The story
Founded by Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph M. Schenck and William Fox in 1985, in Century City.1
From founding to 1956
Twentieth Century Pictures' Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck left United Artists over a stock dispute and began merger talks with the management of financially struggling Fox Film under President Sidney Kent.
Spyros Skouras, then manager of the Fox West Coast Theaters, helped make it happen (and later became president of the new company). The company had been struggling since founder William Fox lost control of it in 1930.
Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures merged in 1935. Initially it was speculated in The New York Times that the newly merged company would be named Fox-Twentieth Century. The new company, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, began trading on May 31, 1935. Kent remained at the company, joining Schenck and Zanuck. Zanuck replaced Winfield Sheehan as the company's production chief.
The company established a special training school. Lynn Bari, Patricia Farr, and Anne Nagel were among 14 young women "launched on the trail of film stardom" on August 6, 1935, when they each received a six-month contract with Twentieth Century-Fox after spending 18 months in the school. The contracts included a studio option for renewal for as long as seven years.
For many years Twentieth Century-Fox identified itself as having been founded in 1915, which was the year that Fox Film was founded. For instance, it marked 1945 as its 30th anniversary. However, in recent years it has considered the 1935 merger as its founding date, even though most film historians agree it was launched in 1915 with the founding of Fox Film. The company's films retained the Twentieth Century Pictures searchlight logo and fanfare in the opening credits but with the name changed to Twentieth Century-Fox.
After the merger was completed, Zanuck signed young actors to help carry Twentieth Century-Fox: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Carmen Miranda, Don Ameche, Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, Sonja Henie, and Betty Grable. Twentieth Century-Fox also hired Alice Faye and Shirley Temple, who appeared in several major films for the studio in the 1930s.
Higher movie attendance during World War II helped Twentieth Century-Fox overtake RKO and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to become the third most profitable film studio. In 1941 Zanuck was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Signal Corps and assigned to supervise the production of U.S. Army training films. His partner William Goetz filled in at the Twentieth Century-Fox office while he was away.
In 1942 Spyros Skouras succeeded Kent as president of the studio. During the next few years, with pictures like Wilson (1944), The Razor's Edge (1946), Boomerang, Gentleman's Agreement (both 1947), The Snake Pit (1948), and Pinky (1949), Zanuck established a reputation for provocative films for adults. Twentieth Century-Fox also specialized in adaptations of best-selling books such as Ben Ames Williams' Leave Her to Heaven (1945), starring Gene Tierney, which was the highest-grossing Twentieth Century-Fox film of the 1940s. The studio also produced film versions of Broadway musicals, including the Rodgers and Hammerstein titles, beginning with State Fair (1945), the only musical they wrote for the screen.
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After the war, audiences slowly drifted away. Twentieth Century-Fox held on to its theaters until a court-mandated "divorce"; they were spun off as Fox National Theaters in 1953. That year, with attendance at half the 1946 numbers, Twentieth Century-Fox gambled on an unproven filming process. Noting that the two film sensations of 1952 had been in the Cinerama format, which required three projectors to fill a giant curved screen, and in "Natural Vision" 3D, which got its effects of depth by requiring the use of polarized glasses, Twentieth Century-Fox mortgaged its studio to buy the 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 film studios empty-handed, and in 1953 introduced CinemaScope with the studio's groundbreaking feature film The Robe.
Zanuck announced in February 1953 that henceforth all Twentieth Century-Fox pictures would be made in CinemaScope. To convince theater owners to install this new process, Twentieth Century-Fox agreed to help pay conversion costs (about $25,000 per screen); and to ensure enough product, Twentieth Century-Fox leased access to CinemaScope to any rival studio choosing to use it. Seeing the box-office returns for the first two CinemaScope releases, The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire (also 1953), Warner Bros., MGM, RKO, Universal-International, Columbia, UA, Allied Artists, and Disney quickly adopted the process. In 1956 Twentieth Century-Fox engaged Robert Lippert to establish the subsidiary company Regal Pictures (later Associated Producers Incorporated) to film B movies in CinemaScope but branded as RegalScope. Twentieth Century-Fox produced new musicals using the CinemaScope process including Carousel and The King and I (both 1956).
