Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, with hyphen, from 1935 to 1985) – also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox – is one of the six major American film studios as of 2011. Located in the Century City area of Los Angeles, just west of Beverly Hills, the studio is a subsidiary of News Corporation.
The company was founded on May 31, 1935,[1] as the result of the merger of Fox Film Corporation, founded by William Fox in 1915, and Twentieth Century Pictures, founded in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph Schenck, Raymond Griffith and William Goetz.
20th Century Fox's most popular film franchises include Avatar, The Simpsons, Star Wars, Ice Age, Garfield, Alvin and the Chipmunks, X-Men, Die Hard, Alien, Speed, Revenge of the Nerds, Planet of the Apes, Home Alone, Dr. Dolittle, Night at the Museum, Predator, and The Chronicles of Narnia (which was previously distributed by Walt Disney Pictures). Some of the most famous actors to come out of this studio were Shirley Temple, who was 20th Century Fox's first movie star, Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
(References to "Fox" below refer to William Fox or Fox Film Corporation until 1935 and shortly afterwards, and to Twentieth Century-Fox or Twentieth Century Fox afterwards.)
Their most commercially successful production partners in later years has been 1492 Pictures, Lucasfilm, Lightstorm Entertainment, Davis Entertainment, Walden Media, Regency Enterprises, Blue Sky Studios, Troublemaker Studios, Marvel Studios, Ingenious Film Partners, Scott Free Productions, Gracie Films, EuropaCorp, Color Force, Centropolis Entertainment, Conundrum Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry Productions, Red Hour Productions, Village Roadshow Pictures, Dune Entertainment, Chernin Entertainment, The Donners' Company, 21 Laps Entertainment and Spyglass Entertainment.
Then, in March 1985, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch advanced Twentieth Century Fox $88 million after buying a half interest in the company for $132 million. Murdoch assumed an active role at the company from the beginning. He acquired seven television stations from Metromedia, Inc. for $2 billion with the intention of drawing on Twentieth Century Fox's extensive library of films and TV shows. When Davis expressed concerns about the company's film operation being tied too closely to a television network, Murdoch offered to buy him out. And so, in September 1985, Davis agreed to sell his interest for $325 million, keeping some of Twentieth Century Fox's valuable real estate.
Twentieth Century Fox Film finally enjoyed some success during the late 1980s. In late 1987 Diller oversaw the release of two big hits--Broadcast News and Wall Street--and his involvement with the studio lured back top talent that had defected elsewhere during the Davis years. A continuing string of successful films like Big and Working Girl boosted the company's earnings by 35 percent. Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, grossed more than $80 million in 1989, and the film War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito, was also a big box-office success that year.
Yet, Twentieth Century Fox Film's movie profits were eroded when Diller demonstrated more interest in the television side of the business than in film making. Specifically, Diller concentrated on bolstering the Fox Broadcasting Company to the detriment of film production. As one theatrical agent explained to Forbes, "Barry's been distracted."
The company then hired Joe Roth, a film director, as the studio's head, charging him with making Twentieth Century Fox Film more productive. Roth was indeed successful, producing multimillion-dollar blockbusters such as Home Alone and Edward Scissorhands. Soon Twentieth Century Fox Film placed first among the studios, controlling more than 18 percent of the box-office share in 1991. Roth's hallmark was his ability to produce entertaining films at a low cost. He frequently chose to produce movies rejected by other studios and encouraged overseas sales to conserve costs. The film remained all important to Roth, who told Forbes, "You have to start from the story. Then you manage the math."
Management Shake-Ups in the 1990s
Roth left Twentieth Century Fox in 1992 to become an independent producer for Walt Disney studios. The former president of the Fox Entertainment Group, Peter Chernin, replaced Roth as president. As management changed, confusion resulted regarding the responsibility for making key decisions at the Twentieth Century Fox Film studios. Rupert Murdoch himself suspended production of Steven Seagal's Man of Honor, the actor's directorial debut. Actor Macaulay Culkin's father appeared to be making production decisions on his son's thriller The Good Son. Even new president Chernin stepped in to decline the Madonna film Angie, I Says when its producers would not comply with a re-write request.
More management changes followed when Strauss Zelnick, president and chief operating officer since 1989, resigned after accepting a position as president and chief executive of an entertainment software company in 1993. Bill Mechanic then moved from the Disney studios, where he served as president of the home video division, to assume the presidency of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. As Zelnick's successor, Mechanic came to the studio with an extensive video background. In his new position, Mechanic was responsible not only for Fox's home video activities, but for production, marketing, distribution, international theatrical activities, and pay TV as well.
