Twentieth Century Fox

Twentieth Century Fox (or 20th Century Fox) was among the first and the last major Hollywood studios to coalesce, initially emerging in the mid-teens as the Fox Film Corporation but not taking on its ultimate configuration until a 1935 merger with 20th Century Pictures, an upstart independent production company run by the inimitable Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–1979). Although the Fox Film Corporation had been an important industry force, not until the 20th Century merger and the installation of Zanuck as production chief did the studio finally come into its own. Arguably the top production executive of the studio era, Zanuck possessed a unique combination of filmmaking and management skills, as well as keen commercial instincts. Through some three decades under Zanuck, Fox's output struck an effective balance of lightweight entertainment and powerful drama—The Mark of Zorro and The Grapes of Wrath in the same year (1940), for instance, both of which Zanuck himself produced. Zanuck also enabled 20th Century Fox to sustain Hollywood's traditional mode of production and marketing strategies far longer than the other studios—well into the 1960s, in fact, when a few big hits like The Sound of Music (1965) were offset by too many costly flops, bringing an end to Zanuck's regime. Fox quickly adapted to the changing industry, enjoying a massive surge with the release of Star Wars (1977) and its first two sequels, which fashioned the consummate New Hollywood movie franchise and carried Fox into the 1980s.

The studio underwent another historic transition in the mid-1980s with the installation of Barry Diller (b. 1942) as president in 1984, and the ensuing purchase of the studio by Rupert Murdoch's (b. 1931) global media giant, News Corporation. While Diller had the commercial and creative instincts that Fox had been lacking since Zanuck's departure, Murdoch brought massive resources and an even broader vision. Together they created a new breed of media conglomerate and fundamentally recast the studio, beginning with the launch of Fox Broadcasting in 1985–1986. The tremendous success of the movie-television "synergy" at Fox changed the landscape of American media, auguring the later studio-network amalgams of Disney-ABC, Paramount-CBS, and NBC-Universal. Moreover, the current alignment of News Corp., with its multiple conduits to media consumers, and Fox Filmed Entertainment, the parent company of 20th Century Fox, has reformulated vertical integration for the cable and digital delivery era. So although the Fox of the early twenty-first century is a far cry from the movie studio(s) that generated it, many obvious affinities and connections persist. There is an affinity, too, between Murdoch, who controlled News Corp. as of 2005, and William Fox (1879–1952), whose equally boundless vision and reckless expansionism laid the groundwork for Murdoch's vast media empire.

THE FOX FILM CORPORATION AND TWENTIETH CENTURY PICTURES

Twentieth Century Fox began as a chain of penny arcades and nickelodeons operated in the early 1900s by William Fox, a young Jewish immigrant (born in Tulchva, Hungary, in 1879) with enormous entrepreneurial drive and vision. Like other industry pioneers, most notably Universal's Carl Laemmle (1867–1939), Fox moved into production and distribution to ensure a flow of product for his growing theater chain and soon came into conflict with the Motion Picture Patents Company, also known as the Edison Trust. Fox was one of the Trust's most aggressive combatants, challenging its hegemony in the courts and in the marketplace. Fox, Laemmle, and the other so-called independents prevailed, and soon they were creating a vertically integrated oligopoly of their own. In 1915 Fox, already a leading exhibitor, formally created the Fox Film Company via the merger of his established production and distribution

DARRYL F. ZANUCK
b. Wahoo, Nebraska, 5 September 1902, d. 22 December 1979

Among Hollywood's pioneering producers and studio heads, Darryl Zanuck was unique for his longevity at the helm of the studio he co-founded, 20th Century Fox, as well as for his intense involvement in the filmmaking process. Along with Irving Thalberg and David Selznick, Zanuck was one of Hollywood's first-generation boy wonders, supervising production at a major studio (Warner Bros.) while still in his twenties. But Zanuck alone among top Hollywood executives rose through the creative ranks (as a writer at Warner), and he alone not only approved and supervised all A-class production on his lot but was also actively engaged in production. In some three decades atop Fox, it was not uncommon for Zanuck to take a script home and rewrite it over a weekend or to substantially rework a screenplay. Zanuck closely supervised post-production, often writing and even directing retakes or added scenes (including sequences in both The Grapes of Wrath, 1940, and My Darling Clementine, 1946). Zanuck took well-deserved producer credit on scores of 20th Century Fox films, including many of its top hits and now-canonized classics.

