Growing up with the last name Zanuck in Old Hollywood was just like real life -- only different.
As a youngster, Richard D. Zanuck had to sell copies of the Saturday Evening Post to learn the value of hard work. “Of course," Zanuck said with a wink, “my dad did have a chauffeur take me to pick up the papers." And even though Zanuck says he never played “catch on the beach" with his dad, he knew his pop cared -- after all, the Hollywood titan bused studio executives to ballgames so they could cheer his son's name just like extras in a sports movie.
Zanuck, now 75, rattles off the anecdotes with a polished comic timing that suggests they're familiar favorites, but at the same time he'd much rather talk about the vibrant present instead of the complicated past. For four of the last five weeks, the No. 1 movie in the country was one that Zanuck had a part in producing, and with “Alice in Wonderland," which has grossed $311 million since its release last month, he has one of the biggest hits of a long career defined by them.
It was telling that recently Basil Inwanyk, a younger producer who worked with Zanuck on “Clash of the Titans," went to him with (he thought) a flattering proposal: “I told Dick I wanted to do a retrospective of his career, and he absolutely hated the idea. 'Are you out of your mind? I'm still in the heart of my career.' And he wasn't trying to be charming. I mean, he was dead serious."
For Zanuck, nothing comes ahead of making movies except for family -- but, of course, making movies is synonymous with family when your father co- founded 20th Century Fox and your mother was silent-film star Virginia Fox and you grew up playing hide-and-seek on soundstages. Ask him about the most memorable people he's worked with and he mentions William Wyler and Paul Newman, Fred Zinnemann and Orson Welles, George Roy Hill and Steven Spielberg, and then he stops because the least interesting part of a movie is the credits -- because it means the action is over.
“These days, right now, these are the good old days," he said last year while taking a lunch break on the green-screen set of “Alice in Wonderland" at Sony Pictures Imageworks. “I've always approached it that way. That's why I'm still working. I'm not the guy who is ready to sit by the pool. I'm too damn busy. I'm not a nostalgia guy. These last few years, working with Tim Burton, it's been the best time I've ever had."
After lunch, Zanuck walked around the studio back lot with the relaxed gait of a lifelong athlete.
“Everything's changed," he said. “The technology is the big thing changing now, the way movies like 'Alice' or 'Avatar' are made. And technology on the other side, the audience side. Word spreads so fast now on a movie, with the Internet, and piracy is something coming down the line like in the music industry."
But his face screwed into a dismissive scowl when asked if he misses the outsized characters of Old Hollywood.
As a youngster, Richard D. Zanuck had to sell copies of the Saturday Evening Post to learn the value of hard work. “Of course," Zanuck said with a wink, “my dad did have a chauffeur take me to pick up the papers." And even though Zanuck says he never played “catch on the beach" with his dad, he knew his pop cared -- after all, the Hollywood titan bused studio executives to ballgames so they could cheer his son's name just like extras in a sports movie.
Zanuck, now 75, rattles off the anecdotes with a polished comic timing that suggests they're familiar favorites, but at the same time he'd much rather talk about the vibrant present instead of the complicated past. For four of the last five weeks, the No. 1 movie in the country was one that Zanuck had a part in producing, and with “Alice in Wonderland," which has grossed $311 million since its release last month, he has one of the biggest hits of a long career defined by them.
It was telling that recently Basil Inwanyk, a younger producer who worked with Zanuck on “Clash of the Titans," went to him with (he thought) a flattering proposal: “I told Dick I wanted to do a retrospective of his career, and he absolutely hated the idea. 'Are you out of your mind? I'm still in the heart of my career.' And he wasn't trying to be charming. I mean, he was dead serious."
For Zanuck, nothing comes ahead of making movies except for family -- but, of course, making movies is synonymous with family when your father co- founded 20th Century Fox and your mother was silent-film star Virginia Fox and you grew up playing hide-and-seek on soundstages. Ask him about the most memorable people he's worked with and he mentions William Wyler and Paul Newman, Fred Zinnemann and Orson Welles, George Roy Hill and Steven Spielberg, and then he stops because the least interesting part of a movie is the credits -- because it means the action is over.
“These days, right now, these are the good old days," he said last year while taking a lunch break on the green-screen set of “Alice in Wonderland" at Sony Pictures Imageworks. “I've always approached it that way. That's why I'm still working. I'm not the guy who is ready to sit by the pool. I'm too damn busy. I'm not a nostalgia guy. These last few years, working with Tim Burton, it's been the best time I've ever had."
After lunch, Zanuck walked around the studio back lot with the relaxed gait of a lifelong athlete.
“Everything's changed," he said. “The technology is the big thing changing now, the way movies like 'Alice' or 'Avatar' are made. And technology on the other side, the audience side. Word spreads so fast now on a movie, with the Internet, and piracy is something coming down the line like in the music industry."
But his face screwed into a dismissive scowl when asked if he misses the outsized characters of Old Hollywood.
