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There was an appreciative laugh from the audience. Darryl Zanuck continued the introductions. “At the end of the table, a man—I worked for him once, I overthrew him once, I took the company away from him once, and now he’s working for me, but I still have the greatest affection for him, Mr. Spyros Skouras.”

Spyros Skouras did not move a muscle.

Each stockholder attending the meeting had been provided with a thirty-two-page four-color annual report which attested to Twentieth Century Fox’s robust financial health.
The Sound of Music
, with a gross approaching $100 million, was the most successful film in motion picture history, there were over thirty other feature films in various stages of production, and the television department had ten shows totaling nine hours of prime-time viewing on the network airwaves. Gross revenues of the company were $227,259,000 for fiscal 1966, earnings before taxes $23,763,000, net earnings after taxes $12,504,000, earnings per share of stock $4.28. Richard Zanuck’s salary was $150,000 with an additional $150,000 a year deferred; one television producer was being paid $435,000 a year, another $365,000 a year.

With the reading of the financial statement, the meeting was thrown open for questions. There were no complaints from the stockholders. A resolution was introduced
praising Darryl Zanuck for his running of the company. Less than two hours after it began, the annual meeting of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation was adjourned.

Five years before, the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation had been flat on its back. In 1962, Fox lost $39.8 million after taxes, and in the three preceding years the company had lost an additional $48.5 million in feature film production. To keep itself going, the Studio had sold 260 of its 334 acres just outside Beverly Hills to the Aluminum Company of America for $43 million. In Rome, production had started on
Cleopatra
, which began to sop up money faster than Fox could pour it in. The Studio was dying. Bankruptcy threatened, the sound stages were closed, the parking lots were empty. Spyros Skouras was fired as president, and Darryl Zanuck, after first threatening a proxy fight, was elected to take his place and save the sinking ship.

The reversal of fortunes of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation had long interested me, for the vicissitudes of that studio seemed to suggest not only the
modus operandi
of all studios, of all motion picture people, but something else as well: I had the feeling that by spending some time at the Studio I could get close to the texture of life in the subtropical abstraction that used to be called The Motion Picture Capital of the World; that by watching motion picture people at work I could see and perhaps understand their ethic. I had been exposed to the motion picture industry at oblique angles ever since I arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, and some of its working arrangements seemed to me far
more magical than that glamour for which the Industry was noted: there was the way in which failure escalated the possibilities of success, the way in which price bore no relation to demand. There was the way in which millions of dollars were gambled on ephemeral, unpredictable and, uncomfortably often, invalid ideas of marketability. There was the way that many, perhaps most, people in the Industry remained unconscious of their own myths and superstitions. There was the Eldorado mood of life in the capital, the way in which social and economic fortunes could shoot up or plummet down, as in a mining boom town, on no more than rumors, the hint of a rich vein, the gossip that the lode was played out.

All this seemed interesting to me, and not entirely for its own sake: the truly absorbing aspect of the motion picture ethic, of course, is that it affects not only motion picture people but almost everyone alive in the United States today. By adolescence, children have been programmed with a set of responses and life lessons learned almost totally from motion pictures, television and the recording industry. It is difficult to banish the notion of one’s own life situations as part of a scenario, appropriately scored: “Lara’s Theme” for an ill-starred love, “Colonel Bogey’s March” for indomitable courage, “Waltzing Mathilda” for bittersweet apocalypse. Few situations fail to evoke a cinematic response; in matters of principle we play
High Noon
, in renunciation scenes
Casablanca
. (“Walter, Barton T. Keyes is a great man,” Edward G. Robinson says about himself to Fred MacMurray in
Double Indemnity
, and whenever I am feeling particularly pleased with myself, the line
comes back.) In pictures, there is no problem without a solution: the Mafia has been cut down to size at every studio from Burbank to Culver City; Gregory Peck has personally taken on anti-Semitism, the Bomb, and Southern bigotry, licked them all, and we all feel, however spuriously, the better for it.