Zanuck was the most dynamic and colorful of the early studio heads. Diminutive, hyper aggressive, and supremely confident, he was a bantam battler and a control freak, a polo-field assailant and casting-couch predator. He was also a rare Midwestern WASP with creative talent within a generation of studio bosses dominated by first- and second-generation eastern European Jews with retail trade experience. Zanuck learned the business, of course, and he remained an astute student of cinema both as a commercial industry and an art form—one of those rare Hollywood executives able, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous phrase, "to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."

Zanuck helped create several important movie cycles, notably the gangster films and historical biopics of the 1930s and the social problem dramas of the 1940s, and he proved equally adept at producing Fox's dual output of entertaining "hokum" (his term) and "serious" pictures. He was the only top studio executive to join the military and to see active duty (as a colonel in the Signal Corps) during World War II, and his pet wartime project was the biopic Wilson (1944), which dramatized Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations to implicitly proclaim Zanuck's own support of the nascent United Nations. His postwar commitment to social problem dramas drew fire from the House Un-American Activities Committee as "un-American," and although he sustained that production cycle, Zanuck also joined the other studio bosses in capitulating to the blacklist.

Zanuck was an inveterate risk taker throughout his career. Examples are Fox's gamble on CinemaScope and Zanuck's subsequent venture into independent production in the 1950s and his blockbuster-scale productions after returning to Fox in the 1960s.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Lloyd's of London (1936), Jesse James (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), Wilson (1944), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), All About Eve (1950), The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956), The Longest Day (1962), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

FURTHER READING

Behlmer, Rudy, ed. Memo From Darry F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century Fox. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Custen, George F. Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Mosley, Leonard. Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Last Tycoon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

Zanuck, Darryl F., with Mel Gussow. Don't Say Yes Until I Finish Talking. New York: Doubleday, 1971.

Thomas Schatz

companies. The following year he moved his modest production operation to Hollywood, opening a studio on the corner of Sunset and Western. That began a period of tremendous growth for Fox, spurred by its two recent star discoveries, Theda Bara (1885–1955) and William Farnum (1876–1953). Under longtime production chief Winfield Sheehan (1883–1945), the studio turned out a winning combination of A-class star vehicles, most notably its exotic Bara pictures directed by J. Gordon Edwards (1867–1925), such as Salome (1918) and The Siren's Song (1919), alongside popular two-reel westerns starring Tom Mix (1880–1940) and Buck Jones (1889–1942).

The Fox Film Company reached a peak of sorts in the late silent era when, though it had few top stars under contract, its roster of staff directors included Raoul Walsh (1887–1980), Frank Borzage (1893–1962), John Ford (1894–1973), Howard Hawks (1896–1977), and F. W. Murnau (1888–1931). Sheehan tended to be a hands-off executive, so these directors enjoyed considerable control of their projects, which included such masterworks as Walsh's What Price Glory (1926), Borzage's Seventh Heaven (1927), and Murnau's Sunrise (1927), along with solid genre work like Ford's Three Bad Men (1926) and Hawks's A Girl in Every Port (1928). Most of these films contained a musical score and sound effects, as Fox in 1926 and 1927 was vying with Warner Bros. to crack the sound barrier via its Movietone sound-on-film system. In 1928 Fox completed construction on its new studio in Westwood (West Hollywood), dubbed "Movietone City," and also began experimenting with widescreen and 70mm pictures—most notably for The Big Trail (1930), a spectacular western directed by Walsh and starring John Wayne (1907–1979) in his first significant leading role. The film flopped, weakening the market for A-class westerns and relegating Wayne to a decade of B-western roles, while also adding to Fox's growing list of woes.

