Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,489

This is the grave of Darryl Zanuck.

Born in 1902 in the ridiculously named town of Wahoo, Nebraska, Zanuck moved with his mother to Los Angeles in 1908. The reason for the move is that young Darryl had bad health and the family evidently had enough money to do the health tourism thing that was common at that time. However, when his father, still back in Nebraska, found out that his son was working as an extra in the movies, he was furious and forced at least his son to return to that lovely, lovely state. Not sure if the mother came back too. In any case, the kid’s health improved and he managed to lie about his age in 1917 and get into the Army to fight in World War I, despite being only 15 years old. He was in the Nebraska National Guard and was sent to France.

Zanuck had remembered his Hollywood time. He was young and wanted more adventure when he got back from Europe. He had decided he wanted to be a writer and he went back to Hollywood and started writing for the movies. He was pretty successful for this almost immediately. He started selling stories by 1922 to people such as Irving Thalberg. There were some plagiarism allegations toward him in these early scripts and I am not sure of their validity, but figured I’d mention it.

Mack Sennett hired Zanuck to write a bunch of his series and then the young writer moved onto the Warner Brothers, where he wrote a bunch of the Rin Tin Tin movies. He also married Virginia Fox in 1924. As you can see, she is also buried here. She was a pretty significant silent actor. The grave claims she was born in 1906, but this is disputed. It doesn’t really matter I guess. She didn’t work much after she married Zanuck, her last film being in 1926.

It really did not take long for Zanuck to become Zanuck the Legend. In 1933, he decided Jack Warner wasn’t paying him enough. That was hardly unusual for that cheap bastard to hold the purse strings tight on his work. But Zanuck wasn’t just some actor. He told Warner to stick it and with Joseph Schenck formed a rival, 20th Century Pictures. Louis Mayer bankrolled it to some extent too. The studio was immediately successful, setting box office records for an independent, with such films as Les Miserables and The House of Rothschild. Then he bought the bankrupt Fox Studios in 1935 and 20th Century Fox was born. Warner would never be as dominant as he was before he pissed off Zanuck. Sometimes that comes back to bite you.

Zanuck was an extremely hands on production man, for better or for worse. Naturally, he often drove the directors and producers below him crazy, but he didn’t care much about that either. He really wanted military service during World War II and volunteered but found himself annoyed to not being taken seriously and shoved into producing movies for the Army, even if he was commissioned as a colonel in the Signal Corps. He told off George C. Marshall (which he had the ego to do) and demanded a real assignment. So Marshall, wanting to be rid of this troublemaker, sent him to London to work with military films there. That put him on John Ford’s unit. Ford kind of hated Zanuck for the same reason everyone else did–he was annoyed by the mogul’s interference and so this drove Ford nuts, but they managed to make it work, more or less. Zanuck got caught up in Harry Truman’s ridiculous “I’m going to make a name for myself by investigating waste in the military” crusade, which of course worked for the future vice-president and president. Zanuck was angry, as were many others, that Ford’s film At the Front, about the war in Tunisia, was not propaganda enough. Truman believed that a bunch of rich guys were getting easy officer positions. Zanuck was so disgusted at being hauled before Truman’s committee that he resigned his commission and went back to Hollywood.

Zanuck took a little time off from Fox and then came back with a vengeance. The mid-40s were a great time for the studio. Classics such as Laura, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentelmen’s Agreement, Twelve O’Clock High, All About Eve and many other films came out under Zanuck’s leadership. We can certainly discuss the relationship between studio heads and films; in the era of the auteur director that has mostly held since the late 60s (probably less today in Superhero Comic Book Fantasy Land Where I Write Fan Fiction About Having Sex with My Favorite Corporate IP but still), studio heads are seen as less important then they were back then. But there’s a good case to make, for instance, that Elia Kazan might not have become the major director he did without Zanuck’s close mentorship. On the other hand, I am sure that Zanuck got in the way of very good directors that he stopped from making films that would have been great but we will never know. Such is the way of these things. Other films over the years that Zanuck promoted heavily included The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Snake Pit, Pinky, and other films with a social edge that was not easy to pull off in the Hays Code era. Overall, Zanuck was nominated for 15 Oscars for his production and won 3 times, for How Green Was My Valley in 1941, Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947, and All About Eve, in 1950. Worthy films, all.

Worried about the rise of television, Zanuck helped promote the widescreen projection system that was developed to compete with it. Unfortunately, Zanuck went so all in that he only started releasing films that could fill the space. Kazan had to take On the Waterfront to Columbia, for example, but Zanuck didn’t see the future of a character driven black and white film in Cinemascope. Instead, he went all in on the bloated, ponderous films of the late 50s and early 60s that demonstrated the sharp limits of the studio system, such as Cleopatra and his dream project, The Longest Day, which should have been retitled The Longest Film. He also started dating young starlets that had no talent or did not have good enough English to fill the leading roles Zanuck wanted to give them. It got pretty embarrassing. Zanuck had promoted his son Richard, who actually was mostly pretty successful, but in the backlash to Darryl’s terrible girlfriend films, they had a huge fight, Darryl denounced his son, and the family broke off relations for awhile. Zanuck was finally fired, the last of the old studio heads to be ousted.

It is worth noting as well that Zanuck was the Harvey Weinstein of his day. He forced all sorts of young starlets to sleep with him if they wanted to work. He was a very gross man. This got Zanuck back in the news for awhile during the Weinstein trial. Zanuck was particularly noted for flashing his junk at women. Gross. Just gross.

Things got a little better toward the end. Richard was back in the fold and worked with his father at Universal to make The Sting, which is nothing if not preeminently entertaining at the very least.

Zanuck died of pneumonia, exacerbated by his cigar habit, in 1979. He was 77 years old.

Darryl Zanuck is buried in Westwood Memorial Park, Westwood, California.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with How Green Was My Valley, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Donald Crisp is in Glendale, California and John Ford is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.