Word: zanucks
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Seberg. Olivia de Havilland, et al.-leads a stuffy, bourgeois life. Fine old Gary Grant is now living in Darryl Zanuck's Left Bank house, where his evening routine is dinner and television...
Tackles & Buttons. As the movies flourished, so did the hotel. Its patrons built their homes around it: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford set their Pickfair high in the hills above it, so did Barrymore, Harold Lloyd and Tom Mix. Will Rogers and Darryl Zanuck played polo nearby, stopped so often at the hotel bar that it was and is still called the Polo Lounge. There were off-screen sporting events: Tom Mix once was sent to the carpet in a flying tackle by an autograph hound; Cartoonist George McManus unscrewed a button marked "Press" from a men's room...
...beautifully directed.' Then he wrote to me to say 'Your services are terminated.' The actors are almost more upset than I am. They gave three goddam good performances and, badly cut, they'll be ruined. In my film, the background remains background, but Mr. Zanuck is already yelling about bigger battles. That's the kind of background he likes...
With that, Zanuck launched his counterattack. "Remember," he proclaimed, "I'm a practical picturemaker, not a fool. I have done my duty to my corporation and-yes-to myself." Mankiewicz, he said, was fired because he demanded full control over Cleopatra, a right Zanuck feels must be reserved for himself. Worse, Mankiewicz wasted vast amounts of money-$7,500,000 by Zanuck's reckoning: Richard Burton worked only one of the first 17 weeks he spent in Rome; Roddy McDowall was called to the set only once in four months; sets were built at hurry-up costs, then...
...Cleopatra, Zanuck said, the key scenes are fine but the continuity and, in some places, the photography are disappointing. A "more or less drastic" editing is needed before it can be released in mid-May. "I can't afford the luxury of more talk," Zanuck says. "Interest on the $35 million the picture has consumed amounts to $7,000 a day. Completing work on it will cost a couple million more." Then, assuring all who would listen that Mankiewicz is still welcome "for debates and conversations about what I do to the film," Zanuck retreated to the consolations...