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20th Century Fox

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 film studio|major American film studios . Located in the Century City, Los Angeles, California|Century City area of Los Angeles, just west of Beverly Hills, California|Beverly Hills, the studio is a subsidiary of News Corporation, the media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch. The company was founded on May 31, 1935, as the result of the merger of Fox Film Corporation, founded by Wilhelm Fried|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 movie franchises include ''Star Wars'', ''Ice Age (film series)|Ice Age'', ''Garfield (film)|Garfield'', ''X-Men (film series)|X-Men'', ''Die Hard (franchise)|Die Hard'', ''Alien (franchise)|Alien'', ''Revenge of the Nerds'', ''Planet of the Apes'', ''Home Alone'', ''Night at the Museum'', ''Predator (franchise)|Predator'', ''Alvin and the Chipmunks (film)|Alvin and the Chipmunks'', and ''The Chronicles of Narnia (film series)|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.)

History

Fox Film Corporation

The '''Fox Film Corporation''' was formed in 1915 by the theater "chain" pioneer William Fox (producer)|William Fox, who formed Fox Film Corporation by merging two corporation|companies he had established in 1913: Greater New York Film Rental, a distribution firm, which was part of the independent film|Independents; and Fox (or Box, depending on the source) Office Attractions Company, a production company. This merging of a distribution company and a production company was an early example of vertical integration. Only a year before, the latter company had distributed Winsor McCay's groundbreaking cartoon ''Gertie the Dinosaur''. Always more of an entrepreneur than a showman, Fox concentrated on acquiring and building theaters; pictures were secondary. The company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, but in 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood, California to oversee the studio's West Coast of the United States|West Coast production facilities where a more hospitable and cost-effective climate existed for film making. Fox had purchased the Edendale, Los Angeles, California|Edendale studio of the failing Selig Polyscope Company, which had been making movies in Los Angeles since 1909 and was the first motion picture studio in the city. With the introduction of sound technologies, Fox moved to acquire the rights to a sound-on-film process. In the years 1925-26, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, the U.S. rights to the Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors, and the work of Theodore Case. This resulted in the Movietone sound system later known as "Fox Movietone". Later that year, the company began offering films with a music-and-effects track, and the following year Fox began the weekly ''Fox Movietone News'' feature, which ran until 1963. The growing company needed space, and in 1926 Fox acquired 300 acres (1.2 km²) in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City", the best-equipped studio of its time. When rival Marcus Loew died in 1927, Fox offered to buy the Loew family's holdings. Loew's Inc. controlled more than 200 theaters as well as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer|MGM studio (whose films are currently distributed internationally by Fox). When the family agreed to the sale, the merger of Fox and Loew's Inc. was announced in 1929. But MGM studio-boss Louis B. Mayer, not included in the deal, fought back. Using political connections, Mayer called on the United States Department of Justice|Justice Department's anti-trust unit to block the merger. Fortunately for Mayer, Fox was badly injured in a car crash in the summer of 1929, and by the time he recovered he had lost most of his fortune in the fall 1929 Wall Street Crash 1929|stock market crash, putting an end to the Loew's merger. Over-extended and close to bankruptcy, Fox was stripped of his empire and ended up in jail. Fox Film, with more than 500 theatres, was placed in receivership. A bank-mandated reorganization propped the company up for a time, but it was clear a merger was the only way Fox Film could survive. Under the new president Sidney Kent, the new owners began negotiating with the upstart but powerful independent Twentieth Century Pictures in the early spring of 1935.

Twentieth Century Pictures

Twentieth Century Pictures was an independent Hollywood motion picture production company created in 1933 by Joseph Schenck, the former president of United Artists, Darryl F. Zanuck from Warner Brothers, William Goetz from Fox Films, and Raymond Griffith. Financial backing came from Schenck's older brother Nicholas Schenck and the father-in-law of Goetz, Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM Studios . Company product was distributed by United Artists(UA), and was filmed at various studios. Schenck was President of 20th Century while Zanuck was named Vice President in Charge of Production and Goetz served as vice-president. Successful from the very beginning, their 1934 production, ''The House of Rothschild'' was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. In 1935, they produced the classic film ''Les Misérables (1935 film)|Les Misérables'', from Victor Hugo's novel, which was also nominated for Best Picture. Legend has it that the new independent took a detour straight into the major studio camp when Zanuck became outraged by United Artists' refusal to reward Twentieth Century with UA stock. Schenck, who had been a UA stockholder for over ten years, resigned from United Artists in protest of the shoddy treatment of Twentieth Century, and Zanuck began discussions with other distributors which led to talks with the floundering giant, Fox. For a list of films produced by Twentieth Century Pictures, see List of 20th Century Pictures films.

