20th Century Fox

Twentieth Century Film Corporation



Twentieth Century Fox Film Corportation which is also more commonly known as 20th Century Fox, is another one of the major American film production studios. The company was founded in December of 1934 as the result of a merger between two entities Fox Film Corporation which had been founded by William Fox in the year of 1915 and Twentieth Century Pictures which was founded by Darryl F Zanuck and Joseph Schenck in the year of 1933. Twentieth Century Fox studios are located in Century City in Los Angeles, the studio is a subsidiary of News Corporation, which is the media conglomerate which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Some of 20th Century Fox’s most well-known movie’s include; Star Wars, Ice Age, X-Men, Die Hard, Home Alone, Alien and Night at the Museum, with some of the well known stars to have come out of this company being Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe.

With Fox being more of an entrepreneur than a showman, he focused his attention on acquiring and building theaters; pictures were secondary. The company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, but in 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood, California to oversee the studio's new West Coast production facilities where a more hospitable and cost effective climate existed for film making. With the introduction of sound technologies, Fox moved to acquire the rights to a sound-on-film process. In the years 1925-26, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, the U.S. rights to the Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors, and the work of Theodore Case. This resulted in the Movietone sound system later known as 'Fox Movietone'. Later that year, the company began offering films with a music-and-effects track, and the following year Fox began the weekly Fox Movietone News feature, which ran until 1963. The growing company needed space, and in 1926 Fox acquired 300 acres in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City", the best-equipped studio of its time. When rival Marcus Loew died in 1927, Fox offered to buy the Loew family's holdings. Loew's Inc. controlled more than 200 theaters as well as the MGM studio. When the family agreed to the sale, the merger of Fox and Loew's Inc. was announced in 1929. But MGM studio-boss Louis B. Mayer, not included in the deal, fought back. Using political connections, Mayer called on the Justice Department's anti-trust unit to block the merger.

With Fox now being close to bankruptcy, he was stripped of his empire and even ended up in jail. Fox Film, with more than 500 theatres as a result of this Fox ended up being placed in receivership. A bank-mandated reorganization propped the company up for a time, but it was clear a merger was the only way Fox Film could survive. Under the new president Sidney Kent, the new owners began negotiating with an upstart but powerful independent organization called Twentieth Century Pictures in the early spring of 1935.

Twentieth Century Pictures was an independent Hollywood motion picture production company created in 1932 by Joseph Schenck, the former president of United Artists, Darryl F. Zanuck from Warner Brothers, William Goetz from Fox Films, and Raymond Griffith. Financial backing came from Schenck's older brother Nicholas Schenck and the father-in-law of Goetz, Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM Studios .

Schenck was President of 20th Century while Zanuck was named Vice President in Charge of Production and Goetz served as vice-president. In 1935, they produced the classic film Les Misérables, from Victor Hugo's novel, which was nominated for Best Picture. Joe Schenck and Fox management agreed to a merger; Spyros Skouras, then manager of the Fox-West Coast theaters, helped in the merger. Although Twentieth Century was the senior partner in the merger, it was still a dwarf compared to Fox. With this in mind, observers of this mouse-and-elephant combination expected that the new company would be called "Fox-Twentieth Century." However, the new company was called The Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, which began trading on December 28, 1934Schenck became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, while Kent remained as President. Zanuck became Vice President in Charge of Production, replacing Fox's longtime production chief Winfield Sheehan.

Aside from the theatre chain and a first-rate studio lot, Zanuck and Schenck felt there wasn't much else to Fox. The studio's biggest star, Will Rogers, died in a plane crash weeks after the merger. Its leading female star, Janet Gaynor, was fading in popularity. Promising leading men James Dunn and Spencer Tracy had been dropped because of heavy drinking. Zanuck quickly signed young actors who would carry Twentieth Century-Fox for years: Tyrone Power, Don Ameche, Henry Fonda, ice-skater Sonja Henie,Gene Tierney and Betty Grable. And also on the Fox payroll he found two players whom he would build into the studio's leading assets, Alice Faye and seven-year-old Shirley Temple. Favoring popular biographies and musicals, Zanuck built Fox back to profitability. Thanks to record attendance during World War II, Fox passed RKO and mighty MGM to become the third-most profitable studio. While Zanuck went off for eighteen months' war service, junior partner William Goetz kept profits high by emphasizing light entertainment.

