Hollywood Memorial

Zanuck was a producer, writer, actor and director who played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors. At age eight, he found his first movie job as an extra. He later managed to find work producing movie plots, selling his first story in 1922. He then worked for Mack Sennett and took that experience to Warner Brothers where he wrote stories for ‘Rin Tin Tin’ and under a number of pseudonyms wrote over forty scripts from 1924-1929. He moved into management in 1929 and became head of production in 1931. In 1933 he left Warners to found Twentieth Century Pictures with Joseph Schenck and William Goetz, releasing their material through United Artists. In 1935 they bought out Fox studios to become Twentieth Century-Fox. Zanuck was vice-president of this new studio. ‘People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.’ A notorious womanizer with a hot casting couch, he left his wife Virginia Fox Zanuck in 1956, and the later films which he came to produce often featured his girlfriend of that day. He returned to control of Fox in 1962 in a confrontation over the release of Zanuck’s production of ‘The Longest Day’ as the studio struggled to finish the difficult filming of ‘Cleopatra.’ He made his son Richard D. Zanuck head of production. He became involved in a power struggle with the board and his son from around 1969. In May 1971, Zanuck was finally forced from ‘his’ studio. He was the winner of 3 Thalberg Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. In 1946, Zanuck had said, ‘Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months.’