monday.' So you have to do it on your own." He has already checked off teen flick (Dazed and Confused), western (The Newton Boys), romance (Before Sunrise), sequel (Before Sunset), animation (Waking Life), sci-fi (A Scanner Darkly, due in 2006), filmed play (Tape...
...shrewdest analysts of the industry are directors without intellectual pretensions. Henry Hathaway (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer; True Grit) watches Darryl Zanuck turn misogynism into money: "In the early days we always had as a leading man . . . elegant, fashionable men who had good speaking voices. And Darryl said . . . 'Women love bums!' He took all the heavies; Bogey was a heavy; when he picked Clark Gable, Gable was playing a heavy . . . Richard Widmark . . . was the worst . . . heavy in the world . . . And it's still true. Look at the Burt Reynolds and the Clint Eastwoods and all of that crap coming...
...often said, "Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan." It is odd that among the multiparents of Mogul Spielberg, no mention was made of Richard Zanuck and David Brown, who introduced Spielberg to the world of feature motion pictures by producing Spielberg's first two feature-length films, the acclaimed Sugarland Express and the legendary Jaws. We need no recognition for ourselves, but Zanuck/Brown might have had at least a footnote in your cover story. Richard D. Zanuck David Brown New York City America's Changing Face...