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Immediately after taking over as president, Darryl Zanuck shut the Studio down, fired most of its personnel, and threw out all the story properties bought by the previous management. The only production activity was one television show then in the dying days of its run. “It was desperate.” Richard Zanuck said. There is a strained quality in his voice that becomes a slight rasp when he gets impatient. “There were only about fifty people here—everyone else had been canned—and we just sat around looking at each other. We closed down the commissary to save money, and everyone—secretaries, producers, carpenters—ate lunch in a little electricians’ shed. It’s an awful thing to say, but things were so tight, we were trying to figure out ways to get another janitor off the payroll.”

Zanuck fingered one of the bronze baby shoes. There were charges when he took over the Studio that his appointment was due only to Hollywood’s tribal law of primogeniture. The accusations of nepotism did not disturb him. “Quite frankly, naming me as production chief made a lot of sense,” he said, draining the cup of coffee. “As the largest stockholders, my family stood to lose the most if the company went under. What nearly killed this company was the politics, the antagonism between the money people in the East and the picture people out here. With D.Z. in New York and me out here, that antagonism is gone now.”

Like almost everyone brought up in the movie industry, Richard Zanuck is almost immune to the world outside. He reads voraciously, but mainly scripts, and his mind is an encyclopedia of plots, gimmicks and story angles. No detail escapes his attention. “How about a midget for the shoeshine boy?” he asks the director of a thriller. “There’s something insidious about a midget.” A producer’s suggestion that an actor in a Western wear a mustache gets a quick veto. “We had a picture here once,
The Gunfighter
, with Greg Peck, and it bombed out. You know why? Peck wore a mustache.” (Zanuck was thirteen when
The Gunfighter
was released.) He mentions a Gary Cooper comedy shot at the Studio years before. “Good picture,” he says, “but small hat. You could never put Coop in a small hat and get your money back.”

The two Zanucks keep in close contact, communicating by telephone and teletype several times daily. “In the old days, my father could staff and cast a picture in minutes from the card file listing everyone under contract,” Richard Zanuck said. “Nowadays, planning a
picture takes longer than making one. Jesus, you spend hours fighting with agents over billing, salary, fringe benefits, start dates, stop dates, the works.” He leaned back in his chair and ran his finger across his hairline. “D.Z. doesn’t have the temperament for this sort of thing,” he said. “His inclination was always to throw an agent out of his office. Not me. I like to wheel and deal.”

Several days later, Richard Zanuck asked me to come by his office as he demonstrated his capacity for wheeling and dealing. He was slumped at his desk, picking at his fingernails with a letter opener. With him was Owen McLean, the studio’s executive casting director, a heavy-set, round-faced man whose lips are set firmly against his teeth. “Agents always travel in pairs,” Zanuck explained, nodding at McLean. “You can’t play a lone hand against them. You’ve got to have someone backing you up, taking notes.” His lips parted in a quick smile. “Just in case.”

His secretary buzzed and announced that agents Evarts Ziegler and Richard Shepherd were in the outer office. There was a minimum of small talk as the agents entered the office. The project under discussion involved Paul Newman, director Martin Ritt and the husband-wife writing team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., the quartet responsible for the hugely successful
Hud
. Their new project was a Western called
Hombre
, the story of a white man who preferred to live among the Indians and who against his will came out into the white man’s world. The meeting had certain ritual aspects. The game lay in not yielding a point too easily, in dreaming up new demands just as a detail
appeared settled. No one seemed to think it extraordinary that the two agents began by demanding $1.3 million for the four people in the package.

There was no argument over Newman: $750,000 against 10 per cent of the gross until the picture showed a profit. After that, a piece of the profits.

Then the Ravetches. “They get $150,000 a picture,” said Ziegler, a smooth, expensively tailored man who doodled constantly with a gold pencil.

Zanuck agreed without comment.

“Irving is going to co-produce,” Ziegler said. “That’s fifty more.”

Zanuck looked up quickly. “It was twenty-five the other day,” he said. “You changed the figures.”

“Not changed,” Ziegler replied. He searched for the proper word. “Corrected.”