Exploring New Products and Positions
Unlike some major studios, Twentieth Century Fox Film supported the development of pay-per-view (PPV) television in 1993, a service through which customers could order new movies over the telephone for in-home viewing on their televisions. Although the company was not considering pay-per-view as a venue for new movie releases, the studio developed promotional and marketing strategies for its pay-per-view releases. For example, the company engineered retail tie-ins with the Improv, a comedy club, for the pay-per-view showings of such comedies as Hot Shots! Part Deaux! and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. In 1994, Twentieth Century-Fox Film negotiated a pay-per-view distribution agreement with DirecTV.
Twentieth Century Fox Film also established an "interactive division" that year. Fox's prior experience with video games had met with mixed results, as earlier forays in the pre-Nintendo days fell victim to the video game "crash" of the mid-1980s. Since then, Fox had typically licensed its film properties to video developers. This practice slowed, however, as the announcement of the new interactive division grew closer. One of Twentieth Century Fox Film's first products in this arena was based on its movie The Pagemaster, an animated adventure set in a library. The Pagemaster game product was made available for a variety of platforms, including Sega Genesis, Nintendo Super Entertainment Systems, and Nintendo Game Boy. The company selected Al Ovadia, president of licensing and merchandising for the studio, to lead the new division.
Twentieth Century Fox Film launched another new enterprise in 1994--an animation unit headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. Called Fox Animation Inc., the new unit expected to issue one animated feature every 18 months or so. The studio recruited exceptional talent to lead its animation division, in particular Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, creators of such animated hits as An American Tail and Land before Time.
A year later, Twentieth Century Fox Film created yet another new division, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, to distribute its video and interactive programming products. Bob DeLellis assumed the presidency of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment North America, and Jeff Yapp served as president of the division's international operations.
In 1996 Twentieth Century Fox Film received the largest film financing in history through Citicorp, a bank holding company. The studio intended to use the capital for film production and acquisitions. "With the help of Citicorp," explained Simon Bax, chief financial officer of Fox Filmed Entertainment, "we were able to put together an innovative film financing structure on attractive terms. As a major studio and as a part of the News Corporation, we were able to put in place a mechanism for funding our full production slate over the next three years, while providing investors with an attractive return on their investment."
In 1997 Twentieth Century Fox Film's animation unit released its first feature-length production, providing Disney studios with stiff competition. Anastasia, the story of the Russian tsarina thought to have survived the massacre of the Romanovs, received promotion valued at about $200 million from a variety of sponsors. Pictures of characters from Anastasia appeared on the packages of products from Dole Foods, while Hershey manufactured Anastasia-themed chocolate bars. Other products offered toy coupons or movie ticket orders. Anastasia even had a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade that year. Mechanic had great faith in the success of the unit's first feature. "If you said to me I had to put my job on the line for any movie, I would put it on this one," the executive told Fortune. Anastasia made in excess of $58 million at the box office.
Twentieth Century Fox Film distributed Anastasia through pay-per-view television during the summer of 1998. Service providers were pleased with the decision, since it attracted a new audience for them. "Anastasia could be the building block for the distribution of more nontraditional PPV programming in the future," Jamie McCabe, a vice-president of worldwide PPV, told Multichannel News.
In 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Film experienced one of its greatest successes to date, producing the Oscar-winning disaster picture Titanic. Breaking all box-office attendance records, the movie opened a merchandising treasure chest for the studio, which licensed merchandise, such as costumes and life jackets, to be sold through the catalog firm of J. Peterman. Other licensing agreements for t-shirts and collectibles followed, as did some unauthorized material. In fact, Twentieth Century Fox Film initiated litigation against Suarez Corporation Industries, located in Ohio and doing business as Lindenwold Fine Jewelers, for marketing a copy of a necklace featured in the movie.
A Hollywood institution, Twentieth Century Fox Film was likely to produce its share of blockbusters in the future. As technologies progressed, the company also planned to make its mark on other related areas of the entertainment industry, including interactive video games and animation.
Principal Subsidiaries: CBS/Fox Video; Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation is a subsidiary of Fox Inc., which is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd. Throughout its long history, the company has enjoyed a reputation as a major Hollywood motion picture studio. It produced some of the more prominent box-office hits--such as The Sound of Music and Star Wars--and has expanded into related areas of the entertainment industry through the development of subsidiaries such as Fox Animation Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
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 Fox was in trouble. A remake of Theda Bara's Cleopatra had begun in 1959 with Joan Collins in the lead. As a publicity gimmick, producer Walter Wanger offered one million dollars to Elizabeth Taylor if she would star; she accepted, and costs for Cleopatra began to escalate, aggravated by Richard Burton's on-set romance with Taylor and surrounding media frenzy.
