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George Frederick Custen

Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck And The Culture Of Hollywood Hardcover – November 28, 1997

by George F. Custen (Author)

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Spanning four decades and more than a thousand films, the creative output of Darryl D. Zanuck was astonishing and unparalleled. With The Jazz Singer he supervised the innovation of film sound. With The Public Enemy and Little Caesar he reinvented the gangster film. With 42nd Street he reinvigorated the musical. He set the standard for film biography with pictures such as Young Mr. Lincoln and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell . He innovated CinemaScope. And he molded the star images of James Cagney, Shirley Temple, Tyrone Power, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and Rin Tin Tin.In this major new biography, George F. Custen illuminates Zanuck's evolution into one of the most influential producers in American film. He explains what set him apart from rivals Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick, how he developed the gritty realism that came to redefine motion pictures, and how he brilliantly predicted and capitalized on changing public tastes.Zanuck was a man of enormous energy and eccentricity, commanding his studio with a sawed-off polo mallet. Dozens of his memorable films—including I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang , The Grapes of Wrath, Gentleman's Agreement, All About Eve, The Day the Earth Stood Still , and The Robe —have come to represent the era in which they were made. Hard-boiled or nostalgic, historical or pure Hollywood, Zanuck's films and Zanuck himself have become legends of the cinema. But what exactly was this producer's contribution to the films he made? How did he rise from being a writer of silent serials to become head of production at Warner Brothers by his mid-twenties, and then to form his own studio, Twentieth Century-Fox at age thirty-three?Twentieth Century's Fox tells the whole story—from Zanuck's boyhood to his tumultuous years with the feuding Warners, his battles with the censors and with his own actors, and the legendary acting-out of scenes during story conferences in his famous green office. Along the way, Custen treats us to inside stories about actors such as Edward G. Robinson, Gregory Peck, and Marilyn Monroe. In never-before-published story conference notes, telegrams, and surprisingly candid anecdotes, he reveals how—more than any producer before or since—this diminutive, enigmatic fellow from Wahoo, Nebraska, changed the way we look at film.Custen highlights the studio as the context of production. Zanuck's ability to shape the producer's role and the organizational style during the golden years of the studio system—with its own peculiar methods, clearly delineated rules, and pecking order—was the crucible out of which he forged a unique vision of American film and American culture.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Basic Books
Publication date

November 28, 1997
Dimensions

6.75 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10

046507619X
ISBN-13

978-0465076192
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Unfairly remembered as a vulgar, cigar-chomping mogul, producer Darryl F. Zanuck (1902-79) gets his due in this perceptive biography. Film historian George F. Custen analyzes Zanuck's role in shaping gritty, urban-oriented movies such as The Public Enemy that made Warner Brothers' reputation in the 1920s and '30s. Discussing Zanuck's career at 20th Century Fox, Custen emphasizes Zanuck's nurturing of socially conscious films such as Gentleman's Agreement, wisely relegating to a brief epilogue the later years of his physical and mental decline. This intelligent appraisal doubles as a cogent history of the Hollywood studio system.

From Library Journal

Zanuck is one of Hollywood's most fascinating characters: an uneducated Midwesterner who became a brilliantly intuitive writer and editor for Warner Brothers, the man who ran 20th Century-Fox for 20 years, a gentile in a business dominated by Jewish moguls, and a great shaper of popular culture. Custen (Bio-Pics, Rutgers Univ., 1992) considers him, along with MGM's Irving Thalberg, "the most important and most influential producer in the history of the American cinema." He claims that Zanuck has never received his full due from historians because of his crude and abrasive personality and marshals plenty of evidence to support his claim. This is not a full-length biography. Custen chooses to concentrate on the intricacies of movie-making, and the story in effect stops with Zanuck's 1956 departure from Hollywood for a short-lived career of independent filmmaking in France. Use of archival material marks it as an important study, but by no means is it the last word on Zanuck.?Thomas J. Wiener, editor, "Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An effective, in-depth evaluation of the life and work of the master movie mogul. One increasingly circulated variation on the auteur theory holds that certain remarkable producers, like Zanuck, have had a profound shaping influence on the movies they oversaw. But even in these terms, Zanuck enjoyed a remarkable, perhaps unique career. With close to 1,000 movies to his credit, he painstakingly crafted (working at an extraordinary level of detail) an unprecedented string of noteworthy--and usually successful--films, from All About Eve to The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. As Custen (Performing Arts/CUNY, Staten Island) notes, Zanuck ``would not give up the belief that although filmmaking was a collaborative enterprise, ultimately he and he alone possessed the judgment to successfully run the machinery of storytelling and to regulate the enterprise surrounding it.'' Zanuck was also responsible for any number of cinematic milestones. From the first major talkie, The Jazz Singer, to the first gangster movies, to Cinemascope, he had a sixth sense for surprising the public with its own unsuspected wants. As Custen demonstrates, Zanuck, an artiste among businessmen, was quite unlike any of the other men who ran studios. He came to Hollywood during the Silent Era, vaguely determined to be a writer. His real break came with his creation of the Rin Tin Tin series. From there he giddily ascended to the control of his own studio at the age of 31, a position he maintained until he was in his 50s, when in the fit of a middle-age crisis he moved to Europe and pursued a peripatetic and priapic existence, producing occasional movies as the mood took him. While Custen's story has great legs, his writing suffers from feet of clay--he can't resist constantly repeating himself. Nonetheless, a significant reappraisal of a major, often neglected, moviemaker. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

Custen claims that Zanuck's famously vulgar personality--he loved tabloid lingo and extramarital sex in the office--has eclipsed the fact that he also broke new ground in Hollywood films, tackling serious issues like poverty, racism, and anti-Semitism long before it was fashionable to do so. But by down-playing Zanuck's foibles, Custen diminishes the wild contradictions that made him such a fascinating man. -- Entertainment Weekly

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; First Edition, First Printing (November 28, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 046507619X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465076192
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.75 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.75 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,261,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,925 in Video Direction & Production (Books)
- #2,177 in Movie Direction & Production
- #5,216 in Movie History & Criticism

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4.7 7 ratings

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babyboomerlarry

Nitpicker

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 4, 2013

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The narrative starts out slow and boring. It is as if the author is trying to turn it into a scholarly presentation. Well, it's a biography. Zanuck himself would tear it to shreds and do a rewrite. After 90 pages, when the author gets into the facts of the movies Zanuck helped bring to screen along with the behind-the-scenes machinations, does the book come alive. The last thirty or so pages also hold little interest. The author needs to learn a lesson- when you have nothing to say, don't say it.

So, the book is very informative for about the 65% middle. From that, you will learn alot about how the Zanuck ego made Hollywood history.

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C. Landry

Darryl F. Zanuck

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 31, 2016

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A wonderful overview of director Darryl F. Zanuck !

4 people found this helpful

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HighSierra49er

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 14, 2015

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Excellent reading on one of the original Hollywood studio moguls.

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anonym

Für Film- und Hollywood-Geschichte unentbehrlich.

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on June 15, 2017

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Sehr gut recherchiertes und interessantes Buch über die Geschichte von Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, das Hollywood-Studio-System und Filmwesen. Kurzweilig!

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Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck And The Culture Of Hollywood Hardcover – November 28, 1997

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