Studio (9780307817600) (2 page)

Some months after I began my research, the studio’s
vice president in charge of public relations came out to California from his headquarters in New York. He was appalled at the access I had been given and ordered it stopped. At a meeting in his office, he offered to buy me off, to make it “worth my while” to let the studio have editorial control over my book. If I refused, I would not be let back on the lot. I was in a quandary. I had no intention of giving up editorial control of the book, but at the same time I needed two set pieces—the preview of
Dr. Doolittle
in Minneapolis and the picture’s premiere in Los Angeles—to complete the research on the book. I asked to see Richard Zanuck.

We had seen each other nearly every day I was at the studio, sometimes at lunch (I had a standing invitation at his table in the commissary), sometimes at dailies (I also had a standing invitation to watch the rushes with him). I told him that I could not in good conscience give him veto over the book and that, if that were the condition, I would pack it in. I suspect he wondered if I already had enough material to make a book; I also suspect he thought that throwing me off the lot at that late date would make any book I wrote less amiable. He finally asked if he could read the manuscript and make suggestions that I would be under no obligation to follow. I agreed. He ultimately asked me to delete three minor references. One—a producer’s bad rapping of an actor—my lawyer had already said was libelous; the other two would have complicated Zanuck’s divorce proceedings from his first wife. I made the deletions he requested.

The Studio
was simplicity itself to write. It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes. That
there were no surprises—I knew exactly what I was going to do—was for me the problem. Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions. There were no detours like that in
The Studio
. My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.

When I finally read
The Studio
—I had picked it up because I had to check something in it—I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. In the decade since I finished it, I myself had worked extensively in the movie business. Indeed, the first picture I wrote was for Richard Zanuck and Twentieth Century Fox. “Look,” he told the producer, “do you mind if we don’t mention
The Studio
in the announcement? It would make my life simpler.” He remains the best executive I have met in the movie business, forceful and decisive. If he makes a wrong decision (and I think he might like to reconsider opening up Fox to me), he sticks by it, never apologizing, never explaining. That I had written
The Studio
was one thing; that I had now written a screenplay ready to go into production was another altogether.

If I were writing
The Studio
today, I would probably be more compassionate, but that is a factor of age and experience. The story of Henry Koster’s meeting with Zanuck troubles me more than anything in the book, yet I think I would probably still put it in: a fact of the movie business is that people are used and discarded like so many wads of Kleenex. I would also change a nuance here and a nuance
there, largely because I am convinced that it is impossible for anyone who had never worked in the movie business to understand the dynamics of any given picture. But on the whole, I am surprised and a little gratified at how accurate the portrait remains. In some circles, it is an article of faith that Hollywood is dead, the studios extinct. To which I can only say rubbish. Movies must still be financed and distributed, and they are still largely financed and wholly distributed by the major motion picture companies. If there are fewer pictures, the stakes are higher. A film like
Star Wars
can redeem the mistakes of ten years. Richard Zanuck was fired by his father at Fox; he went to Warner Brothers and was fired there. He formed an independent production company, went to Universal and co-produced
Jaws
, which probably has made more money than all the films his father produced personally in a lifetime.

Hollywood is a technological crapshoot. Table stakes open at a million dollars. It was true in 1968, it is true now.

I suppose that is why after seventeen years I like
The Studio
now. I got it right.

Los Angeles
January 1985

And in Alphabetical Order

Shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of May 16, 1967, Darryl F. Zanuck stepped out of an elevator on the eighteenth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. He was wearing sunglasses and smoking a large black cigar and in the lapel buttonhole of his well-tailored blue blazer was the rosette of the
Legion d’Honneur
. In his wake, stopping when he stopped, walking when he walked, trailed a convoy of equally well-tailored men in the employ of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, over whose annual stockholders’ meeting Zanuck was scheduled to preside that afternoon in the Waldorf’s Starlight Roof. Leading the convoy, but a half step behind his father, the dauphin to
the king, was Zanuck’s only son, Richard Darryl Zanuck, a member of the board of directors of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and the Studio’s Los Angeles-based executive vice president in charge of world-wide production.

As Darryl Zanuck entered the meeting room, a number of stockholders rose and began to applaud. The elder Zanuck paid no attention, and he seated the young woman with him, a slender French girl in a green silk Pucci dress, in a chair at the rear of the room. Then he headed for the dais, shaking hands with board members and embracing old friends as he went. Over the dais hung the green, gold and black flag of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Already in his place at the end of the front table on the dais was Fox’s chairman of the board, Spyros P. Skouras. During the years when Darryl Zanuck held the same post his son holds now, Skouras had chaired these annual meetings, but on this afternoon, he sat impassively, looking like an aging white-maned lion, his hands folded in front of him.

Darryl Zanuck took his place at the lectern, his son in a chair immediately to his right. The cigar was still implanted in Darryl Zanuck’s mouth. “Well, here we go again,” he said to Richard Zanuck. The microphone picked up his nasal Nebraska twang and there was a titter from the audience. Darryl Zanuck glared impatiently and then called the meeting to order, placing the agenda in front of him. Suddenly he stopped and took off his sunglasses.

“Are these the right goddamn glasses?” he said. “For Christ’s sake, no.”

He replaced the sunglasses with reading glasses and began to introduce the members of the board and Studio executives sitting on the double-tiered dais. When he came to his son, he stopped, fumbling for effect: “On my right, I can’t remember his name, heh, heh, now I’ve got it, Richard Zanuck.”