Meanwhile, another remake — of the 1940 Cary Grant hit My Favorite Wife — was rushed into production in an attempt to turn over a quick profit to help keep Fox afloat. The romantic comedy, titled Something's Got to Give, paired Marilyn Monroe, Fox's most bankable star of the 1950s with Dean Martin, and director (George Cukor). The troubled Monroe caused delays on a daily basis, and it quickly descended into a costly debacle. As Cleopatra's budget passed the ten-million dollar mark, Fox sold its back lot (now the site of Century City) to Alcoa in 1961 to raise cash. After several months of very little progress, Marilyn Monroe was fired from Something's Got to Give and two months later she was found dead, although somewhat controversially. Elizabeth Taylor's highly disruptive reign on the Cleopatra set continued unchallenged.
With few pictures on the schedule, Skouras wanted to rush Zanuck's big-budget war epic The Longest Day, a highly 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 Fox's largest shareholder, for whom The Longest Day was a labor of love that he had dearly wanted to produce for 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 something had to give and re-signed her. But days before filming was due to resume, she was found dead at her Los Angeles home and 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 went on to be recognized as one of the great World War II films.
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 and made a series of cheap, popular pictures that restored Fox as a major studio. The biggest boost to the studio's fortunes came from the tremendous success of The Sound of Music (1965), an expensive and handsomely produced adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, which became one of the all-time greatest box office hits.
Fox also had two big science-fiction hits in the 1960s: Fantastic Voyage (which introduced Racquel Welch to movie audiences) in 1966, and the original Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, in 1968.
Zanuck stayed on as chairman until 1971 but there were several expensive flops in his last years, resulting in Fox posting losses from 1969 to 1971. Following his removal, and after an uncertain period, new management brought Fox back to health. Under president Dennis Stanfill and production head Alan Ladd, Jr., Fox films connected with modern audiences. 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. In 1977 Fox's success reached new heights and produced the most profitable film made up to that time, Star Wars.
Statistics:
Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Fox Inc.
Incorporated: 1915
Employees: 360
Sales: $1.2 billion (1996 est.)
SICs: 7812 Motion Picture, Video Tape Production; 7819 Services Allied to Motion Pictures
Address:
10201 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90064
U.S.A.
The company was founded on May 31, 1935,[1] as the result of the merger of Fox Film Corporation, founded by William Fox in 1915, and Twentieth Century Pictures, founded in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph Schenck, Raymond Griffith and William Goetz.
20th Century Fox's most popular film franchises include Avatar, The Simpsons, Star Wars, Ice Age, Garfield, Alvin and the Chipmunks, X-Men, Die Hard, Alien, Speed, Revenge of the Nerds, Planet of the Apes, Home Alone, Dr. Dolittle, Night at the Museum, Predator, and The Chronicles of Narnia (which was previously distributed by Walt Disney Pictures). Some of the most famous actors to come out of this studio were Shirley Temple, who was 20th Century Fox's first movie star, Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
(References to "Fox" below refer to William Fox or Fox Film Corporation until 1935 and shortly afterwards, and to Twentieth Century-Fox or Twentieth Century Fox afterwards.)
Their most commercially successful production partners in later years has been 1492 Pictures, Lucasfilm, Lightstorm Entertainment, Davis Entertainment, Walden Media, Regency Enterprises, Blue Sky Studios, Troublemaker Studios, Marvel Studios, Ingenious Film Partners, Scott Free Productions, Gracie Films, EuropaCorp, Color Force, Centropolis Entertainment, Conundrum Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry Productions, Red Hour Productions, Village Roadshow Pictures, Dune Entertainment, Chernin Entertainment, The Donners' Company, 21 Laps Entertainment and Spyglass Entertainment.
Then, in March 1985, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch advanced Twentieth Century Fox $88 million after buying a half interest in the company for $132 million. Murdoch assumed an active role at the company from the beginning. He acquired seven television stations from Metromedia, Inc. for $2 billion with the intention of drawing on Twentieth Century Fox's extensive library of films and TV shows. When Davis expressed concerns about the company's film operation being tied too closely to a television network, Murdoch offered to buy him out. And so, in September 1985, Davis agreed to sell his interest for $325 million, keeping some of Twentieth Century Fox's valuable real estate.