In 1942 Spyros Skouras succeeded Schenck as president of the studio. Together with Zanuck, who returned in 1943, they intended to make Fox's output more serious-minded. During the next few years, with pictures like The Razor's Edge, Wilson, Gentleman's Agreement, The Snake Pit, Boomerang, and Pinky, Zanuck established a reputation for provocative, adult films. Fox also specialized in adaptations of best-selling books and Broadway musicals, including the Rodgers and Hammerstein films, beginning with the musical version of State Fair in 1945, and continuing on years later with Carousel in 1956, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. They also distributed, but did not make, the CinemaScope version of Oklahoma! and the 1958 film version of South Pacific. After the war, audiences drifted away, and the arrival of television hastened the process. Fox held on to its theatres until a court-mandated divorce; they were spun off as Fox National Theatres in 1953. That year, with attendance at one-half 1946's level, Fox gambled on an unproven gimmick. Noting that the two movie sensations of 1952 had been Cinerama, which required three projectors to fill a giant curved screen, and "Natural Vision" 3-D, which got its effects of depth by requiring the use of polarized glasses, Fox mortgaged its studio to buy rights to a French anamorphic projection system which gave a slight illusion of depth without glasses. President Spyros Skouras struck a deal with the inventor Henri Chrétien, leaving the other filmstudios empty-handed, and in 1953 introduced CinemaScope in the studio's groundbreaking feature film The Robe.

The success of The Robe was so massive that in February 1953 Zanuck announced that henceforth all Fox pictures would be made in CinemaScope. To convince theater owners to install this new process, Fox agreed to help pay conversion costs (about $25,000 per screen); and to ensure enough product, Fox gave access to CinemaScope to any rival studio choosing to use it. Seeing the box-office for the first two CinemaScope features, The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire, Warner Bros., MGM, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures (1 film only while others are VistaVision), Columbia Pictures and Disney quickly adopted the process. CinemaScope brought a brief up-turn in attendance, but by 1956 the numbers again began to slide. That year Darryl Zanuck announced his resignation as head of production. Officially attributed to burn-out, rumors persisted that his wife had threatened divorce (in community-property California) after discovering Zanuck's affair with actress Bella Darvi. Zanuck moved to Paris, setting up as an independent producer; he did not set foot in California again for fifteen years. [edit] Production and financial problems His successor, producer Buddy Adler, died a year later. President Spyros Skouras brought in a series of production executives, but none had Zanuck's success. By the early 1960s Fox was in trouble. A remake of Theda Bara's Cleopatra had begun in 1959 with Joan Collins in the lead. As a publicity gimmick, producer Walter Wanger offered one million dollars to Elizabeth Taylor if she would star. Taylor accepted, and costs for Cleopatra began to escalate, aggravated by Richard Burton's on-set romance with Taylor, and the media frenzy that surrounded it. Meanwhile, another remake—this one of the 1940 Cary Grant hit My Favourite Wife—was rushed into production in an attempt to turn over a quick profit to help keep Fox afloat. The romantic comedy, titled Something's Got to Give paired Fox's most bankable star of the 1950s—Marilyn Monroe—with Dean Martin, but with a troubled star and director (George Cukor) causing delays on a daily basis, it quickly descended into a costly debacle. As Cleopatra's budget passed the ten-million dollar mark, Fox sold its back lot (now the site of Century City) to Alcoa in 1961 to raise cash. After several months of very little progress, Marilyn Monroe was fired from Something's Got to Give, although somewhat controversially Elizabeth Taylor's highly disruptive reign on the Cleopatra set continued unchallenged. With few pictures on the schedule, Skouras wanted to rush Zanuck's big-budget war epic The Longest Day, a highly accurate recounting of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, into release as another source of quick cash. This offended Zanuck, still Fox's largest shareholder, for whom The Longest Day was a labour of love that he had dearly wanted to produce for years. After it became clear that Something's Got to Give would not be able to progress without Monroe in the lead (Martin had refused to work with anyone else), Skouras finally relented and re-signed her. But days before filming was due to resume, she was found dead at her Los Angeles home and the unfinished scenes from Something's Got to Give were shelved. They wouldn't see the light of day for nearly 40 years. Rather than being rushed into release as if it were a B-picture, The Longest Day was lovingly and carefully produced under Zanuck's supervision. It was finally released at a length of three hours, with a huge international cast, and went on to be recognized as one of the great World War II films. At the next board meeting, Zanuck spoke for eight hours, convincing directors that Skouras was mis-managing the company and that he was the only possible successor. Zanuck was installed as chairman, and then named his son Richard Zanuck as president. This new management group seized Cleopatra and rushed it to completion, shut down the studio, laid off the entire staff to save money, axed the long-running Movietone Newsreel and made a series of cheap, popular pictures that restored Fox as a major studio. The biggest boost to the studio's fortunes came from the tremendous success of The Sound of Music (1965), an expensive and handsomely produced adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, which became one of the all-time greatest box office hits. Fox also had two big science-fiction hits in the 1960's: Fantastic Voyage (which introduced Racquel Welch to movie audiences) in 1966, and the original Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, in 1968. Zanuck stayed on as chairman until 1971 but his last years saw several expensive flops, resulting in Fox posting losses from 1969 to 1971. Following his removal, and after an uncertain period, new management brought Fox back to health. Under president Dennis Stanfill and production head Alan Ladd, Jr., Fox films connected with modern audiences. Stanfill used the profits to acquire resort properties, soft-drink bottlers, Australian theatres, and other properties in an attempt to diversify enough to offset the boom-or-bust cycle of picture-making. In 1977, Fox's success would also reach new heights and produced the most profitable film made up to that time, Star Wars.