“No,” Zanuck said.

Ziegler doodled a row of zeros on a piece of paper and without looking up said, “Richard Zanuck is being cold to me.”

Zanuck shrugged. Ziegler did not argue the point.

The longest discussion was over Ritt. He had once been under contract to Fox and the Studio was now suing him for failure to live up to that contract’s provisions. All film companies file charges almost promiscuously, since a lawsuit is a potent bargaining tool in any subsequent negotiations. Few of the suits ever come to trial.

Painfully earnest, with furrowed brow, Shepherd opened for $350,000 for Ritt. Zanuck laughed.

“He’s getting $300,000 for his current picture,” Shepherd said.

Zanuck picked up the letter opener and laughed again. Shepherd agreed to cut Ritt’s price to $250,000, if Fox dropped the lawsuit.

A look of surprise crossed Zanuck’s face. “If we drop the suit, he only gets one-fifty,” he said. He gnawed at a fingernail. “All my legal people tell me we’ve got an open and shut case.”

“You’re putting a price tag on the merits or lack of merits of a piece of litigation,” Shepherd protested.

Zanuck smiled. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “If we drop the suit, my legal department is going to lose the prestige of winning a case. That means a lot to a lawyer. I’ve got to consider that.”

They argued back and forth, Shepherd prefacing every remark with “In all honesty … I must be truthful … In all fairness …” His figure dropped slowly and Zanuck’s came up. They finally met at $200,000, with Fox agreeing to drop the litigation. Shepherd was still reluctant. “I’ll have to check Marty’s financial needs for the rest of the year,” he said.

When the agents finally left the office, Zanuck picked a piece of paper off his desk and showed it to McLean.

“We’ll make a deal,” he said. “No doubt about that.” The paper was a carbon copy of a memo he had sent Darryl Zanuck in New York several days before, stating that he could tie up Ritt and the rest of the package for exactly what he had just agreed to pay. The deal was confirmed the next day.

By the time I returned to the Studio,
Hombre
had been completed and was in release. (“
Hombre
’s 4th Frisco Frame Boff 16G”—
Daily Variety
.) There were forty-eight features in various stages of production, nine television series shooting and a score of others in the planning and pilot stage. Three new sound stages had been built at the main Studio lot in Westwood, bringing the total to twenty-two, but space was still at a premium. Television production had spilled over onto the Studio’s secondary lot on Western Avenue, near the Hollywood Freeway, and when all that space was in use, the Studio was forced to rent additional stages from Desilu in Culver City, where two more television shows were shooting.
At the Studio’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley,
Planet of the Apes
, a science-fiction morality tale about a simian civilization, starring Charlton Heston, was shooting its exteriors, as were two television Westerns,
Custer
and
Daniel Boone
. In the absence of a back lot, every available inch at the Westwood lot was in use. An alley had been converted into an all-purpose French street, the exterior of Sound Stage 5 into the Gotham City Municipal Library for the television show
Batman
, and the outside of the commissary into the Colonial Post Inn in Peyton Place Square.

The trend was up. All twenty-two sound stages on the Westwood lot had been repainted in pastel Mondrian designs. A New Talent Program had been initiated, and every day on Sound Stage 2, the twenty-two young actors and actresses in the school, each paid a minimum of $175 a week, with first six-month and then yearly options on their contracts, underwent a strenuous regimen of dancing and acting lessons. They were given occasional roles in features and television to test their screen presence, were depended upon to attend major premieres, the girls in dresses provided by the Studio’s wardrobe department, and were always available for such publicity functions as launching pigeons by the maypole in Century City to open the Southern California Festival of Flowers. There were whirlwind daily tours through the Studio at $2 a head and there was a more elaborate $50 tour for business executives from 500 major American corporations. The $50 tour included a chauffeured limousine to and from the Studio, a personal guide in a red, white and blue miniskirt, a visit to an active sound stage, a test of the dashboard controls on Batman’s Batmobile, lunch in the commissary,
a look at unedited film in one of the Studio’s screening rooms, and a glass of California champagne with the guide at the end of the day.

