Hollywood: Three to Get Ready

No spotlights swept the sky when it happened. No vinyl microskirted star lets babbled by; no gawkers gathered under a spangled marquee. Yet the event was as important as any premiere in Hollywood history. On the day in 1966 when Jack Warner sold his studio to the parvenu Seven Arts Productions, a new movie epoch began.

Warner was the last of the old-style movie moguls — the wily pioneers like Goldwyn, Mayer and Cohn — who ruled their lots like caliphs, buying stars like steers, firing directors as easily as office boys, and selecting scripts by gut instinct. And the power vacuum they left behind is being filled by men with polished fingernails and vocabularies to match. The arrival of the newcomers may not guarantee a Celluloid City renaissance. But it has already generated a measurable optimism.

The major Hollywood production centers are purring with some 150 feature films scheduled for 1968. Budgets are bigger than ever, now that the vast conglomerate industries have moved in and allowed the studios to enjoy gelt by association. To maintain a liaison be tween the new financiers and the new film makers, studios are turning to the new executives. Cool, crisp as a bank note, three such men, none of them yet 40, are already the masters of production at some of the nation's biggest and best-known studios:

20th Century-Fox now takes orders from Richard Zanuck, 33, executive vice president in charge of production. A tough, laconic demon for physical fitness (he does 50 push-ups a day before starting work), Darryl Zanuck's only son sometimes talks like one of the old-time tyrants. "I'll practically do anything short of murder to achieve what I want," he says. After graduating from Stanford and serving as an Army lieutenant, he got his first film job as production assistant on his father's 1957 version of The Sun Also Rises. In 1962, Darryl Zanuck, after taking charge of Fox, put his son then 27—in charge of production. Cynical studio executives snickered about the son still rising. They snicker no longer. Though his meticulously neat desk in Hollywood has a phone with a hot line to Dad in New York, his sometime critics grudgingly concede that the kid with the sulphurous temper has something—and besides he isn't a kid any more. Since the financial success of The Sound of Music— a Dick Zanuck product all the way—Fox has moved steadily from post-Cleopatra losses to $15,420,000 in net profits in 1967. Listed for production are such ambitious projects as: Hello, Dolly!; Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet; Staircase, a comedy about two aging homosexuals;The Great White Hope, a corrosive drama of Negro prejudice.