Twentieth Century's Fox

Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck was a man of enormous energy and eccentricity. Commanding Twentieth Century-Fox with a sawed-off polo mallet, Zanuck produced dozens of memorable films, including I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang , The Grapes of Wrath , Gentleman’s Agreement , All About Eve , and The Day the Earth Stood Still . In this major new biography, George F. Custen illuminates Zanuck’s evolution into one of the most influential producers in American film. With The Jazz Singer Zanuck supervised the innovation of film sound. With The Public Enemy and Little Caesar he reinvented the gangster film. With 42nd Street he reinvigorated the musical. He set the standard for film biography with pictures such as Young Mr. Lincoln and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell . He innovated CinemaScope. And he molded the star images of James Cagney, Betty Grable, Tyrone Power, and Shirley Temple.Hard-boiled or nostalgic, historical or pure Hollywood, Zanuck’s films and Zanuck himself have become legends of the cinema. In never-before-published story conference anecdotes, Custen reveals how more than any producer before or since--this diminutive, enigmatic fellow changed the way we look at film. He explains what set him apart from rivals Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick, how he developed the gritty realism that came to redefine motion pictures, and how he brilliantly predicted and capitalized on changing public tastes.Covering Zanuck’s life from his boyhood in Wahoo, Nebraska, to the tumultuous years with the feuding Warner Brothers, from his battles with the censors to inside stories about actors such as Edward G. Robinson, Gregory Peck, and Marilyn Monroe, Custen’s Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood tells how Zanuck redefined the role of the producer in American cinema.