It was in 1930, in fact, that William Fox's chronic overreaching finally caught up with him. As his company flourished in 1928 and 1929, Fox borrowed heavily to further upgrade production and expand theater operations, to promote Fox's sound and widescreen technologies, and also, remarkably enough, to finance a hostile take-over bid to acquire Loew's/MGM. But then a series of events in 1929, including a near-fatal car accident, a threatened federal antitrust suit (over the Loew's take-over), and the stock market crash, devastated Fox both physically and financially. Overextended, incapacitated, and vulnerable to hostile creditors, Fox was ousted in 1930 and replaced as president by one of those creditors, Harley Clarke, while Sheehan remained head of production. There were some upbeat developments in the early sound era, especially on the talent front. Janet Gaynor (1906–1984), who burst to stardom in Seventh Heaven and Sunrise, enjoyed a successful transition to sound via two 1929 musical hits, Happy Days and Sunny Side Up, while the recently signed Will Rogers (1879–1935), longtime film (and vaudeville) personality, suddenly surged to top stardom in the sound era. But these rising stars could not stem the impact of the Depression, and the studio's fortunes faded badly after Fox's ouster. In 1932 Clarke was replaced by Sidney Kent, who proved to be a capable chief executive but could not forestall the inevitable. In 1933 Fox West Coast Theaters, the studio's exhibition arm—and, in effect, its parent company—went into receivership.

That same year, Darryl F. Zanuck left his position as production chief at Warner Bros. to join forces with Joseph Schenck (1878–1961) (brother of Nick Schenck, president of Loew's, Inc.) to create 20th Century Pictures, an independent production company designed to release A-class pictures through United Artists (UA). 20th Century was an immediate success, turning out some twenty films in the next two years, including Moulin Rouge (1934), The House of Rothschild (1934), Les Misérables (1935), and The Call of the Wild (1935). Although 20th supplied the bulk of UA's output, repeated efforts by Schenck and Zanuck to form a partnership with UA were thwarted by two of its cofounders, Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) and Mary Pickford (1892–1979), who still controlled the company. So Schenck and Zanuck were receptive to Sidney Kent's suggestion in early 1935 that they realign 20th with Fox, which had continued to produce after declaring bankruptcy but was still in disarray. What Kent wanted was a studio executive team, but Schenck and Zanuck saw a far greater opportunity for their newly created company. They not only maneuvered the deal into a veritable merger, they made it one in which 20th Century took the lead in terms of the corporate title, the logo, the remuneration, and corporate control. In a deal executed in May 1935, the two companies formed 20th Century Fox. Kent remained president, handling sales and theater operations out of New York, and Schenck became board chairman and nominal head of the studio, but 20th Century Fox clearly was Darryl Zanuck's domain. He replaced Sheehan as vice president in charge of production at a salary of $5,000 per week (the highest salary of the three top executives) plus 10 percent of the gross, and he assumed complete control of the studio—a position he would retain for most of the next thirty-five years.

THE CLASSICAL ERA

The 20th Century Fox merger was an instant success by any measure, especially in terms of production efficiency, quality pictures, increased revenues, and profits. The success came relatively quickly, but only after Zanuck did some extensive house-cleaning in terms of both contract talent and projects in development. Zanuck brought with him from 20th a few key artists and technicians, notably the composer Alfred Newman (1901–1970) and editor Barbara McLean (1903–1996) (essentially a coeditor with Zanuck, who directly supervised the cutting of all top productions). He retained some of Fox's top talent but invariably strengthened their departments. The veteran Fox cinematographers Ernest Palmer (1885–1978) and Arthur Miller (1895–1970) were joined by the Technicolor specialist Leon Shamroy (1901–1974), for instance, and the production designer William Sandorhazi was joined in the early Zanuck era by Boris Leven (1908–1986), Nathan Juran (1907–2002), James Basevi (1890–1962), and Lyle Wheeler (1905–1990). Zanuck's most significant efforts involved a limited pool of contract stars. Fox star Will Rogers was just reaching the very height of his career in 1935, and Shirley Temple (b. 1928), already a seasoned movie veteran at age seven, was just breaking through to top stardom (and top billing). Rogers starred in two sizable hits in 1935, the lavish period comedies Steamboat Round the Bend and In Old Kentucky, but was killed in a plane crash in August. Offsetting this unfortunate loss was Temple's emergence as Hollywood's top star in 1935 on the strength of multiple hits, including The Little Colonel and Curly Top; and her star continued to soar in Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), Heidi (1937), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). Meanwhile, Zanuck quickly expanded the studio's star stable, signing a few established stars like Loretta Young (1913–2000) but relying primarily on recently or newly signed young talent like Tyrone Power (1913–1958), Alice Faye (1915–1998), Henry Fonda (1905–1982), Sonja Henie (1912–1969), and Don Ameche (1908–1993).

