Darryl F. Zanuck

At 77 years old, Darryl F. Zanuck has this physical status:

Darryl Francis Zanuck (September 5, 1902-December 22, 1979) was an American film producer and studio executive; he wrote about films beginning in the silent period.

He was one of Hollywood's longest survivors (the length of his career was only equaled by Adolph Zukor)).

During his time as producer for Best Picture, he received three Academy Awards, but he was also responsible for many more.

Early life

Zanuck, the son of Sarah Louise Torpin, who later married Charles Norton, and Frank Zanuck, who owned and operated a Wahoo hotel, were born in Wahoo, Nebraska. Donald (1893-1903), his older brother, died in a tragic accident when he was only 9 years old. Zanuck was of Swiss descent and was raised as a Protestant. Zanuck and his mother migrated to Los Angeles, where the better weather might have boosted her poor health. He started his first film job as an extra at age eight, but his sarcastic father took him to Nebraska. Despite being 15, he deceived a recruiter, joined the United States Army, and served in France during World War I.

Since returning to the United States, he worked in various part-time jobs while still looking for writing jobs. He found work designing film scripts and wrote his first story in 1922 to William Russell and his second to Irving Thalberg. Frederica Sagor Maas, a film editor at Universal Pictures' New York office, said that one of Zanuck's stories was entirely plagiarized from another author's book.

Zanuck later worked for Mack Sennett and FBO (where he wrote The Telephone Girl and The Leather Pushers) and then moved to Warner Bros., where he wrote over 40 scripts from 1924 to 1929, including Red Hot Tires (1925) and Old San Francisco (1927). In 1929, he went into management and became the head of manufacturing, 1931.

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