Videoage International December 2021

6 Book Review V I D E O A G E December 2021 I n March 2019, Rupert Murdoch sold 21st Century-Fox to Walt Disney for $71.3 billion. A year later, Disney announced that the film studio would be rebranded as 20th Century Studios. “Before Disney changed the name, there was one last movie that encapsulated the 20th Century-Fox brand,” says U.S. author and Hollywood historian Scott Eyman. Starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, Ford v Ferrari was a sports drama about the effort made by American car designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles to build a race car for Ford at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. “It was a movie that Darryl Zanuck—or Alan Ladd Jr.— would have made in a heartbeat,” writes Eyman, “a movie that embodied and ennobled the best of the pictures that 20th Century-Fox had made, no matter the era.” For much of the last century, any movie-goer could discern the iconic drum roll and trumpet fanfare that accompanied almost every title from 20th Century-Fox. In his most recent book, Eyman presents a broad-strokes history of the American film studio, offering a fuller portrait of the ups and downs of one of the “Big Six” U.S. studios. 20th Century-Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio (336 pgs., Running Press/Turner Classic Movies, 2021, U.S. $28) delves deep and explores the roles of two men whose bearing on the studio cannot be understated: William Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck. Scott Eyman is very much a Hollywood history buff. A frequent book critic for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Observer , he has written 15 books about the movie industry, including biographies of actors Cary Grant and John Wayne, directors John Ford and Ernst Lubitsch, and studio head Louis B. Mayer, among others. With his latest, Eyman continues to use his extensive understanding of old Hollywood to look to the past for the legacy of a studio that no longer exists the way it once did. To begin, Eyman first considers the seeds of the studio, starting with Fox Film Corporation, a motion picture company founded in 1915 by the Hungarian-American film executive and businessmanWilliamFox. Born asWilhelmFuchs in Tolcsva, Hungary in 1879, he was brought by his parents Michael and Hannah Fuchs to the United States when he was just nine months old. Raised on the Lower East Side of New York City, “Wilhelm Fuchs embodied the classic immigrant mindset: if he wasn’t hustling, he was losing,” writes Eyman. After buying his first nickelodeon, Fox quickly expanded with the help of Tammany Hall, the New York City political machine, and when he started Fox Film, he signed on German film director F.W. Murnau, who rang in the “beginning of the greatest period of Fox films” in the late 1920s. The success Fox had, though, came to an end, when, in the spring of 1930 he lost control of his company, which then merged with 20th Century Pictures to form 20th Century- Fox in 1935. Things got even rockier for Fox when he was imprisoned on conspiracy charges and, as Eyman puts it, “never made another movie.” Following the merger, Darryl Francis Zanuck became a much larger player. The second child of Frank and Louise Zanuck, Darryl Zanuck was born in 1902 in the very small town of Wahoo, Nebraska, and after his parents divorced, he spent most of his time with his mother in Glendale, California. He began writing scripts for studios in the 1920s and worked his way into Warner Bros., where he wrote so many that the studio occasionally put his credits under a pseudonym. After walking out of Warner, he took part in setting up 20th Century Pictures with Joseph Schenk, releasing films through United Artists. As Eyman writes, “[t]he merger solved several problems for Zanuck—he would immediately acquire an impeccably modern studio instead of renting space from United Artists. More important, he would be master of his own fate.” From then on, Zanuck grows into the focal point of Eyman’s book. After discussing the official launch of 20th Century-Fox, the book covers an astounding amount of information, glossing over the following four decades with economy and speed. To read what follows is like encountering a revolving door of facts and anecdotes about Zanuck’s life or the goings-on at the studio. In that way, parts of 20th Century-Fox resemble an inventory of names and numbers — actors, executives, movies, and the money that was made. These moments, while successful at delivering information, come off as a little dry. The strongest sections of 20thCentury-Fox come when Eyman is able to not only recount real-life events but also offer psychological insight to his subjects. He does accomplish opening a window into the psychology of both Fox and Zanuck, showing a deeper understanding of both their characters. In one such moment, Eyman writes that “the story of William Fox is about a business rather than a man, if only because he seems to have willfully obliterated anything resembling a personality in favor of the single-minded pursuit of achievement. You get a sense of grinding responsibility, a frightening level of aggression mixed with situational expedience, seasoned with a touch of megalomania.” With Zanuck, Eyman brings that level of insight by citing the studio head’s interactions within his family. Zanuck had three children with his wife Virginia Fox, the silent film actress. Eyman tells the reader that Zanuck “kept tabs on his kids more or less the same way he kept tabs on his employees: through memos.” Zanuck’s workaholic tendencies, though, were one of his qualities that earned him comparisons to the other great Hollywood studio heads. Eyman comments that “he was very much in the mold of Mayer, of Warner, of Goldwyn, in that he was an instinctive autocrat and had a very personal vision of what he wanted his movies to be.” In some cases, the nuance and awareness of his subjects falters and gives way to analyses that are just a bit too neat and tidy. When addressing the Disney buyout, Eyman suggests that “[Fox and Zanuck] would have understood perfectly. Both men understood that corporations age and decline just like human beings, to be replaced by more aggressive companies better equipped to invest and retool for the future.” In all, Eyman has supplied an enjoyable read with 20th Century-Fox , outlining the shifts in power and portraying these titanic studio heads with a depth that any film buff could appreciate. “In short,” Eyman writes of the studio, “for more than a century, Fox flourished by creating trends rather than following them.” Author Scott Eyman chronicles the history of the iconic Hollywood studio, from its start in 1915, to its heyday in the 1960s, to its sale to Disney in 2019. A Tale of Two Studio Heads: How 20th Century-Fox Flourished in Two Centuries By Luis Polanco