The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (461 page)

And
Torn from the Flag: A Film by Klaudia Kovacs
(07), a film about that escape from Hungary in 1956.

Adolph Zukor
(1873–1976), b. Ricse, Hungary
Alphabetically nearly last, and historically nearly first, Adolph Zukor testifies to the business battleground as a basis for longevity. Imagine a supreme Paramount star—Gary Cooper, say—and check the dates: Zukor was twenty-eight when Cooper was born, and he lived another fifteen years after the death of the star who towered above him physically and in the public’s knowledge of who counted in pictures. How did he do it? It looks as if he kept healthy so long by avoiding the ordeal of sitting in the dark watching films. The movies did not interest Adolph Zukor: he wanted just power, empire, and profit. Otherwise, fresh air and exercise were his ideals—no wonder Paramount took that splendid mountain as its logo. While some pioneers regretted the post-1945 decline of the picture business, no doubt Zukor was happy to become a part of a richer concern, Gulf & Western. A little younger when that merger took effect and he might have aimed at taking over the parent. Like all Hungarians of the Hapsburg era, he knew the tonic of aggrandizement.

And like all conservative progressives, while the Austro-Hungarian empire was in its death-throes, Zukor was carving out fresh domain. For some businessmen in New York, 1914–18 was significant as the birth of an industry when competitive intolerance fought for the hearts of the world. Zukor had come to America when he was sixteen, after an upbringing of great hardship in Hungary. He learned English selling furs, and in 1903 he went into the amusement arcade business—a tiny man in a fur-collared coat. He had one large failure, trying to promote Hales Tours, where the audience sat in a railway carriage and views floated past (a similar device figures in Max Ophüls’s
Letter from an Unknown Woman
). In 1910, he merged some of his interests with a friend, Marcus Loew, but he kept several theatres for himself. Zukor never trusted anyone, and that prophetic caution is usually self-fulfilling.

He had not sold furs to the urban lower-class audiences who came to early movies. Zukor noticed that he was dealing with a different clientele, and he wondered how the middle classes might be enticed into the dark—allegedly a place of wasting disease, self-indulgent escapism, and bad habits, all anathema to respectable people. He knew that they would only venture in under the guise of worthy enlightenment. While the social fabric of Europe was torn apart by war and revolution, in America Zukor exploited the self-importance of class distinction and perhaps did more than Marx or Marcuse to sap American middle-class strength of will. He sold unreality to sensible people, and they have not yet been able to do without it. The trick was to make movies like theatre: prestigious, long, and dull. It worked, and it helped transform movies from a sensation to a narrative fantasy.

Before 1912, no film in America stretched the audience beyond thirty minutes’ concentration, and most were shorter. Zukor left Loew and helped to finance the hour-long French film,
Queen Elizabeth
, starring Sarah Bernhardt, in return for U.S. distribution rights. He leased it on a states rights basis and found that middle-class audiences gathered to see the famous actress as if she were Niagara Falls brought to their town. In 1912, he formed Famous Players Film Company and hired Edwin Porter to make similar films of American stage stars: James Hackett in
The Prisoner of Zenda
and James O’Neill (Eugene’s father) in
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

They were deadweight entertainments, but the marketing approach worked and within two years Griffith would galvanize the new potential for length. Theatres began to be built fit for this refined audience; there were cloakrooms where they could leave their coats, but no equivalent closet where hardworking earnestness was exchanged for flesh and fantasy. Zukor was a magician who never mentioned his most comprehensive trick.

In 1916, he merged with Jesse Lasky’s Feature Plays, and for the next five years there was a bitter struggle for control of that incipient major. Zukor won through boldness and insight: he floated loans, he based himself in New York where the money was, he seldom interfered in picture-making. He guessed that the audience would watch anything. Only the structure of the industry was at issue. And it was Zukor who determined that the company making and distributing pictures should also own theatres. Paramount—as it was called eventually—set the pattern for such a monopoly. Zukor created a business strategy that lasted until the late forties and was only broken by federal intervention. He was president of Paramount until 1935, and thereafter chairman. That post remained his until long after the mountain had turned into a fake, conical form.

As a studio, Paramount was known for sophistication, wit, glamour, style, smartness—so many of its films were sleek as fur. It was the home for years of De Mille, Lubitsch, Leisen, von Sternberg, La Cava, Chevalier, March, Cooper, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Fields, Hope and Crosby, Dietrich, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Colbert and Lombard, Jerry Lewis, Ladd and Lake. It would be too generous to credit Zukor with all those hirings, but the studio was consistent, cultivated, and a world unto itself.
The Devil Is a Woman
angered Spain that such a decor-and-light charade might traduce the real thing, and Ernst Lubitsch once admitted that Paris, France was a tamer place than Paris, Paramount.

Edward Zwick
, b. Winnetka, Illinois, 1952
1986:
About Last Night…
1989:
Glory
. 1992:
Leaving Normal
. 1994:
Legends of the Fall
. 1996:
Courage Under Fire
. 1998:
The Siege
. 2003:
The Last Samurai
. 2006:
Blood Diamond
. 2008:
Defiance
.

Edward Zwick makes solid, dramatic films that seem to be taken from the news magazines. He has also tried his hand at adapting such disparate authors as David Mamet (
About Last Night …
came from
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
) and Jim Harrison (
Legends of the Fall
). He is a writer-director, a former journalist, a regular figure behind the camera on the TV series
Family
, and the creator of another,
thirtysomething
. That may be the best work he has done, despite the obvious historical significance of
Glory
and the careful handling of its male cast.
Legends of the Fall
is his most ambitious film, and the most uncertain, despite a true sense of legend and icon in the handling of Brad Pitt. He has not yet made a movie that reveals Edward Zwick or stands out above the crowd, but
Courage Under Fire
is the most intriguing—because of its pursuit of a rare subject (women in combat), its fine casting, and its overall sense of doubt over what actually happened versus what the state wants to say happened. Zwick is fond of the military, he has worked very steadily with Denzel Washington, and he directs in a straightforward, if anonymous, manner. But we may not yet have seen his best, or most relaxed, work.

Blood Diamond
was as good as his best, but
Defiance
(about Jewish partisans in Belorussia) had the distinct feeling of a film crew playing in the woods. We have seen so much of this sort of thing for real that actors have a very hard time. It may be in the logic of film history that actors have no one left now except liars and dreamers.

Terry Zwigoff
, b. Appleton, Wisconsin, 1948
1985:
Louie Bluie
(d). 1994:
Crumb
(d). 2001:
Ghost World
. 2003:
Bad Santa
. 2006:
Art School Confidential
.

After the University of Wisconsin, Zwigoff went to live in San Francisco, where he did all manner of things—including the collecting of popular song recordings from the late twenties, and a dedication to adult comic books. He is reclusive, not much short of depressive, and possibly more self-deprecating than any other filmmaker this author has met. Yet he has to be considered as a rare, individual voice.
Ghost World
(taken from the comic book by Daniel Clowes) turned into a refreshingly wry picture about awkward, deadpan teenagers who simply refuse to fall for the commercialized lies of the consumer society. With excellent performances by Thora Birch, Steve Buscemi, and Scarlett Johansson, it was an intriguing fusion of adult point of view with the most rugged kind of anarchistic teenage culture.

In a fascinating way, it showed the fictionalized version of those remarkable Crumbs—the dysfunctional yet very talented and tender family celebrated in what is one of the most unusual of American documentaries. So far,
Crumb
is Zwigoff’s most striking work, but—if he could sustain a run of movies—it seems possible that he could yet deliver some major satirical pictures.

Table of Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Acknowledgments

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z