Zanuck supervised virtually all of the top feature production at Fox's Westwood plant, including some fifteen to twenty pictures per year that he personally produced. (From 1936 until he left for military duty in 1942, Zanuck was the credited producer on over 110 films.) Additionally, he monitored Sol Wurtzel's (1890–1958) B-movie operation on the Western Ave. lot, which accounted for nearly half of Fox's output. Thus Zanuck assumed a very different role at Fox from the one he had held as production chief at Warner Bros. Although he had been a "creative executive" at Warner's, now he was more actively engaged in production and more directly involved in shaping the rapidly emerging house style. Moreover, that style was generally brighter, more upbeat, and more technically polished at 20th Century Fox, particularly in the years just after the merger. This undoubtedly was a function of the resources available at Fox, as well as changes in the national temperament and Zanuck's own development as a filmmaker and purveyor of popular entertainment. Relying on a group of capable but undistinguished contract directors and his cadre of newly signed, would-be stars, Zanuck developed a mélange of energetic musicals, light comedy-drama, quasi-historical biopics, and adventure yarns steeped in sentimental Americana—or what Zanuck himself termed "hokum." Typical of 20th Century Fox's output in the mid-1930s were films like Lloyd's of London (1936), In Old Chicago (1937), and Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), which may have lacked critical prestige but did excellent business.

In 1939 and 1940 Zanuck began a campaign to upgrade the studio's output, signing the top directors John Ford, Fritz Lang (1890–1976), Henry King (1886–1982), and Henry Hathaway (1898–1985), and assigning them increasingly ambitious projects. This resulted in superior product but also a growing rift in Fox's house style. Ford and Lang tended to take on more "serious" and artistically estimable films, often literary adaptations or biopics shot in black and white. Hathaway and King, conversely, directed more polished and blatantly "commercial" films—more accomplished versions, often in Technicolor, of the period musicals and quasi-historical adventures that Fox already was producing. Fox's rising stars tended to reinforce this divide. Tyrone Power, for instance, was featured in quintessential hokum like Jesse James (King, 1939), Johnny Apollo (Hathaway, 1940), and Brigham Young (Hathaway, 1940), whereas Henry Fonda starred in the Ford-directed classics Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath, and in Lang's dark, offbeat sequel to the Jesse James biopic, The Return of Frank James (1940). Zanuck himself produced films on both sides of this divide, although his rapport with the more cinematically accomplished directors, particularly Ford, was often strained. Zanuck did reward Ford handsomely for his work, however, paying him a salary in 1939 of $235,000, just short of his own. And although Ford did some of his best work at this time on independent productions like Stagecoach (1939), his work with Zanuck at Fox from 1939 through 1941 was simply unparalleled, culminating in How Green Was My Valley (1941), a critically acclaimed hit that won Oscars^® for best picture and best director.