Twentieth Century Fox Film finally enjoyed some success during the late 1980s. In late 1987 Diller oversaw the release of two big hits--Broadcast News and Wall Street--and his involvement with the studio lured back top talent that had defected elsewhere during the Davis years. A continuing string of successful films like Big and Working Girl boosted the company's earnings by 35 percent. Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, grossed more than $80 million in 1989, and the film War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito, was also a big box-office success that year.
Yet, Twentieth Century Fox Film's movie profits were eroded when Diller demonstrated more interest in the television side of the business than in film making. Specifically, Diller concentrated on bolstering the Fox Broadcasting Company to the detriment of film production. As one theatrical agent explained to Forbes, "Barry's been distracted."
The company then hired Joe Roth, a film director, as the studio's head, charging him with making Twentieth Century Fox Film more productive. Roth was indeed successful, producing multimillion-dollar blockbusters such as Home Alone and Edward Scissorhands. Soon Twentieth Century Fox Film placed first among the studios, controlling more than 18 percent of the box-office share in 1991. Roth's hallmark was his ability to produce entertaining films at a low cost. He frequently chose to produce movies rejected by other studios and encouraged overseas sales to conserve costs. The film remained all important to Roth, who told Forbes, "You have to start from the story. Then you manage the math."
Management Shake-Ups in the 1990s
Roth left Twentieth Century Fox in 1992 to become an independent producer for Walt Disney studios. The former president of the Fox Entertainment Group, Peter Chernin, replaced Roth as president. As management changed, confusion resulted regarding the responsibility for making key decisions at the Twentieth Century Fox Film studios. Rupert Murdoch himself suspended production of Steven Seagal's Man of Honor, the actor's directorial debut. Actor Macaulay Culkin's father appeared to be making production decisions on his son's thriller The Good Son. Even new president Chernin stepped in to decline the Madonna film Angie, I Says when its producers would not comply with a re-write request.
More management changes followed when Strauss Zelnick, president and chief operating officer since 1989, resigned after accepting a position as president and chief executive of an entertainment software company in 1993. Bill Mechanic then moved from the Disney studios, where he served as president of the home video division, to assume the presidency of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. As Zelnick's successor, Mechanic came to the studio with an extensive video background. In his new position, Mechanic was responsible not only for Fox's home video activities, but for production, marketing, distribution, international theatrical activities, and pay TV as well.
Exploring New Products and Positions
Unlike some major studios, Twentieth Century Fox Film supported the development of pay-per-view (PPV) television in 1993, a service through which customers could order new movies over the telephone for in-home viewing on their televisions. Although the company was not considering pay-per-view as a venue for new movie releases, the studio developed promotional and marketing strategies for its pay-per-view releases. For example, the company engineered retail tie-ins with the Improv, a comedy club, for the pay-per-view showings of such comedies as Hot Shots! Part Deaux! and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. In 1994, Twentieth Century-Fox Film negotiated a pay-per-view distribution agreement with DirecTV.
Twentieth Century Fox Film also established an "interactive division" that year. Fox's prior experience with video games had met with mixed results, as earlier forays in the pre-Nintendo days fell victim to the video game "crash" of the mid-1980s. Since then, Fox had typically licensed its film properties to video developers. This practice slowed, however, as the announcement of the new interactive division grew closer. One of Twentieth Century Fox Film's first products in this arena was based on its movie The Pagemaster, an animated adventure set in a library. The Pagemaster game product was made available for a variety of platforms, including Sega Genesis, Nintendo Super Entertainment Systems, and Nintendo Game Boy. The company selected Al Ovadia, president of licensing and merchandising for the studio, to lead the new division.
Twentieth Century Fox Film launched another new enterprise in 1994--an animation unit headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. Called Fox Animation Inc., the new unit expected to issue one animated feature every 18 months or so. The studio recruited exceptional talent to lead its animation division, in particular Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, creators of such animated hits as An American Tail and Land before Time.
A year later, Twentieth Century Fox Film created yet another new division, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, to distribute its video and interactive programming products. Bob DeLellis assumed the presidency of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment North America, and Jeff Yapp served as president of the division's international operations.
In 1996 Twentieth Century Fox Film received the largest film financing in history through Citicorp, a bank holding company. The studio intended to use the capital for film production and acquisitions. "With the help of Citicorp," explained Simon Bax, chief financial officer of Fox Filmed Entertainment, "we were able to put together an innovative film financing structure on attractive terms. As a major studio and as a part of the News Corporation, we were able to put in place a mechanism for funding our full production slate over the next three years, while providing investors with an attractive return on their investment."
