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Says Warner Director Michael Curtiz: "I had no idea about duck hunting, and neither did anybody else in the studio. But we all had to go. The casting director almost blew my head off. They put us in those damned trenches in the rain early in the morning, three, five o'clock, I forget. But that was the order from Zanuck."
Director William Wellman, now with MGM, grimly recalls a hunting trip with Zanuck in British Columbia: "You had to shake the porcupines out of the trees at night. It snowed. We had to break trail for the horses. We were snowbound for three days. Zanuck chased a grizzly for 30 hours, came back with a sprained ankle. We made 20 separate fords. We lost the horse carrying our medicine. I got blood poisoning. It was the ruggedest, damndest trip you've ever seen. But d'you know what? Zanuck loved it."
Underlings whom the boss drafted for riding and polo suffered many a bruise and fracture, but kept their loyalty intact. As time went on, he replaced the polo casualties with better poloists, to whom he gave studio jobs. Though the team was at first sneered at as the only one "where the horses are better bred than the men," its intense, fearless little captain drove it to win the respect of its opponents and the hospitality of Pasadena's uppity Midwick Country Club. Meanwhile, headlong Darryl Zanuck became a two-goal player at the price of such injuries as a smashed nose and a broken hand.
Virgin & Victim. More staid in his outside activities than he used to be, Zanuck, the one-man studio, still gives a three-ring performance. In a story conference where he plays all the roles of scenes in the making, the bristle mustache suddenly twitches, and the face looks heavenward in horror. The jaw sags until the huge cigar droops from his lower lip like a wet sheet hanging from a tenement window. He leans back across the grand piano in his office. His voice becomes shrill and frightened. This is Zanuck impersonating a virgin in distress.
In a chase scene, he will rush around his office, crouch behind desks, push over chairs, hide in his anteroom and come popping out with an excited summary of the action. Once his conferees were startled on entering the office to find him prone on the floor under his desk. "I've got it!" he yelled exultantly as they entered. "The guy is under the truck. He's fixing a flat-he's like this. And whack! The truck slips off the jack and down onto his neck! It's great! Great!" Re-enacted on the screen by Richard Conte, Zanuck's performance made a grimly effective scene in Thieves' Highway.
Zanuck's leather-lunged chatter during a conference rambles almost as much as his footsteps, and the sessions usually last about 2½ hours. It is Scenario Coordinator Mollie Mandaville'si vital job to take down the jumble of words and translate them into a tight, coherent account that will reach the participants' desks the next morning so that they will know precisely what the boss said. Zanuck is annoyed if a new writer puts some of his ad-libbed dialogue into the script. He thinks in pictorial terms, does not fancy himself as a dialogue writer, intends his ad-libbing only as a guide.