CinemaScope resulted in a brief uptick in attendance, but by 1956 the numbers again began to slide. That year Darryl Zanuck announced his resignation as head of production. Zanuck moved to Paris and set himself up as an independent producer, seldom returning to the United States for many years. In mid-1956 the company loaned its pre-1948 film library, including TV distribution rights but not the copyrights of these titles, to National Telefilm Associates for 10 years.
Production and financial problems
Zanuck's 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, Twentieth Century-Fox was in trouble. A new version of Cleopatra (1963) began production in 1959 with Joan Collins in the lead. As a publicity gimmick, producer Walter Wanger offered $1 million to Elizabeth Taylor if she would star; she accepted and costs for Cleopatra began to escalate. Richard Burton's on-set romance with Taylor was surrounding the media. However, Skouras' selfish preferences and inexperienced micromanagement on the film's production did nothing to speed up production on Cleopatra.
Meanwhile, another remake—of the Cary Grant hit My Favorite Wife (1940)—was rushed into production in an attempt to turn over a quick profit to help keep Twentieth Century-Fox afloat. The romantic comedy entitled Something's Got to Give paired Marilyn Monroe, Twentieth Century-Fox's most bankable star of the 1950s, with Dean Martin and director George Cukor. The troubled Monroe caused delays daily, and it quickly descended into a costly debacle. As Cleopatra's budget passed $10 million, eventually costing around $40 million, Twentieth Century-Fox sold its back lot (now the site of Century City) to Alcoa in 1961 to raise funds. After several weeks of script rewrites on the Monroe picture and very little progress, mostly due to director George Cukor's filming methods, in addition to Monroe's chronic sinusitis, Monroe was fired from Something's Got to Give and two months later she was found dead. According to Twentieth Century-Fox files, she was rehired within weeks for a two-picture deal totaling $1 million, $500,000 to finish Something's Got to Give (plus a bonus at completion), and another $500,000 for What a Way to Go. Elizabeth Taylor's disruptive reign on the Cleopatra set continued unchallenged from 1960 into 1962, though three Twentieth Century-Fox executives went to Rome in June 1962 to fire her. They learned that director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had filmed out of sequence and had only done interiors, so Twentieth Century-Fox was then forced to allow Taylor several more weeks of filming. In the meantime during that summer of 1962 Fox released nearly all of its contract stars to offset burgeoning costs, including Jayne Mansfield.
With few pictures on the schedule, Skouras wanted to rush Zanuck's big-budget war epic The Longest Day (1962), an accurate account of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, with a huge international cast, into release as another source of quick cash. This offended Zanuck, still Twentieth Century-Fox's largest shareholder, for whom The Longest Day was a labor of love that he had dearly wanted to produce for many 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 decided that re-signing her was unavoidable. But days before filming was due to resume, she was found dead at her Los Angeles home and the picture resumed filming as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner in the leads. Released in 1963, the film was a hit. The unfinished scenes from Something's Got to Give were shelved 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 and was well received.
At the next board meeting, Zanuck spoke for eight hours, convincing directors that Skouras was mismanaging 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 (the archives of which are now owned by Fox News), and made a series of cheap, popular pictures that restored Twentieth Century-Fox as a major studio. The saving grace for the studio's fortunes came from the tremendous success of The Sound of Music (1965), an expensive and handsomely produced film adaptation of the highly acclaimed Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, which became a significant success at the box office and won five Academy Awards, including Best Director (Robert Wise) and Best Picture of the Year.
Twentieth Century-Fox also had two big science-fiction hits in the decade: Fantastic Voyage (1966), and the original Planet of the Apes (1968), starring Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, and Roddy McDowall. Fantastic Voyage was the last film made in CinemaScope; the studio had held on to the format while Panavision lenses were being used elsewhere.