HENRY FONDA
b. Grand Island, Nebraska, 16 May 1905, d. 12 August 1982

Henry Fonda appeared in fewer than a dozen films for 20th Century Fox, but those early roles effectively shaped his enduring persona—a common man of quiet decency, Midwestern stoicism, homespun virtue, and reluctant heroism. Fonda never forgave Darryl Zanuck for forcing him into a long-term contract to get the role of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but that transaction gave Fonda a career-defining role and brought 20th Century Fox precisely the kind of critical acclaim and industry prestige that Zanuck had hoped for.

Fonda spent his youth in Omaha, where he began an acting career that took him to Broadway. His role in a hit play, The Farmer Takes a Wife, brought him to Hollywood for the screen version, which was produced by Fox—as was Fonda's second picture, Way Down East—in 1935 just before the merger with 20th Century. Under contract to the independent producer Walter Wanger, Fonda worked primarily as a romantic co-star opposite leading ladies like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and his ex-wife Margaret Sullavan. In his first two pictures for 20th Century Fox, Fonda was second-billed to Tyrone Power in Jesse James and Don Ameche in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (both 1939). Then, at the behest of John Ford, Zanuck gave Fonda the title role in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). This was the first of three consecutive projects with the director, who understood precisely how to make use of Fonda's reticent gallantry and resolute sense of justice, not to mention his lanky frame and angular features. Fonda was second-billed to Claudette Colbert in Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), a frontier drama that gave further weight to his epic-historic persona; but that persona took on a truly mythic dimension with his portrayal of a contemporary prairie nomad, the displaced Okie Tom Joad, in The Grapes of Wrath. Based on John Steinbeck's 1939 bestseller, the film is a masterwork of poetic realism and social conscience, with Ford's understated semidocumentary approach perfectly suited to Fonda's unaffected, natural acting style.

Zanuck cast him in more blatantly commercial pictures, but some of his best work was done in loan-out comedy roles, like Paramount's All About Eve (1941) and Warner's The Male Animal (1942). Fonda joined the Navy in 1942, his three-year hiatus bracketed by two memorable Fox westerns, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), in which he played a drifter who tries unsuccessfully to stop a lynching, and My Darling Clementine (1946), a Ford-directed biopic of Wyatt Earp. Once his Fox contract expired in 1947, Fonda's film career slowed considerably, as he became a more selective freelance star and spent a good deal of time back on Broadway. Among his notable later performances are the besieged president in Fail-Safe (1964) and the retired professor in his last film, On Golden Pond (1981).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

You Only Live Once (1937), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), Mister Roberts (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), 12 Angry Men (1957), How the West Was Won (1962), Fail-Safe (1964), On Golden Pond (1981)

FURTHER READING

Fonda, Henry, with Howard Teichmann. Fonda: My Life. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984.

McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: A Life. New York: St. Martin's, 2003.

Thomas Schatz

Like all of the major studios, 20th Century Fox underwent significant changes during World War II. As revenues and profits surged, output was reduced during the war from roughly fifty releases to one-half that total, and B-movie production was phased out altogether. Fox also saw wholesale changes in the executive ranks. In 1941 Joe Schenck began serving a federal prison term (for income tax evasion related to a labor union scandal); in 1942 Zanuck joined the Signal Corps, becoming the only top studio executive to serve overseas; and Sidney Kent died suddenly of a heart attack. This created a void in the studio's executive ranks, which the Fox board filled by appointing Spyros Skouras (1893–1971), head of the company's theater operations, as company president—a position he would hold for the next twenty years.

In terms of wartime production trends, Fox sustained the prewar split between heavier drama and lightweight fare. The more ambitious, substantial films included The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a somber western involving lynch-mob violence and social injustice; The Song of Bernadette (1943), a "fictionalized biography" about the girl who saw visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes; and Zanuck's pet project, Wilson (1944), a biopic that centered on Woodrow Wilson's creation of the League of Nations (and a major box-office disappointment). The more upbeat commercial films were invariably star vehicles—costume adventures and war films with Tyrone Power like The Black Swan (1942) and Crash Dive (1943), and a run of Betty Grable (1916–1973) musical hits including Springtime in the Rockies (1942), Coney Island (1943), Pin Up Girl (1944), and Diamond Horseshoe (1945). Grable emerged during the war as Fox's top star and a bona fide national icon—an unabashedly sexy, brassy blonde with "million dollar legs" whose ubiquitous pin-up became a symbol of American pluck and playful sexuality.