Movies, moreover, have given most Americans their entire fix on how other Americans live. How many of us grew up thinking of the medical profession in terms of
Not As a Stranger
, of the literary life as
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
, of heroin addiction as
The Man with the Golden Arm?
The South was
Gone with the Wind
, and later
The Long Hot Summer;
the Catholic priesthood,
Going My Way
. For the socially mobile, movies have constituted an infinitely accessible, if infinitely inaccurate, primer in traditional social behavior. This very inaccuracy of social milieu in Hollywood pictures—the rich in Southampton do not wear white dinner jackets in the summer (
From the Terrace
), United States Senators do not drive Rolls-Royces (
Seven Days in May
), army officers do not salute as if they are hailing a cab, nor do they allow enlisted men to call them by their first names (any picture about the military)—seemed to suggest that Hollywood lives at a considerable remove from the rest of the society, lives and thrives entirely on its own myths. In some ways Hollywood seemed a perfect example of a closed and inbred society, and the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, not long ago on the brink of ruin, now the most successful studio in Hollywood, itself shored up by all the basic tenets of the Industry, seemed the best place to observe it in action.

And so, some time ago, I arranged to follow the Studio’s
activities over the course of a single year, to see how some of the people there got along, got ahead, fell behind, stayed in place, and, above all, fabricated the myth. What I hoped to find at the end of that year was something of the state of mind called Hollywood.

The day I arrived in the small austere lobby of Fox’s administration building in Los Angeles, an elderly Studio policeman stood guard behind a glassed enclosure, examining each person entering the building before pressing a button opening the door into the Studio’s inner sanctum. Beside him was a clipboard on which was written:

Richard Zanuck’s office is just across the hall from his father’s, but at that time, the elder Zanuck had not once returned to Hollywood since he had taken over the Studio. He preferred to remain in New York where the books are kept and the financial decisions made, leaving
the picture making to his son. The suite occupied by Richard Zanuck is cavernous. It is dark-paneled and on the wall hang art department sketches of forthcoming Fox productions. Behind his desk, in a gold frame, there is a color photograph of his ex-wife, Lili, and their two daughters, Virginia and Janet, as well as two pairs of bronzed baby shoes. There is no hint of show business in the office, no framed
Variety
headlines, no pictures of movie stars with fulsome messages of endearment, no sentimental props from old Fox films. On the mantel over the fireplace there is a four-clock console, showing the time in Los Angeles, New York, London and Paris, and in the adjoining bar-dressing room are leatherbound scripts of all the pictures Fox has made since Richard Zanuck took over as production chief. The anonymity of the office is in a way reflective of what it means today to be a production chief in the new Hollywood, dominated as it is by the independent producers. As much as is possible, Richard Zanuck tries to function by the rules prevailing in Hollywood before the independents took over, guarding Fox’s slowly eroding right to shape every picture from story conference to cutting room. But it is virtually impossible today for a production chief to put his personal stamp on a picture in the way that Darryl Zanuck did. He is, in many ways, a traffic manager, whose flexibility of action is far more limited than that of, say, the chief executive of an automobile company. Instead of assembling a “package”—story, talent, director, producer—he is more apt to be
presented
with one, take it or leave it. If he takes, which means putting up the money and providing the facilities, and he ends up with a
Lord Jim
—Hollywood’s equivalent of the Edsel—his
job is in jeopardy, although he had almost nothing to do with the making of the picture.

Richard Zanuck shook my hand and asked his secretary to bring us each a cup of coffee. He is a tightly controlled man with the build of a miniaturized halfback, twelve-month tan, receding brown hair and manicured fingernails that are chewed to the quick. He has hesitant blue eyes, a quick embarrassed smile and a prominent jaw whose muscles he reflexively keeps knotting and unknotting. He was wearing a monogrammed Sulka shirt and a gray hopsack suit. He blew on his coffee to cool it, and as he sipped, he reflected on the state of the Studio when he took over in 1962.

