One of the best books ever written on Hollywood, a fly on the wall account of 20th Century Fox in 1968. At that time Fox was going through a “great romantic story” phase – the studio almost went under due to Cleopatra, but then Zanuck came back and turned it around with The Sound of Music. This, however, turned out to probably hurt the studio in the long run: they greenlighted a rash of expensive musicals, such as Dr Doolittle, Star and Hello Dolly (an original one, Tom Swift, was in planning), which almost drove the studio bankrupt again and saw the Zanucks kicked out, for good this time.
Nonetheless, I think the Zanuck II regime was a pretty good one – anyone would have greenlighted those movies, and they picked some left-field winners, like Planet of the Apes and Patton. (David Brown, Dick Zanuck’s offsider, always thought it wasn’t the musicals which killed him and Dick Zanuck at Fox – it was a trilogy of “dirty” movies: Myra Breckinridge, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Portnoy’s Complaint.)
So Dunne’s account makes an engrossing reading – it was more dramatic a year or two later but he probably wouldn’t have gotten the access then. He focuses on sections – the marketing of Dr Doolittle, filming Star, pre production on Hello Dolly, shooting The Sweet Ride, activities at the acting school, Irwin Allen shooting a TV series. Dunne is a little unfair I think on producers – he pokes gentle fun at Paul Monash and Ernest Lehmann, focusing on their little egotisms. Monash I don’t know about but surely Lehmann deserved more respect. But an excellent book overall.
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