But the Studio’s main concern remained what motion picture people call The Product. In the cutting room, the $18 million production of
Dr. Dolittle
, a musical fantasy starring Rex Harrison and based on Hugh Lofting’s wistful and delicate children’s stories, was in the final stages of editing. On the sound stages,
Star!
, a $12 million musical biography based loosely on the life of Gertrude Lawrence and starring Julie Andrews, was shooting. No cast had been set yet, nor had the script been completed, for Robert Fryer’s $4.5 million production of
The Boston Strangler
. And dominating the Studio was a huge billboard that said: “THINK 20TH.”

There were problems with the script of
The Boston Strangler
. The Studio had purchased the book from author Gerold Frank for $250,000 and assigned it to Robert Fryer to produce. It was Fryer’s first motion picture assignment after producing a string of hit Broadway musicals, including
Sweet Charity
and
Mame
. A stocky, red-haired man with a delayed, slightly abstracted demeanor, Fryer drove a black Rolls-Royce and, as if resisting the studied casualness of the Studio, he still dressed Eastern—tweed jackets, gray flannel slacks, double-breasted blue suits.
The Strangler
was supposed to start shooting in the fall, but on the hot midsummer afternoon when I first met Fryer, the script was still incomplete. The first script, by English playwright Terence Rattigan, had not worked out, and Fryer had assigned the job of writing a new script to Edward Anhalt, a veteran Hollywood writer who had won Academy
Awards for
Panic in the Streets
and for
Becket
. One of the highest paid writers in Hollywood, Anhalt works entirely on his boat and had driven onto the lot that afternoon only to report his progress to Fryer and Richard Fleischer, who was going to direct
The Strangler
. The meeting took place in Fleischer’s office in the ramshackle, barracks-like Old Writers Building.

“Well?” Fryer said, sinking into a chair and loosening his striped tie.

“We’re not going to make it,” Fleischer said pleasantly. He is a quiet, infinitely patient man in his early fifties. His father, Max Fleischer, was a pioneer in the animated cartoon field, a guiding hand behind
Popeye
and
Betty Boop
. The younger Fleischer directed Richard Zanuck’s first feature film,
Compulsion
, and had been employed steadily at the Studio ever since Richard Zanuck had taken over as production chief. He had just finished directing
Dr. Dolittle
, and besides
The Boston Strangler
he was also preparing to co-direct
Tora, Tora, Tora
, an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

“I need a Fresca,” Fryer said. The air conditioner was on full, but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “What am I going to tell Dick Zanuck?”

“That we’re not going to go to Boston in September,” Fleischer said. He knotted a loose thread around a button on his jacket. “There’s no point in going if the script isn’t finished.”

Fryer looked across the table at Anhalt. He seemed to be controlling his anxiety with great physical effort. “When are you going to be finished, Eddie?”

Anhalt neatly arranged a pile of file cards on the coffee table. He was wearing Ben Franklin half-glasses,
a turtleneck sweater and a tailored summer-weight hacking jacket. He has a rugged outdoor face, his head is completely shaved and he looks fifteen years younger than his fifty-five years.

“The first of November,” Anhalt said finally.

Fryer sighed. “Can’t we send a second unit to Boston in September?”

“Why?” Fleischer said.

“To shoot exteriors,” Fryer said hesitantly.

“You’ve got a problem,” Fleischer said. He thought for a moment. “Two problems. You don’t have a finished script, you might add locations, you might drop locations. Then you send actors to Boston—I’m not talking about the principals—you’re not sure they’ll still be available when principal photography starts.”

Fryer looked at Anhalt for support, but Anhalt only shook his head. “I say we can’t start with half a script,” he said. He riffled through his cards. “We’ve got sixty people in the first forty pages and they’re all speaking parts. A lot of those are going to be cut and boiled down and collapsed, so you can’t really cast.”

“But if we send a second unit, we can get the full feeling of the fall,” Fryer insisted. “We don’t start shooting until January, we’ve got a winter picture. You get a late spring in Boston. It doesn’t get warm until May. We want the change of seasons. Otherwise …” His voice trailed off. “Otherwise we get a winter picture.”