It was very loosely based on Steve Brodie, whose claim to fame was that he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886. Zanuck’s first film at 20 th was The Bowery (1933), hardly a “great man” look at history. (4) Zanuck brought along with him a few stars from Warners, including Arliss. In 1933 Zanuck, Joseph Schenck, the president of United Artists, and William Goetz, formed 20 th Century Pictures, with the deal including release through UA. What else should a studio do but follow it up with Alexander Hamilton (1931) and Voltaire (1933)? Zanuck’s following biographical films tended to focus on the “great man” approach (a single extraordinary man accomplishes something unique), sometimes with odd variations. In 1929 he did a sound version for Warner Brothers of his stage and silent success Disraeli, which won him an Academy Award for best actor. (3) George Arliss was a British stage actor who had specialised in playing historical figures. Zanuck seems to have stumbled into the biographical film genre. (2) Zanuck eventually became head of production at Warners where he specialised in contemporary stories about social issues, such as gangster movies and social comment films such as I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932). Another Zanuck attempt at an historical film was the 1929 epic Noah’s Ark. One of his most successful films, Old San Francisco (1927), a white-slavery-in-Chinatown melodrama, was set in 1906 not to provide an historical view, but to use the earthquake as the climax. His scripts for Warner Brothers in the twenties were mostly contemporary stories. (1) Zanuck entered the film business first as a writer. This was perhaps the beginning of Zanuck’s interest in American historical stories, particularly those that focused on a “great man,” since Zanuck was particularly close to his grandfather. When Zanuck was growing up in Nebraska, he heard stories from his maternal grandfather, Henry Torpin, about the older man’s adventures as a railroad construction engineer. Zanuck and his collaborators had widely varying attitudes toward history on film, as we will see by looking at the production of several of Zanuck’s films at 20 th Century Pictures and 20 th Century-Fox from the thirties through the early fifties. When he was the dominant creative force at 20 th Century-Fox as its vice-president of production in the thirties and forties, Zanuck’s interest in history was in the stories it provided him and his collaborators (screenwriters, directors, technicians, et al.). Zanuck was more a storyteller than an historian.
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