Zanuck stayed on as chairman until 1971, but there were several expensive flops in his last years, resulting in Twentieth Century-Fox posting losses from 1969 to 1971. Following his removal and replacement by Dennis Stanfill as chairman, and after an uncertain period, new management brought Twentieth Century-Fox back to health. Under president Gordon T. Stulberg and production head Alan Ladd, Jr., Twentieth Century-Fox films connected with modern audiences. Board chairman Dennis Stanfill used the profits to acquire resort properties, soft-drink bottlers, Australian theaters and other properties in an attempt to diversify enough to offset the boom-or-bust cycle of picture-making.
Foreshadowing a pattern of film production still yet to come, in late 1973 Twentieth Century-Fox partnered with Warner Bros. to co-produce The Towering Inferno (1974), an all-star action blockbuster from producer Irwin Allen. Both studios found themselves owning the rights to books about burning skyscrapers. Allen insisted on a meeting with the heads of both studios and announced that as Twentieth Century-Fox was already in the lead with their property it would be career suicide to have competing movies. Thus the first joint-venture studio deal was struck. In hindsight, while it may be commonplace now, back in the 1970s, it was a risky, but revolutionary, idea that paid off handsomely at both domestic and international box offices around the world.
Twentieth Century-Fox's success reached new heights by backing the most profitable film made up to that time, Star Wars (1977). Substantial financial gains were realized as a result of the film's unprecedented success: from a low of $6 in June 1976, stock prices more than quadrupled to almost $27 after Star Wars release; 1976 revenues of $195 million rose to $301 million in 1977.
Marvin Davis and Rupert Murdoch
With financial stability came new owners, when 20th Century-Fox was sold for $720 million on June 8, 1981, to investors Marc Rich and Marvin Davis. 20th Century-Fox's assets included Pebble Beach Golf Links, the Aspen Skiing Company and a Century City property upon which Davis built and twice sold Fox Plaza.
In 1982, the company decided to try on capitalizing the video game industry by forming the company's first video game division, Fox Video Games, in order to sell cartridges for consoles and computers, under the "Games of the Century" slogan, but the division failed due to the video game crash of 1983.
By 1984, Rich had become a fugitive from justice, having fled to Switzerland after being charged by U.S. federal prosecutors with tax evasion, racketeering and illegal trading with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. Rich's assets were frozen by U.S. authorities. In 1984, Marvin Davis bought out Marc Rich's 50% interest in 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation for an undisclosed amount, reported to be $116 million. In late 1983 and 1984, Australian businessman Rupert Murdoch made an unsuccessful attempt at acquiring Warner Communications, which included film studio Warner Bros. Pictures and other assets such as Warner Music Group. After failing to acquire Warner Communications through his company News Corporation, Murdoch shifted his attention to acquiring another film studio in Twentieth Century-Fox. Davis sold the 50% stake in Twentieth Century-Fox to News Corporation for $250 million in March 1985. Davis later backed out of a deal with Murdoch to purchase John Kluge's Metromedia television stations. Murdoch went ahead alone and bought the stations, and later bought out Davis' remaining stake in Twentieth Century-Fox for $325 million. From 1985, the hyphen was permanently deleted from the brand name, with Twentieth Century-Fox changing to Twentieth Century Fox.