Fox continued to thrive in the immediate postwar era, enjoying record revenues in 1946 and then returning to wartime levels through the late 1940s. The new executive setup proved effective, with Skouras operating primarily out of New York while Zanuck ran the studio and supervised production. Zanuck continued to produce Fox's top films but handled far fewer than he had a decade earlier—only fifteen films from 1945 to 1950, including My Darling Clementine (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Snake Pit (1948), Twelve O'Clock High (1949), and All About Eve (1950). Reducing his own producing load, Zanuck allowed some of his top writers and directors to produce their own films. The most prominent was Otto Preminger (1906–1986), who enjoyed a career breakthrough as producer-director on Laura (1944), a noir thriller that featured two fast-rising Fox stars, Gene Tierney (1920–1991) and Dana Andrews (1909–1992), and made a sudden star of the middle-aged stage actor Clifton Webb (1889–1966), who also became a fixture at Fox. After that surprise hit, Preminger became one of the busiest and most successful hyphenates on the lot, serving as producer-director on Centennial Summer (1946), Daisy Kenyon (1947), Whirlpool (1949), and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950).

Fox's house style underwent subtle but significant adjustments in the postwar era, as the penchant for darker, heavier drama became more pronounced. To be sure, there were the occasional Grable musicals and Power costumers—films like Mother Wore Tights and Captain from Castile, two of the studio's biggest 1947 hits. But these upbeat releases were far outweighed by a steady output of realistic crime films, trenchant melodramas, stylized noir thrillers, and "social problem films." Fox started the postwar trend toward location shooting and "police procedurals" with The House on 92nd Street (1945), shot entirely on location in New York City, and then pursued the trend more vigorously than any other studio. Meanwhile, a pervasive darkness crept into nearly all of Fox's films, even Technicolor melodramas like Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Particularly dark were Fox's social problem films—Gentleman's Agreement, The Snake Pit, Pinky (1949), and others—which took on issues like racism and mental illness. In fact, Zanuck and Fox were still presenting bleak, probing portraits of the contemporary American condition in the late 1940s, long after the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigation and conservative backlash had induced the other Hollywood studios to play it safe. That impulse culminated in 1950 with noir thrillers like Whirlpool, Night and the City, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, social dramas like Panic in the Streets and No Way Out, and even westerns like The Gunfighter and Broken Arrow, although by the early 1950s (and the second HUAC investigation), Fox too was backing away from films that might be construed as un-American.

FROM THE ZANUCK ERA
TO THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

The year 1950 also marked the release of All About Eve, Fox's consummate postwar success. Produced by Zanuck, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993), the film starred Bette Davis (1908–1989) as a veteran stage star struggling with advancing age and a declining career, and its many awards included Oscars^® for best picture, director, and screenplay. All About Eve also featured Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) in a bit part—one of several in the early 1950s that paved the way to leading roles and top stardom. A worthy successor to Betty Grable, Monroe was the fifties-era blonde bombshell whose star vehicles—Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire (both 1953), River of No Return (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and others—were money in the till for Fox. These hits were also highlights in an otherwise lackluster period, when Fox's only other real star was its widescreen CinemaScope format, which debuted in The Robe (1953), turning that routine biblical yarn into a major hit and persuading Zanuck to produce all of the studio's releases in CinemaScope.

The emphasis on Monroe and widescreen spectacles underscored a shift to a more upbeat, conservative ethos at Fox, which intensified when Zanuck resigned his executive post in 1956 to pursue independent production in France and installed producer Buddy Adler (1909–1960) as head of the studio. That led to a particularly fallow period for Fox, which by 1960–1961 was showing net losses for the first time in decades—and threatened to grow much worse in light of the now-legendary budget overruns on Cleopatra (1963). Problems on that film, along with the success of Zanuck's own D-Day drama, The Longest Day (1962), prompted his return to Fox to salvage Cleopatra and reverse the studio's declining fortunes. Zanuck assumed the presidency of Fox in August 1962, replacing Skouras, and he appointed his son Richard (b. 1934) head of production. Within a year the studio was showing a profit, and in 1965 it enjoyed monumental success with The Sound of Music, whose $80 million in rental receipts made it Hollywood's all-time biggest hit.

