Daryl F. Zanuck: Started in Silent Comedy!

Only our ignorance has prevented us from doing a dedicated post on Daryl F. Zanuck (1902-1979) hitherto — but it’s not the ignorance you think. I mean, I know all the classic Hollywood pictures he either produced, wrote or otherwise contributed to. It would be difficult for me even to make a short list of favorites, but I will try. But meantime, we should explain that by now, 15 years into the existence of this blog, we have written about most of the major studio moguls, but not the usual way. Plenty of other writers have done that, there’s no need for me to add to the mountain of refuse. Instead my pathway in has usually been some connection to my own usual content threads. As it happens most of the studio heads either had origins in vaudeville or the nickelodeon business, and some even had connections to the amusement world. That covers nearly all of them. Furthermore, long ago I did a post on William Fox, and sort of lazily figured that since Twentieth Century only lasted a couple of years as an independent entity before acquiring Fox, I had it covered. Silly me!

Anyway, I was delighted to learn that Zanuck ALSO has connections to “my” world. First, he was married to Virginia Fox, who was Buster Keaton’s leading lady for a spell. But it gets even better than that, because in the early ’20s he actually worked for Mack Sennett! He also wrote Fighting Blood boxing pictures for FBO,“Telephone Girl” comedies starring Alberta Vaughn, and Rin Tin Tin pictures. By the middle of the decade he was working on features like A Broadway Butterfly (1925) with Dorothy Devore and Louise Fazenda, Hogan’s Alley (1925) with Ben Turpin, Oh! What a Nurse (1926) and The Better ‘Ole (1926) with Syd Chaplin.

Zanuck got his feet wet as a producer with Lubitsch’s version of Lady Windemere’s Fan (1925), and The Jazz Singer (1927) was the making of him. I’m not going to listen some favorite movies that bear his credit, ones I’ve written about, and ones particularly relevant to this blog. Please don’t trouble this writer with comments about what I “missed”. I know his other movies, I’m just trying to maintain some focus. They include: Old San Francisco(1927), Tenderloin (1928),Show of Shows (1929), Dr. X (1932), The Cabin in the Cotton (1933), 42nd Street (1933), The Bowery (1933), Moulin Rouge (1934), The Mighty Barnum (1934), Folies Bergère de Paris (1935), The Call of the Wild (1935), Pigskin Parade (1936), In Old Chicago (1938), several Shirley Temple movies, Jesse James (1939) and The Return of Frank James (1940), some Sherlock Holmes pictures, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Rose of Washington Square (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939),Swannee River (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Lillian Russell (1940), Buffalo Bill (1944), Dragonwyck (1944), Nightmare Alley (1947), All About Eve (1950), The Longest Day (1962), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970).

Zanuck is also reputed to have been one of Hollywood’s worst offenders when it came to the casting couch. A difference of degree, not of kind, I’ll warrant!

For more on early Hollywood history please see Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube