Fox That Got Away: The Last Days of the Zanuck Dynasty at Twentieth Century-Fox

by Stephen M. Silverman

Subtitled The last days of the Zanuck dynasty at Twentieth-Century Fox. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

8 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1988

Reviews

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring book about the rough patch that Fox went through in the 1960s and early 70s. This is one of those non-fiction books where the author obviously wanted to include every single bit of research he did, even when it wasn't relevant, so we get a little too much of the very beginnings of Fox back in the early days of motion pictures, not much about their mid-century glory days, and way too much about the very end when a research company was brought in to help Fox plan a future that would help them avoid their past mistakes. Silverman must have access to virtually every memorandum produced during this period and he quotes from all of them, no matter how trivial the information contained is. He has a tendency to reinforce some faulty myths about the 60s and 70s Fox films, For example, he implies that movies like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Tora! Tora! Tora! were disasters. They weren't: both made back their cost, and Beyond made a nice profit. Not recommended.