Inspired by the runaway success of that film, Fox embarked on a woefully ill-advised production campaign that resulted in the musical extravaganzas Doctor Dolittle (1967), Star! (1968), and Hello, Dolly! (1969), and the wildly ambitious war epic, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a US-Japanese co-production about the attack on Pearl Harbor. These and other big-budget projects failed at the box office, causing cumulative net losses in 1969–1970 of just over $100 million, contributing mightily to an industry-wide recession and to the ouster of Richard Zanuck in 1970 and Darryl Zanuck in 1971. At that point 20th Century Fox came under control of its board chairman, Dennis Stanfill, although like many of the studios at the time, it was without effective leadership, direction, or control. Interestingly enough, Fox did release some modest offbeat hits in that era, including Planet of the Apes (1968), which spun off several film sequels and TV series; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a prototypical action-adventure buddy movie co-starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford; and breakthrough hits by two of the era's leading auteurs: Robert Altman's (b. 1925) M*A*S*H (1970) and William Friedkin's (b. 1935) The French Connection (1971).

The French Connection gave Fox another batch of Oscars^®, including best picture and best director, and helped spur a recovery that accelerated in 1973–1974 with the arrival of Alan Ladd Jr. (b. 1937) as head of production. Under Ladd, Fox turned out solid, predictable hits like The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Omen (1976), along with some inspired comedy hits like Young Frankenstein (1974), one of several Mel Brooks (b. 1926) films done at Fox, and Silver Streak (1976). The studio's fortunes were forever changed with the 1977 release of George Lucas's (b. 1944) space epic, Star Wars, which cost roughly $13 million and grossed well over $200 million, giving Fox another all-time box-office hit. But unfortunately for Fox, Ladd signed away the sequel rights to Lucas in lieu of his final payment as writer-director, which meant that Fox would collect only distribution fees on subsequent releases—which were among the most successful films of their respective release years (1980, 1983, 1999, 2003, and 2005). Other Fox hits from the Ladd era included several exceptional women's pictures, Julia, The Turning Point (both 1977), and An Unmarried Woman (1978), and two of the top box-office hits of 1979, Alien and Breaking Away.

Ladd left for independent production that same year, initiating a period of turmoil at Fox that intensified with the sale of the studio to the oil magnate Marvin Davis in 1981, and then the brief, unsuccessful tenures of Alan Hirschfield as chief executive and Sherry Lansing (b. 1944) as production head. Both Hirschfield and Lansing were out by 1983, as Fox continued to struggle and Davis's interest waned; but the company's fortunes began to turn in 1984 with the hiring of Barry Diller as president and CEO. At age forty-two, Diller already had a remarkable track record in US media, starting in the late 1960s at ABC where he developed the TV-movie and miniseries operations, and then at Paramount, where in 1974 he was named chairman of the studio's motion picture and television divisions. Diller found Fox to be undercapitalized and Davis unwilling to invest, so he began looking for outside investors. He found one in Rupert Murdoch, an Australian-born media baron whose global publishing empire, News Corp., had begun rapidly expanding into media. Impressed by Diller and the opportunity at hand, which was enhanced substantially by the deregulation of US media under President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), Murdoch decided to invest heavily, purchasing half-ownership of Fox in 1984 and completing the acquisition in 1985 (for a bargain total price of $575 million). Murdoch also became a naturalized US citizen in 1985 to satisfy FCC regulations that prohibited foreign ownership of TV stations.