With financial stability came new owners, and in 1978 control passed to the investors Marc Rich and Marvin Davis. In early 1985, Davis sold Rich's (who had fled the U.S. after evading $100,000,000 in U.S. income taxes) half of Fox to News Corp. Six months later, Davis sold his half of Fox, giving Rupert Murdoch's company complete control. To run the studio, Murdoch hired Barry Diller from Paramount. Diller brought with him a plan which Paramount's board had refused: a studio-backed, fourth free-to-air commercial television-network. But to gain FCC approval of Fox's purchase of Metromedia's television holdings (once the stations of the old DuMont network), Murdoch had to become an American citizen. He did so in 1985 (the same year Twentieth Century Fox dropped the hyphen from its name), and in 1986, the new Fox Broadcasting Company took to the air. Over the next twenty-odd years the network and owned-stations group have expanded to become extremely profitable for News Corp. The film studio has prospered too, with Fox choosing to back away from its reputation for literary adaptations and adult themes to concentrate on larger movies such as the Star Wars trilogies (1977-1983 and 1999-2005), 1997's Titanic (a co-production with Paramount Pictures), and others. Since January 2001, this company has been the international distributor for MGM/UA releases, and as of 2006, the worldwide video distributor for the MGM/UA library. In the 1980s, Fox – through a joint venture with CBS, called CBS/Fox Video, had distributed certain UA films on video, thus UA has come full circle by switching to Fox for video distribution. Fox also makes money distributing movies for small independent film companies. In 2008, Fox announced an Asian subsidiary, Fox STAR Studios, a joint venture with STAR TV, also owned by News Corporation. Fox STAR will start producing films for the Bollywood market first, then will expand to several Asian markets in the coming years.
The distinctive Art Deco 20th Century Fox logo, designed by famed landscape artist Emil Kosa, Jr., originated as the 20th Century Pictures logo, with the name "Fox" substituted for "Pictures, Inc." in 1935. The logo was originally created as a painting on several layers of glass and animated frame-by-frame. It had very little animation – just a sideline view of the tower with searchlights, some moving and some non-moving. Over the years, the logo's design went through several changes. In the 1950s, Rocky Longo, an artist at Pacific Title, was hired to recreate the original design for the new CinemaScope process. In order to give the rather static design the required "width", Longo tilted the "0" in 20th—an idiosyncratic element which became part of the design for more than two decades. In 1981, after Longo repainted the eight-layered glass panels (and straightened the "0"), his revised logo became the official trademark. In 1994, after a few false starts and expensive failed attempts (which even included trying to film the familiar monument as an actual three-dimensional model), Fox in-house television producer Kevin Burns was hired to produce an all-new, standardized logo – this time using the new process of CGI. With the help of graphics producer Steve Soffer and his company Studio Productions Burns directed that the new logo contain more detail and animation, so that the longer (21 second) Fox fanfare with the "CinemaScope extension" could be used as the underscore. This required a virtual Los Angeles City be designed around the monument—one in which buildings, moving cars and street lights can be briefly glimpsed. In the background can be seen the famous Hollywood sign, which would give the monument an actual location. One final touch was the addition of