Twentieth Century/Fox merger

Joe Schenck and Fox management agreed to a merger; Spyros Skouras, then manager of the Fox-West Coast theaters, helped in the merger (and later became president of the new company). Although Twentieth Century was the senior partner in the merger, it was still much smaller than Fox, and it was expected that the new company would be called "Fox-Twentieth Century." However, the new company was called '''The Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation''', and began trading on May 31, 1935; the hyphen was dropped in 1985. Schenck became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, while Kent remained as President. Zanuck became Vice President in Charge of Production, replacing Fox's longtime production chief Winfield Sheehan. Aside from the theater chain and a first-rate studio lot, Zanuck and Schenck felt there wasn't much else to Fox. The studio's biggest star, Will Rogers, died in a plane crash weeks after the merger. Its leading female star, Janet Gaynor, was fading in popularity. Promising leading men James Dunn (actor)|James Dunn and Spencer Tracy had been dropped because of heavy drinking. Zanuck quickly signed young actors who would carry Twentieth Century-Fox for years: Tyrone Power, Don Ameche, Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney,Sonja Henie, and Betty Grable. Also on the Fox payroll he found two players who he built up into the studio's leading assets, Alice Faye and seven-year-old Shirley Temple. Favoring popular biographies and musicals, Zanuck built Fox back to profitability. Thanks to record attendance during World War II, Fox overtook RKO and mighty MGM to become the third most profitable studio. While Zanuck went off for eighteen months' war service, junior partner William Goetz kept profits high by emphasizing light entertainment. The studio's—indeed the industry's—biggest star was creamy blonde Betty Grable. In 1942 Spyros Skouras succeeded Schenck as president of the studio. Together with Zanuck, who returned in 1943, they intended to make Fox's output more serious-minded. During the next few years, with pictures like ''The Razor's Edge (1946 film)|The Razor's Edge'', ''Wilson (film)|Wilson'', ''Gentleman's Agreement'', ''The Snake Pit'', ''Boomerang (1947 film)|Boomerang'', and ''Pinky (film)|Pinky'', Zanuck established a reputation for provocative, adult films. Fox also specialized in adaptations of best-selling books Ben Ames Williams' Leave Her to Heaven (1945) staring Gene Tierney which was the highest-grossing Fox film of the 1940s. Fox also produced Broadway musicals, including the Rodgers and Hammerstein films, beginning with the musical version of ''State Fair (1945 film)|State Fair'' in 1945, and continuing years later with ''Carousel (film)|Carousel'' in 1956, ''The King and I (1956 film)|The King and I'', and ''The Sound of Music (film)|The Sound of Music''. They also distributed, but did not make, the CinemaScope version of ''Oklahoma! (film)|Oklahoma!'' and the 1958 film version of ''South Pacific (film)|South Pacific''. After the war and with the advent of television audiences 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 level, Twentieth Century-Fox gambled on an unproven gimmick. Noting that the two movie sensations of 1952 had been Cinerama, which required three projectors to fill a giant curved screen, and "Natural Vision" 3-D film|3-D, which got its effects of depth by requiring the use of polarized glasses, Fox mortgaged its studio to buy 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 filmstudios empty-handed, and in 1953 introduced CinemaScope in the studio's ground-breaking feature film ''The Robe (film)|The Robe''. The success of ''The Robe'' was so massive that in February 1953 Zanuck announced that henceforth all Fox pictures would be made in CinemaScope. To convince theater owners to install this new process, Fox agreed to help pay conversion costs (about ,000 per screen); and to ensure enough product, Fox gave access to CinemaScope to any rival studio choosing to use it. Seeing the box-office for the first two CinemaScope features, ''The Robe (film)|The Robe'' and ''How to Marry a Millionaire'', Warner Bros., MGM, Universal Pictures (then known as Universal-International), Columbia Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures|Disney quickly adopted the process. CinemaScope brought a brief up-turn in attendance, but by 1956 the numbers again began to slide. That year Darryl Zanuck announced his resignation as head of production. Officially attributed to burn-out, rumors persisted that his wife had threatened divorce (in community-property California) after discovering Zanuck's affair with actress Bella Darvi. Zanuck moved to Paris, setting up as an independent producer; he did not set foot in California again for fifteen years.

