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One night in 1927 the Warners summoned him. Starting the next day, they told him, he would be the studio's executive producer, with a salary jump from $125 to $5,000 a week. As he left the office, an old doorman whispered that the incumbent production boss had been let out, and wondered who would get the job. "Me," said Zanuck, who now recalls: "He got hysterical, he thought it was so funny."
Zanuck pampered his mustache, put more bite into his voice, began turning out flamboyant, exciting pictures at low cost. He had stuttered for years, but by 1930, as he grew into confident authority, the stutter disappeared.
Zanuck broke with the Warners three years later. He had committed the studio to restoring, by a certain date, a 50% industrywide pay cut. When the time came, Harry Warner insisted that he would not resume the full pay scale until a week later. Though his contract still had five years to run, Zanuck quit rather than go back on his word.
Kick in the Pants. For advice on his next move, he went to canny Joseph M. Schenck, an industry pioneer and boss of United Artists. Before he left Schenck's apartment, they had written out a longhand contract to form 20th Century, and Schenck has been Zanuck's nominal boss* ever since. In 18 months with 20th Century, Zanuck made 18 pictures—17 of them successes. The bustling little company developed an earning power roughly equal to that of the huge Fox Film Corp., whose assets were nine times as large. Fox needed the production vitality of a Zanuck; 20th Century could use Fox's theaters and distribution setup. While Zanuck hunted bear in Alaska, Joe Schenck bagged a prize at home: a merger creating 20th Century-Fox.
Under Zanuck, the studio boomed from 108 acres to 284, from five usable sound stages to 16. Its employees now total 4,000 at peak strength. Not so much a starmaker as a moviemaker, Zanuck never built his constellation to the size of MGM's or the brightness of Paramount's, but it is now bigger & brighter than ever: Betty Grable,* Jeanne Crain, Gregory Peck, Clifton Webb, Linda Darnell, Paul Douglas, Tyrone Power, Dan Dailey, Anne Baxter, Gene Tierney. Zanuck's producers, who include perennial Court Jester George Jessel, have a hard time shining in his shadow. He employs some of Hollywood's best directors: Elia Kazan (Pinky), Henry King (Twelve 0'Clock High), Joseph Mankiewicz (A Letter to Three Wives'), Anatole Litvak -(The Snake Pit).
World War II matured Zanuck, both as man and moviemaker, sent him back to the studio bursting to produce films of ''real significance." As a lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps, making training and combat documentary movies, the commander in chief of the Fox lot chafed under discipline and hostility, has since decided that "It was a great thing to get a kick in the pants at that stage of your career." The kick was sometimes well deserved, notably when he let himself be photographed in attitudes of bravery under fire in his Technicolor documentary of U.S. landings in North Africa. In the middle of 1943, after service for which he won the Legion of Merit, he tore into his studio job again.