In 1997 Twentieth Century Fox Film's animation unit released its first feature-length production, providing Disney studios with stiff competition. Anastasia, the story of the Russian tsarina thought to have survived the massacre of the Romanovs, received promotion valued at about $200 million from a variety of sponsors. Pictures of characters from Anastasia appeared on the packages of products from Dole Foods, while Hershey manufactured Anastasia-themed chocolate bars. Other products offered toy coupons or movie ticket orders. Anastasia even had a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade that year. Mechanic had great faith in the success of the unit's first feature. "If you said to me I had to put my job on the line for any movie, I would put it on this one," the executive told Fortune. Anastasia made in excess of $58 million at the box office.
Twentieth Century Fox Film distributed Anastasia through pay-per-view television during the summer of 1998. Service providers were pleased with the decision, since it attracted a new audience for them. "Anastasia could be the building block for the distribution of more nontraditional PPV programming in the future," Jamie McCabe, a vice-president of worldwide PPV, told Multichannel News.
In 1998 Twentieth Century Fox Film experienced one of its greatest successes to date, producing the Oscar-winning disaster picture Titanic. Breaking all box-office attendance records, the movie opened a merchandising treasure chest for the studio, which licensed merchandise, such as costumes and life jackets, to be sold through the catalog firm of J. Peterman. Other licensing agreements for t-shirts and collectibles followed, as did some unauthorized material. In fact, Twentieth Century Fox Film initiated litigation against Suarez Corporation Industries, located in Ohio and doing business as Lindenwold Fine Jewelers, for marketing a copy of a necklace featured in the movie.
A Hollywood institution, Twentieth Century Fox Film was likely to produce its share of blockbusters in the future. As technologies progressed, the company also planned to make its mark on other related areas of the entertainment industry, including interactive video games and animation.
Principal Subsidiaries: CBS/Fox Video; Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation is a subsidiary of Fox Inc., which is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd. Throughout its long history, the company has enjoyed a reputation as a major Hollywood motion picture studio. It produced some of the more prominent box-office hits--such as The Sound of Music and Star Wars--and has expanded into related areas of the entertainment industry through the development of subsidiaries such as Fox Animation Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
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 Fox was in trouble. A remake of Theda Bara's Cleopatra had begun in 1959 with Joan Collins in the lead. As a publicity gimmick, producer Walter Wanger offered one million dollars to Elizabeth Taylor if she would star; she accepted, and costs for Cleopatra began to escalate, aggravated by Richard Burton's on-set romance with Taylor and surrounding media frenzy.
Meanwhile, another remake — of the 1940 Cary Grant hit My Favorite Wife — was rushed into production in an attempt to turn over a quick profit to help keep Fox afloat. The romantic comedy, titled Something's Got to Give, paired Marilyn Monroe, Fox's most bankable star of the 1950s with Dean Martin, and director (George Cukor). The troubled Monroe caused delays on a daily basis, and it quickly descended into a costly debacle. As Cleopatra's budget passed the ten-million dollar mark, Fox sold its back lot (now the site of Century City) to Alcoa in 1961 to raise cash. After several months of very little progress, Marilyn Monroe was fired from Something's Got to Give and two months later she was found dead, although somewhat controversially. Elizabeth Taylor's highly disruptive reign on the Cleopatra set continued unchallenged.
With few pictures on the schedule, Skouras wanted to rush Zanuck's big-budget war epic The Longest Day, a highly 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 Fox's largest shareholder, for whom The Longest Day was a labor of love that he had dearly wanted to produce for 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 something had to give and re-signed her. But days before filming was due to resume, she was found dead at her Los Angeles home and 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 went on to be recognized as one of the great World War II films.
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 and made a series of cheap, popular pictures that restored Fox as a major studio. The biggest boost to the studio's fortunes came from the tremendous success of The Sound of Music (1965), an expensive and handsomely produced adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, which became one of the all-time greatest box office hits.
Fox also had two big science-fiction hits in the 1960s: Fantastic Voyage (which introduced Racquel Welch to movie audiences) in 1966, and the original Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, in 1968.
Zanuck stayed on as chairman until 1971 but there were several expensive flops in his last years, resulting in Fox posting losses from 1969 to 1971. Following his removal, and after an uncertain period, new management brought Fox back to health. Under president Dennis Stanfill and production head Alan Ladd, Jr., Fox films connected with modern audiences. 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. In 1977 Fox's success reached new heights and produced the most profitable film made up to that time, Star Wars.
Statistics:
Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Fox Inc.
Incorporated: 1915
Employees: 360
Sales: $1.2 billion (1996 est.)
SICs: 7812 Motion Picture, Video Tape Production; 7819 Services Allied to Motion Pictures
Address:
10201 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90064
U.S.A.