Best known as a co-founder of 20th Century Fox, he played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors (the length of his career was rivaled only by that of Adolph Zukor).

[citation needed] When the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941, he was commissioned as a colonel in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, but was frustrated to find himself posted to the Astoria studios in Queens, New York, and even worse, serving alongside the spoiled son of Universal's founder, Carl Laemmle Jr., who was chauffeured by limousine to the facility each morning from a luxury Manhattan hotel.

Appalled by such privileged cosseting, Zanuck stormed down to Washington, DC, and into the War Department, demanding a riskier assignment from Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall.

Zanuck, ever the showman, sent his wife in Santa Monica a package of "Nazi-occupied sand", writing her "I've just been swimming on an enemy beach" – not allowed, of course, to tell her where he had been, let alone that they had been under Nazi gunfire and helped the wounded back to the ship.

Not so Zanuck, who pleaded with the War Department, as soon as American troops were posted for action in North Africa, and was rewarded with the assignment of covering the invasion for the Signal Corps.

Unlike Col. Warner, most colonels from the studio system — Col. Frank Capra, Col. Anatole Litvak, Col. Hal Roach—were actually doing their cinematic jobs, often, like Zanuck, under enemy fire.

Biographer Leonard Mosley suggests this to be because of an inadvertent security leak when Zanuck had mentioned a top-secret, brand new, massively powerful bomb the size of a "golf ball" to a fellow officer from his Hollywood world.

Whatever the reason, despite having published his own first-person account of his wartime adventures (The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther actually liked this book better than the film), he resigned.

[13] He avoided the studio and instead read books at home, surrounded by his growing family, and caught up on all the films he had missed while overseas in his private screening room.

He first personally rescued a cumbersome cut of The Song of Bernadette (1943), recutting the completed film into a surprise hit that made a star of newcomer Jennifer Jones, who won the Oscar.

He relented to actor Otto Preminger's fervent wish to direct a modest thriller called Laura (1944), casting Clifton Webb in his Oscar-nominated role as Gene Tierney's controlling mentor, with David Raksin's haunting score.

The scathing theater world of Bette Davis's aging actress in All About Eve (1950) went on to win six Oscars at the Academy Awards;[14] the disturbing questions of a bomber squadron leader Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High (1949) challenged wartime patriotism.

Wilson (1944), an expensive picture that was unsuccessful at the box office, and an attempt to make a film of One World, a memoir by politician Wendell Willkie of his tour of war-damaged Europe, a project that was aborted before shooting began.

The urgency was increased when an aggressive appliance tycoon and shareholder, Charles Green, began threatening a proxy takeover, claiming the current Fox administration was wasting stockholders' money.

Skouras now began to oversee Fox's somewhat startled research scientists, based on the East Coast and accustomed to Hollywood executives who thought R&D was a waste of money.

Though Fox shares immediately went up, Green found this an even more damning indication of Zanuck and Skouras's leadership and began readying his proxy fight for the May shareholder meeting.

This meant that a CinemaScope process had to be publicly demonstrated to the industry's studios, theater owners, manufacturers, to stockholders and the press—by mid-March, to give them enough time to impress their shareholders with their new product and thus win the proxy fight.

"The enthusiastic response of those who attended these screenings and the laudatory reviews of CinemaScope in the trade press," writes John Belton in his book, Widescreen (1992), "undoubtedly played a major role in Green's defeat" at the May 5 meeting.

Committed to its all-widescreen slate, Fox had to drop several projects that were deemed unsuitable for CinemaScope—one of them being Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), which Zanuck could not visualize being in color and widescreen.

The public demonstrations that spring had already included excerpts from The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire (also 1953), a glossy star package with Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall.

Eventually, in his absence, Fox began to fall to pieces due to the ballooning budget of Cleopatra (1963), whose entire set constructed at Pinewood Studios had to be scrapped before shooting even started.

Meanwhile, Zanuck picked up a hefty book by Cornelius Ryan called The Longest Day, which promised to fulfill his dream of making the definitive film of D-Day.

Flying back to the States, he had to convince a Fox board, staggering under the still-unfinished Cleopatra's $15 million cost, to finance what he was sure would be a box-office hit, as indeed it was, despite skeptics that included his son Richard.

He replaced Spyros Skouras as president, who had failed to control perilous cost overruns on the still-unfinished Cleopatra and had been forced to shelve Marilyn Monroe's last vehicle, Something's Got to Give after principal photography had started, at a loss of $2 million.

When finally finished, the relentlessly authentic film could not disguise its downbeat nature as a chronicle of American defeat, the last thing critics and audiences wanted to revisit at the height of the Vietnam War in Asia.

As the tumultuous decade wore on, Richard also began to falter with lavish costume musicals that expensively tanked: Rex Harrison as the man who could talk to the animals in Doctor Dolittle (1967), Julie Andrews in the period film Star!

Quietly, eyeing a debt level whose interest they could hardly afford to pay, the nervous board members moved Richard to president and promoted his father to chairman, or more accurately, kicked the older man upstairs, which is how Zanuck began to perceive it.

Richard, stunned and humiliated, flew back to Los Angeles on New Year's Day; a studio guard stood watch at his office; it was left to his secretary to tell him he had until 6:00 pm to be off the lot.

"[18] A New York Times article in February 2020 following Weinstein's conviction repeated similar claims about Zanuck, while reporting that he also "had a well-documented habit of flashing his penis at women.

Zanuck addressed issues such as racism (Pinky), antisemitism (Gentleman's Agreement), poverty (The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road), unfair labor exploitation and destruction of the environment (How Green Was My Valley), and institutionalized mistreatment of the mentally ill (The Snake Pit)[citation needed].