The demise of Fox had actually begun a half dozen years before, in 1956, when Darryl Zanuck had resigned as vice president in charge of production. The elder Zanuck was a tycoon in Hollywood when the title carried with it feudal power and virtual
droit de seigneur
. He came out of Nebraska after World War I, parlayed a novel which was underwritten by a patent medicine maker into a Hollywood writing job, wrote a series of films for Rin Tin Tin, became production chief at Warner Brothers at twenty-four, and founded Twentieth Century Fox with Joseph Schenk at thirty-one. “He has so many yes-men following him around the Studio,” Fred Allen once observed, “he ought to put out his hand when he makes a sharp turn,” but he won three Academy Awards and two Irving Thalberg Awards and came closer to the ideal of Thalberg (the prototype of Scott Fitzgerald’s last tycoon, Monroe Stahr) than any other Hollywood mogul.

But the advent of television, in 1948, had changed the face of Darryl Zanuck’s Hollywood. Weekly audiences
shrank from a peak of 90 million customers in the halcyon days to 30 million, and feature film production fell from a high of 600 a year to less than 150. With production so sharply curtailed, the studios were no longer able to keep under contract a complete roster of stars, producers, directors and writers. Independent producers moved into the void and agents became the new czars of Hollywood, allocating to their clients the profits and perquisites that once had belonged solely to the studios. The changes dismayed Darryl Zanuck, and he quit as Fox’s production chief, went to Paris and formed an independent production company. Richard Zanuck joined him there as a story and production assistant.

The younger Zanuck was born in 1934. There was no paternal coddling. Even when his son was a child, Darryl Zanuck took delight in trouncing him at checkers. Nor was Richard Zanuck allowed to win a point at badminton until he was big enough to ram the shuttlecock down his father’s throat. He attended Harvard Military School in Los Angeles and after that graduated from Stanford. Summers he worked at the Studio, first on the labor gang and in the editing room, then in the advertising department in New York, and finally in Paris, as his father’s assistant. In 1959, tied up in Africa with another picture, Darryl Zanuck gave his son a chance to produce
Compulsion
, a fictional re-enactment of the Leopold-Loeb case. Richard Zanuck brought
Compulsion
in under budget, ahead of schedule and good enough for its two stars, Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell, to win best acting awards at the Cannes Film Festival.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., Twentieth Century Fox had fallen on lean days. Management was ineffectual and the production reins finally passed to Spyros Skouras, the Greek theater owner and company president who had always been content in the past to watch the books and let Darryl Zanuck supervise the picture making. At a time when other studios were retrenching in the face of television, Skouras pushed through dud after dud; with the sale of the back lot and the debacle of
Cleopatra
, the company was in a state of financial ruin. Then, after repeated absences, Marilyn Monroe was fired off a picture called
Something’s Got to Give
and she went home and not too long afterward committed suicide. The picture was scrapped for a $2 million loss. It was the last straw. The board of directors issued a terse, three-paragraph announcement saying Skouras had been forced to “resign” because of “ill health.”

From his headquarters in Paris, Darryl Zanuck, who was drawing a $150,000 annual consultant’s fee from Fox, watched the company scramble for a new management. His family’s large bloc of Fox stock—something in the vicinity of 100,000 shares—seemed in danger of going down the drain, as did his own production of the World War II epic,
The Longest Day
, which he had planned to release through Fox as a hard-ticket, roadshow picture, but which the panicked studio was preparing to saturation-book across the country. “I looked around for someone to recommend to them,” he said later, “but found no one who would be an improvement.” Except himself.

Zanuck’s announcement of his candidacy stirred no
enthusiasm on the board of directors, which was concerned with his profligate ways in both his business and private lives, and lines were drawn for a proxy fight. The prospect of a destructive proxy battle, however, was far less tolerable to Fox stockholders than the return of Darryl Zanuck. Whatever his faults—and his rivals took pains to chronicle in detail Zanuck’s romantic interludes and the millions he spent in abortive efforts to make stars out of such former consorts as Bella Darvi and Juliette Greco—Zanuck at least offered a lifetime of film knowhow, experience totally lacking in the bankers and brokers who opposed him. The stockholders threw their support to Zanuck and the board backed down, naming him president and relegating Skouras to the figurehead post of chairman of the board. There was still the matter of the new production chief. “D.Z. asked me who I thought was best qualified,” Richard Zanuck recalls. “And I told him. Me.”