store front signs – each one bearing the name of Fox executives who were at the studio at the time. One of the signs reads, "Murdoch's Department Store"; another says "Chernin's" and a third reads: "Burns Tri-City Alarm" (an homage to Burns' late father who owned a burglar and fire alarm company in Upstate New York). The 1994 CGI logo was also the first time that Twentieth Century Fox was recognized as "A News Corporation Company" in the logo, despite being owned by News Corp. for eight years to that point. The Fox fanfare was originally composed in 1933 by Alfred Newman, head of Fox's music department from 1940 until the 1960s. It originally was used in films made by Darryl F. Zanuck's Twentieth Century Pictures before the company merged with Fox films.In 1953, an extended version was created for CinemaScope films, and debuted on the film How to Marry a Millionaire, released that same year. (The Robe, the first film released in CinemaScope, used the sound of a choir singing over the logo, instead of the regular fanfare.) By the 1970s, the Fox fanfare was only being used sporadically in films. George Lucas enjoyed the Alfred Newman music so much that he insisted it be used for Star Wars (1977), which features the CinemaScope version. Composer John Williams composed the Star Wars main theme in the same key as the Fox fanfare as an extension to Newman's score. In 1980, Williams conducted a new version of the fanfare for The Empire Strikes Back. Williams' recording of the Fox fanfare has been used in every Star Wars film since. As the CGI logo was being prepped to premiere at the beginning of James Cameron's True Lies (1994), Burns tapped composer Bruce Broughton to perform a new version of the familiar fanfare. In 1997, Alfred's son, composer David Newman, recorded the version of the fanfare that is currently being used. Parodies of the fanfare have appeared at the start of the films The Cannonball Run (cars drive around the logo), White Men Can't Jump, The Day After Tomorrow (thunderstorm on the set), Live Free or Die Hard (where the spotlights go out as a result of a terrorist-controlled power outage), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (piano-rock version of the fanfare), The Simpsons Movie (Ralph Wiggum "sings along" with the fanfare; in trailers and commercials, the "0" in the tower is replaced by a pink, half-bitten donut, the type Homer eats), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (with snow and volcanoes covering the logo; international prints used the regular logo like the previous Ice Age films), Minority Report, where the logo, alongside its DreamWorks counterpart, appears immersed in water, similar to the film's "precog" characters, Max Payne, and Mirrors. In the 2003 production, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the logo appears as a huge unlit monument dominating the nighttimes London skyline. One parody of particular interest was seen at the end of Fox's Futurama, the words "20th Century Fox" were changed to "30th Century Fox" as a nod to the shows setting, the 30th and 31st centuries. As a surprise twist, the opening fanfare for Alien³ has the music "freeze" on the penultimate melody tone, and then adds wailing French horns and bending strings, before continuing with a crash into the opening titles, thus setting the dark mood for the movie. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Foxstar Productions, and Fox Studios Australia are just a few of the other corporate entities that have used variations on the original 1933 design. A new logo of the studio was unveiled in the teaser trailer for James Cameron's Avatar, which was announced that Avatar will be the first film from 20th Century Fox to use the new unveiled logo.