Remembering JAWS producer Richard D. Zanuck
Hello, Islanders!
You make a few financial decisions that anger your father so much he fires you. Your own father fires you! What do you do? If you’re Dick Zanuck, you go on to produce some of the most popular and profitable films ever made.
The son of legendary studio head Darryl Zanuck, who, as head of, and co-founder of, 20th Century Fox, produced such films as Twelve- O’Clock High, Cheaper by the Dozen, All About Eve, The Longest Day and Tora! Tora! Tora!,
Having practically grown up on the Fox lot, it was only natural that Zanuck follow his father into the movie making business. He would go on to supervise the production of some very popular films, including Best Picture Oscar winners The Sound of Music, Patton and The French Connection, which was released after he left the studio. However, whether justified or not, he also took the blame from his father on the box office failure of such huge, high dollar projects as Cleopatra, Hello, Dolly and Doctor Doolittle. It was the last film on the list that caused Darryl to push the blame on Richard’s shoulders, dismissing him from the studio in 1970.
He teamed up with another young producer, David Brown, to form the Zanuck/Brown Company, setting up shop at Universal. There first two films were a horror film called Ssssss and a little period film that went on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture – The Sting. In 1974 they gave a young director named Steven Spielberg his first feature film, assigning him to The Sugarland Express. So impressed were they with Spielberg’s work that they eventually settle on him for another film they had the rights do, JAWS.
JAWS went on to become the most popular film ever made, and the producers continued their run of good luck at Universal with 1978’s JAWS 2. The success of JAWS and JAWS 2 propelled the producers into a new league, one where their names on a movie poster was just as important as the names of the stars or the director. This allowed the producers to shop their films to other studios, which they did when making the Dan Aykroyd/John Belushi dark comedy Neighbors at Columbia and Zanuck returning to Fox with the Oscar nominated The Verdict.
Shortly after the release of JAWS 2, Zanuck married his third wife, Lili, who joined him and Brown as a producer on other popular films, including both Cocoon and it’s sequel, Cocoon: the Return. In 1989, with Brown now serving as an Executive Producer, Richard and Lili produced Driving Miss Daisy, which would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Other films produced by the couple include Rush, Mulholland Falls, Road to Perdition and the Tim Burton version of Planet of the Apes. In 1991, the Academy awarded Zanuck the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award which is given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” That sums Richard D. Zanuck up exactly.
My favorite Dick Zanuck story concerns some tension during the production of JAWS. At the time of filming, Mr. Zanuck was married to actress Linda Harrison (Nova in the original Planet of the Apes) and he had promised Ms. Harrison that she would play the role of Ellen Brody. Unfortunately, Spielberg wanted actress Lorraine Gary who was married to Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal. Lorraine got the part and Zanuck went to Sheinberg, worried at how he was going to tell his wife she didn’t get the part. Mr. Sheinberg picked up the phone and called producer William Frye, who was currently producing Airport 1975. “Bill,” Sheinberg said into the phone, “you’ve got another passenger on your plane.” Ms. Harrison not only shows up on the plane but was later featured in both Cocoon films as well as the Apes reimagining.
Mr. Zanuck passed away on July 13, 2012. He was 87.
Words by Michael A Smith. Michael is co-author of Jaws 2: The Making Of The Hollywood Sequel. You can order the book by contacting Michael at OsFanMike@aol.com.
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