To gain FCC approval of 20th Century-Fox's purchase of Metromedia's television holdings, once the stations of the long-dissolved DuMont network, Murdoch had to become a U.S. citizen. He did so in 1985, and in 1986 the new Fox Broadcasting Company took to the air. The network's visual imagery has often incorporated the searchlights of 20th Century Fox's logo. Over the next 20-odd years the network and owned-stations group expanded to become extremely profitable for News Corporation. Between the 1980s and 2010s, it aired in-house programming produced by 20th Century Fox's television studios (such as Family Guy, The Simpsons and The X-Files), as well as outside content from other studios (such as Beverly Hills 90210, Married... with Children and The O.C.). In October 1993, 20th Century Fox bought the rights to the Marvel Comics characters X-Men, while the Marvel characters the Fantastic Four were bought in 1998. During the 1990s, Marvel sold off the rest of their characters to other studios, and these studios had a clause in their contracts which would allow the characters rights to revert to Marvel if they failed to produce new films every few years. An animated series based on the X-Men had already begun airing on the Fox network in 1992, prior to 20th Century Fox acquiring the film rights the following year. In 2000, Bryan Singer directed the first film and the second film, while Brett Ratner was hired to direct the third film of the original trilogy. In 1994, News Corporation launched FX, which evolved into a premium cable network utilizing Fox's television production capabilities. That year, it also co-founded Foxtel, which went on to become Australia's main pay television provider. In 1996, News Corporation launched the popular cable news channel Fox News. All three of these entities initially used logos which were inspired by 20th Century Fox's searchlight logo design. Beginning in the mid-1990s, News Corporation also utilized the 20th Century Fox brand when launching various cable sports channels around the world, with these channels being branded Fox Sports channels.
In 1994, 20th Century Fox would establish four new divisions: Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox Family Films, Fox Animation Studios, and Fox 2000 Pictures. Fox Searchlight would specialize in the specialty and indie film market, with Thomas Rothman, then president of production at The Samuel Goldwyn Company, being brought on to head up the new studio. It was soon given its name with Rothman as its founding president. Fox Family Films was tasked with producing films geared towards families, under John Matoian. Fox Animation Studios was established on August 9, 1994, designed to compete with Walt Disney Feature Animation, whom had found success in the Disney Renaissance. Don Bluth and Gary Goldman of the failing Sullivan Bluth Studios were appointed to head the new $100 million animation studio. Fox 2000 Pictures was formed to specialize in mid-budget-ranging films targeted towards underserved groups of audiences, with Laura Ziskin brought on as president. In November 1995, 20th Century Fox entered a $50 million agreement to purchase the library of bankrupt Carolco Pictures, which would have given Fox the rights to make a sequel based on the hit Carolco film Terminator 2: Judgement Day. However, Fox dropped their bid in January 1996, after French company Canal+ submitted a $58 million counterbid for the assets.
In January 1997, News Corporation acquired New World Communications for $2.48 billion, and folded its television operations and library into 20th Century Fox. In June 1997, News Corporation acquired The Family Channel as part of a joint venture with Saban Entertainment, renaming it the Fox Family Channel. In October 2001, News Corporation sold the Fox Family Channel to Disney for $5.2 billion. As part of the sale, Disney acquired the rights to various children's programs which originally aired on the Fox network's Fox Kids block and the Fox Family Channel, in addition to acquiring Saban Entertainment and its library of 6,500 television episodes.
In August 1997, Fox's Los Angeles-based visual effects company, VIFX, acquired majority interest in Blue Sky Studios to form a new visual effects and animation company, temporarily renamed "Blue Sky/VIFX". Blue Sky had previously did the character animation of MTV Films' first film Joe's Apartment. Following the studio's expansion, Blue Sky produced character animation for the films Alien Resurrection, A Simple Wish, Mouse Hunt, Star Trek: Insurrection and Fight Club. VIFX was later sold to another VFX studio Rhythm and Hues Studios in March 1999. According to Blue Sky founder Chris Wedge, Fox considered selling Blue Sky as well by 2000 due to financial difficulties in the visual effects industry in general.
20th Century Fox acquired a 20% stake in film production company New Regency in September 1997, and as part of the deal became their distributor for the next 15 years, with the deal later being renewed past 2012. Regency previously had a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Pictures and intended to renew this deal, but talks between the two parties broke down in July 1997. In 2015, Warner's distribution rights to most of the pre-Fox Regency films expired, and 20th Century Fox subsequently became the new distributor for these films, despite these films still having the Warner Bros. opening logo.
From Wikipedia’s article on 20th Century Studios, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5