Production and financial problems

His 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 (1917 film)|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, but troubled star and director (George Cukor) 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'', although somewhat controversially Elizabeth Taylor's highly disruptive reign on the ''Cleopatra (1963 film)|Cleopatra'' set continued unchallenged. With few pictures on the schedule, Skouras wanted to rush Zanuck's big-budget war epic ''The Longest Day (film)|The Longest Day'', a highly accurate account of the Normandy Landings|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, Death of Marilyn Monroe|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 (film)|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 1960's: ''Fantastic Voyage'' (which introduced Racquel Welch to movie audiences) in 1966, and the original ''Planet of the Apes (1968 film)|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 Episode IV: A New Hope|Star Wars''.http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9073943/Twentieth-Century-Fox-Film-Corporation

Rupert Murdoch

With financial stability came new owners, and in 1978 control passed to the investors Marc Rich and Marvin Davis. By 1985 Rich had fled the U.S. after evading 0,000,000 in U.S. income taxes, and Davis sold Rich's half of Fox to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Six months later Davis sold his half of Fox, giving News Corp. complete control. To run the studio, Murdoch hired Barry Diller from Paramount Pictures|Paramount. Diller brought with him a plan which Paramount's board had refused: a studio-backed, fourth television-network financed by advertising. To gain FCC approval of Fox's purchase of Metromedia's television holdings, once the stations of the old DuMont Television Network|DuMont network, Murdoch had to become a US citizen. He did so in 1985 (the same year 20th Century Fox dropped the hyphen from its name), and in 1986 the new Fox Broadcasting Company took to the air. Over the next 20-odd years the network and owned-stations group expanded to become extremely profitable for News Corp. Since January 2001 this company has been the international distributor for MGM/United Artists|UA releases, and , the worldwide video distributor for the MGM/UA library. In the 1980s Fox— through a joint venture with CBS, called CBS/Fox Video—had distributed certain UA films on video, thus UA has come full circle by switching to Fox for video distribution. Fox also makes money distributing movies for small independent film companies. In 2008 Fox announced an Asian subsidiary, Fox STAR Studios, a joint venture with STAR TV (Asia)|STAR TV, also owned by News Corporation. It was reported that Fox STAR would start by producing films for the Bollywood market, then expand to several Asian markets.Fox opens Asian studio

Television

20th Television is Fox's television Television syndication|syndication division. 20th Century Fox Television is the studio's television production division.

