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New Directions. As a trailblazer, Zanuck has no Hollywood equal. At Warners', he played a key role in the industry's transition from-silent pictures to talkies (The Jazz Singer, The Singing Fool). He sired the cinemusical (Forty-Second Street, Gold Diggers of Broadway). He pioneered and developed the technique of snatching good movie plots out of the headlines (I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang), and injected memorable realism into the gangster cycle of the '30s (Public Enemy, Doorway to Hell). He enabled Producer Louis de Rochemont to launch the semi-documentary (The House on 92nd Street, 13 Rue Madeleine). He set the postwar style of using authentic locations in foreign countries (Prince of Foxes, The Big Lift), and, incidentally, melting Hollywood's frozen funds abroad.*
Most important, Darryl Francis Zanuck, who went no further than the eighth grade, has gone further than anyone in Hollywood in breaking down resistance to serious, grown-up films with controversial themes. A man of courage, physical as well as moral, he insisted on producing such pictures in the teeth of angry pressure groups and, sometimes, to the consternation of his own bosses in the New York office. He lost $2,000,000 on his biggest flop, Wilson (1944), which preached against postwar isolationism, and he fell short of a profit on 1943's The Ox-Bow Incident, a vivid anti-lynching movie which got critics' cheers. But with such films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Snake Pit (1948) and Pinky (1949), he proved that stories based on such themes as unemployment, antiSemitism, mental illness and the Negro problem could pay off on the screen.
Culture & Big Game. For a tycoon of such solid accomplishment and recognition (two Oscars and two prized Irving Thalberg Awards), Zanuck for years cut a rather outlandish figure—even by Hollywood standards. He took sophomoric delight in playing such pranks as putting a trained ape into his executive chair, turning the lights down and summoning a new writer. He surrounded himself with court jesters, browbeat his oversubmissive underlings ("For God's sake, don't say yes until I finish talking"). His sycophants vied so earnestly in their assurances of devotion that one whimsical executive, putting an end to the contest, once volunteered: "When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes sprinkled on Mr. Zanuck's driveway so his car won't skid."
Zanuck's lack of formal schooling made for some conversational bloopers ("Betterment and correctment"), and gave him an oblique approach to culture. His estimate of Les Misérables, which he filmed in 1935: "It's I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang in costume." A restless traveler who keeps his retinue stepping, he once dog-trotted into Paris' Louvre with the observation: "We gotta be outa this joint in 20 minutes."
Zanuck's enthusiasm for big-game hunting, duck shooting, riding and polo also provided sport for sniggering Hollywood humorists. But these furious pursuits were no joke to the animals whose remains now adorn his office, nor to his helpless subordinates who had to tag along.