At that point Murdoch and Diller began assembling the necessary resources to create Fox Broadcasting, a fourth US television network to compete with ABC, CBS, and NBC. Although launching Fox-TV was a bold and visionary move, the rollout was done slowly and deliberately, beginning with a late night program in October 1986 and gradually working into prime time and then into a weeklong evening schedule as Fox acquired its own TV stations and a chain of affiliates. Meanwhile, Murdoch and Diller promoted the notion of movies and television as complementary components of Fox's "filmed entertainment" division. Thus the studio was no longer regarded as primarily a motion picture operation, and indeed Fox's share of the movie market gradually declined as its filmed entertainment revenues increased. The studio turned out a few blockbuster hits during Diller's regime, including Aliens (1986), Die Hard (1988), and Home Alone (1990), but it displayed nowhere near the blockbuster-driven mentality of its major competitors.

In 1992 Diller left Fox, satisfied with his achievements but determined to build and run his own company. Murdoch by then was tightening his grip on Fox as well as News Corp., which he continued to expand at a staggering pace, building a vertically and horizontally integrated global communications system that featured multiple courses of "content," multiple modes of distribution, and multiple "pipelines" to the consumer—with Fox-TV being the most lucrative. The movie studio continued to turn out a steady supply of hits after Diller's departure, most notably Titanic (1997), which Fox co-financed and co-released with Paramount, and which earned over $1.8 billion in its initial worldwide theatrical release. Fox also saw huge revenues as the distributor of the rejuvenated Star Wars series, and in fact by 2005, Titanic, Independence Day (1996), and the Star Wars franchise gave Fox a share in six of the top twenty-five worldwide box-office hits. Meanwhile, Fox Searchlight, the studio's indie subdivision launched in the mid-1990s (primarily as a distributor of low-budget independent films), enjoyed a remarkable run of hits including The Full Monty (1997), Boys Don't Cry (1999), Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Napoleon Dynamite (2004), and Sideways (2004).

In the early twenty-first century, 20th Century Fox remains one of Hollywood's principal motion picture producer-distributors, and along with 20th Century Fox Television is a primary "content provider" for News Corp.'s vast media delivery holdings—the Fox-TV broadcast network, a dozen cable channels (including FX, the Fox Movie Channel, Fox News, et al.), and extensive cable and satellite holdings overseas. Thus the film and television studios, which co-exist within Fox Filmed Entertainment, are part of a worldwide, vertically integrated media system that has effectively reconstituted the studio system of old on a global, diversified scale. Movies are key to the system's success, of course, although Fox's most successful filmed entertainment franchises have come from the television side—hit series like The Simpsons and The X-Files, whose capacity to generate revenues far surpasses even the most successful movie blockbusters. Indeed, given the "ownership" of the contract talent and the mode of production involved, these TV series franchises are perhaps the clearest descendants of the star-genre formulas that made 20th Century Fox and the other Hollywood studios tick a half-century ago.

SEE ALSO Star System;Studio System

FURTHER READING

Block, Alex Ben. Outfoxed: Marvin Davis, Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Joan Rivers, and the Inside Story of America's Fourth Television Network. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Finler, JoelW. The Hollywood Story. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Gomery, Douglas. "Vertical Integration, Horizontal Regulation: The Growth of Rupert Murdoch's US Media Empire." Screen 27, nos. 3–4 (May–August 1986): 78–87.

Kiernan, Thomas. Citizen Murdoch: The Unexpurgated Story of Rupert Murdoch—The World's Most Powerful and Controversial Media Lord. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986.

Mair, George. The Barry Diller Story: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Entertainment Mogul. New York: John Wiley, 1997.

Sinclair, Upton. Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. Los Angeles: Author, 1933; New York: Arno Press, 1970.

Thomas, Laurie, and Barry R. Litman. "Fox Broadcasting Company, Why Now? An Economic Study of the Rise of the Fourth Broadcast 'Network."' Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 35, no. 2 (1991): 139–157.

Thomas, Tony, and Aubrey Solomon. The Films of 20th Century Fox: A Pictorial History. Revised edition. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1985.

Thomas Schatz