Logo and fanfare

[[File:Screenshot 20th Century Fox Logo in 1975.jpg|thumb|250px|left|20th Century Fox logo designed by Rocky Longo in 1950s with the tilted "0"]] The distinctive Art Deco 20th Century Fox logo, designed by famed landscape artist Emil Kosa, Jr., originated as the 20th Century Pictures logo, with the name "Fox" substituted for "Pictures, Inc." in 1935. The logo was originally created as a painting on several layers of glass and animated frame-by-frame. It had very little animation—just a sideline view of the tower with searchlights, some moving and some non-moving. Over the years the logo was modified several times. In 1953, Rocky Longo, an artist at Pacific Title and Art|Pacific Title, was hired to recreate the original design for the new CinemaScope process. In order to give the rather static design the required "width", Longo tilted the "0" in ''20th''—an idiosyncratic element which became part of the design for more than two decades. In 1981, after Longo repainted the eight-layered glass panels (and straightened the "0"), his revised logo became the official trademark. In 1994, after a few false starts and expensive failed attempts (which even included trying to film the familiar monument as an actual three-dimensional model), Fox in-house television producer Kevin Burns was hired to produce an all-new, standardized logo—this time using the new process of Computer-generated imagery|CGI. With the help of graphics producer Steve Soffer and his company Studio Productions (which had recently given face-lifts to the Paramount Pictures|Paramount and Universal Pictures|Universal logos), Burns directed that the new logo contain more detail and animation, so that the longer (21 second) Fox fanfare with the "CinemaScope extension" could be used as the underscore. This required a virtual Los Angeles City to be designed around the monument—one in which buildings, moving cars and street lights can be briefly glimpsed. In the background can be seen the famous Hollywood sign, which would give the monument an actual location (approximating Fox's actual address in Century City). One final touch was the addition of store front signs—each one bearing the name of Fox executives who were at the studio at the time. One of the signs reads, "Murdoch's Department Store"; another says "Peter Chernin|Chernin's" and a third reads: "Burns Tri-City Alarm" (an homage to Burns' late father who owned a burglar and fire alarm company in Upstate New York). The 1994 CGI logo was also the first time that Twentieth Century Fox was recognized as "A News Corporation Company" in the logo, although it had already been owned by News Corp. for eight years. In 2009, an updated version was used to coincide with 20th Century Fox's 75th anniversary and made its official debut with ''Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief''.http://www.nypostonline.com/p/blogs/movies/differ_fox_really_this_year_somewhere_ZCPXjPEGf78WS4CmqHdTkJ The Fox fanfare was originally composed in 1933 by Alfred Newman, who became head of Twentieth Century-Fox's music department from 1940 until the 1960s. It was originally used in films made by Darryl F. Zanuck's Twentieth Century Pictures before the company merged with Fox films.Fox fanfare In 1953 an extended version was created for CinemaScope films, first used on the film ''How to Marry a Millionaire'', released in the same year. (''The Robe (film)|The Robe'', the first film released in CinemaScope, used the sound of a choir singing over the logo, instead of the regular fanfare.) By the 1970s the Fox fanfare was only being used sporadically in films. George Lucas enjoyed the Alfred Newman music so much that he insisted it be used for ''Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope|Star Wars'' (1977), which features the CinemaScope version. Composer John Williams composed the ''Star Wars'' main theme in the same key (B-flat major|B♭ major) as the Fox fanfare as an extension to Newman's score. In 1980 Williams conducted a new version of the fanfare for ''Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back|The Empire Strikes Back''. Williams' recording of the Fox fanfare has been used in every ''Star Wars'' film since. As the CGI logo was being prepared to premiere at the beginning of James Cameron's ''True Lies'' (1994), Burns asked composer Bruce Broughton for a new version of the familiar fanfare. In 1997 Alfred's son, composer David Newman (composer)|David Newman, recorded the new version of the fanfare in ''Anastasia (1997 film)|Anastasia'' (1997); it is still in use . Parodies of the fanfare have appeared at the start of the films ''The Cannonball Run'' (cars drive around the logo), ''White Men Can't Jump'' (rap version of the fanfare), ''The Day After Tomorrow'' (thunderstorm on the set), ''Live Free or Die Hard'' (where the spotlights go out as a result of a terrorist-controlled power outage), ''The Rocky Horror Picture Show'' (piano-rock version of the fanfare), ''The Simpsons Movie'' (Ralph Wiggum "sings along" with the fanfare; in trailers and commercials, the "0" in the tower is replaced by a pink, half-bitten doughnut of the type Homer eats), ''Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs'' (with snow and volcanoes covering the logo, but the regular 20th Century Fox logo was shown on the movie's DVD and Blu-rays release instead) and ''Minority Report (film)|Minority Report'' (where the logo, alongside its DreamWorks counterpart, appears immersed in water, similar to the film's "precog" characters). In the ''X-Men (film series)|X-Men'' films of the 2000's, the "X" in "Fox" remains ghosted on the screen as the scene fades out. In ''Moulin Rouge!'' the logo appears on a stage behind a red curtain with a conductor directing the fanfare. In the 2003 production of ''The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (film)|The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'' the logo appears as a huge unlit monument dominating the nighttime London skyline. On some trailers of ''Diary of a Wimpy Kid (film)|Diary of a Wimpy Kid'', 20th Century Fox placed a cartoon version of the Fox structure on the main studio logo, without the camera panning. At the end of Fox's ''Futurama'', set in the 30th and 31st centuries, the logo is shown with the words "30th Century Fox". As a surprise twist, the opening fanfare for ''Alien 3|Alien³'' has the music "freeze" on the penultimate melody tone, and then adds wailing French horns and bending strings, before continuing with a crash into the opening titles, thus setting the dark mood for the movie. Also on The Simpsons: Season 10 DVD, each disc's opening shows Bart Simpson running around the logo while being chased by the squeaky-voiced teenager. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Foxstar Productions, and Fox Studios Australia are just a few of the other corporate entities that have used variations on the original 1933 design.