Box Office Impact

Nineteen ninety-eight has been another very good year for the veteran producing team of Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown. Their most recent film, Deep Impact, just passed the $200 million mark in overseas grosses, while tallying an impressive $140 million in North America. Over the course of their three-decade partnership, Zanuck and Brown have entertained audiences with such formidable hits as Jaws, Best Picture Oscar winner The Sting, The Verdict, Cocoon and the Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy. Under his own Manhattan Project banner, Brown also co-produced A Few Good Men, The Player and Kiss the Girls, while the L.A.-based Zanuck Company brought us Rush, Wild Bill and Mulholland Falls. This year's ShowEast Convention will pay tribute to Zanuck and Brown's extraordinary track record with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the gala final-night banquet on Oct. 22. Film Journal International had the pleasure of interviewing the robust, erudite David Brown in his New York office, followed by an equally lively phone conversation with Richard Zanuck in L.A.

Not only partners but the best of friends, Zanuck and Brown first met in the 1950s at 20th Century Fox, the longtime domain of Zanuck's father, legendary production head Darryl F. Zanuck. Recalls Richard Zanuck, "All through junior high and even in grade school, I would be chauffeured over to the studio and sold papers there on the lot-for about seven years. And then, each summer vacation, I would go from one department to another, whether in the labor gang breaking sets down or in the story department or in the editorial room or in the film lab or in New York in the marketing department. Every summer, I spent working, in one department or another, at the studio. After I graduated from Stanford, I apprenticed on a couple of shows that my father was making-he had left the studio [in 1956] and formed his own company, Darryl F. Zanuck Productions. I just got right into it. We bought this play by Meyer Levin called Compulsion, about the Leopold and Loeb case. My father was making a picture in Europe, and I started developing this script and ended up producing that picture while he was out of the country. I was 24 years old. It was a good start for me, because the picture was very well-regarded and it won the Best Actor Award at Cannes for Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman."

Brown's link to Darryl F. Zanuck is almost as strong as Richard's blood ties. Former "boy editor" of Liberty magazine, in both the fiction and non-fiction departments, and managing editor of Hearst's Cosmopolitan, Brown claims, "the only reason I got into the movie business was I was getting a divorce." Looking for a change of scene after the breakup of his first marriage, Brown was in a receptive mood when, in 1951, Darryl Zanuck sent out word he was looking for "the best editor in New York" to run his creative department at Fox. "A few people lied