TWENTIETH CENTURY’S FOX: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood.<i> By George F. Custen</i> .<i> Basic Books: 435 pp., $27.50</i>

A rather remarkable development over the past decade or so has been the ongoing rehabilitation--indeed resurrection--of the Hollywood studio system and its chief architects, the once-reviled moguls, studio executives and producers. This is not at all surprising because both the blockbuster-driven New Hollywood and the proliferation of movie classics on cable TV continually remind us that Hollywood’s studio era of the 1930s and ‘40s was indeed a Golden Age. And the more we learn about the “studio system” of old, the more obvious it becomes that the producer was its signal figure, the one who maintained the delicate balance between commerce and art, and the one who orchestrated the vastly complex filmmaking process.

Among Hollywood producers, Darryl Zanuck was both exemplary and utterly unique. When F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted in his oft-quoted opening to “The Last Tycoon” that only a half-dozen men in Hollywood could keep “the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” he may have been thinking primarily of Irving Thalberg, but he most certainly had Zanuck in mind as well. What made Zanuck so unique among that elect few was not only his longevity in the industry but his relentless (if not ruthless) control of the filmmaking process.

Along with Thalberg and David Selznick, Zanuck was among the “boy wonders” of the industry, rising rapidly through the writers ranks at Warners in the 1920s to become head of production while still in his 20s. After a falling out with Harry Warner in 1933, Zanuck and Joe Schenck formed Twentieth Century Pictures, which merged with the recently bankrupt Fox in 1935. For the next two decades, Zanuck ran the Twentieth Century-Fox studio, personally supervising production of dozens of feature films per year. In 1956 with the movie industry in serious turmoil, Zanuck set himself up as an independent producer in France, returning to Fox for an ill-advised comeback in the 1960s, when neither he nor anyone else could get Hollywood back on track.

With George F. Custen’s “Twentieth Century’s Fox,” Zanuck’s rehabilitation reaches a crescendo of sorts: the producer biography (or “mogul book,” as Custen calls it) as hagiography. The author’s aim is no less than to canonize Zanuck as “the greatest and most influential producer in the history of Hollywood.” After positioning Zanuck in the producers’ pantheon alongside Thalberg and Selznick, two filmmakers with whom he is repeatedly (and favorably) compared, Custen eventually asserts Zanuck’s singular status due to the sheer quantity and indisputable quality of his output: from the birth of talkies with “The Jazz Singer” in 1927, through such masterpieces and breakthrough films as “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” “Les Miserables,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” “All About Eve,” “The Robe” and “The Longest Day.” As Custen’s title indicates, Zanuck’s greatest “creation” was Twentieth Century-Fox itself. Through Zanuck’s “absolute mastery” and “virtuosic manipulation” of the studio system, he fashioned Fox’s distinctive “house style,” and thus was “the major architect of the destiny of every single Fox film.”

Zanuck’s story has been told before, although scarcely in such upbeat terms. Mel Gussow’s “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking,” published in 1971, portrayed Zanuck as ranting randy tyrant with a cigar clenched in his teeth, a starlet on his arm (or sprawled on his desk), his trademark polo mallet ever poised to strike and surrounded by fawning sycophants. Published when Zanuck’s career was at its nadir and the disdain for the studio system was at its height, the portrait was colorful, if grossly unfair and distorted. Leonard Mosley’s “Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon” was published in 1984, five years after Zanuck’s death, providing a more balanced, if not altogether positive view. Two subsequent books, Stephen Silverman’s “The Fox That Got Away: The Last Days of The Zanuck Dynasty” and Marlys J. Harris’s “The Zanucks of Hollywood: The Dark Legacy of an American Dynasty,” focus on the near collapse of Fox under an aging Zanuck and his then-inexperienced son, Richard.

Now comes George F. Custen, whose portrait of Zanuck is distinctive and most welcome for several reasons. Most important, perhaps, is Custen’s decision to focus on Zanuck’s career during Hollywood’s “studio era,” that is, from the 1920s until his initial retirement in 1956. Indeed, Zanuck’s later efforts are dispensed with in a brief epilogue. Thus the “arc” of both Zanuck’s career and Hollywood’s classical era are presented not only as coincident but crucially interrelated. Equally important is Custen’s reliance on archival materials: interoffice correspondence, story conference memos, editing records, and so on, which show Zanuck in his element, developing story and script for production and then shaping the footage into a finished product.

Custen, who teaches film at the City University of New York and has written a highly regarded book on Hollywood biopics, well understands the social and commercial imperatives involved in the filmmaking process. And in the case of Zanuck, who so carefully maintained a dual output of entertaining “hokum” (his term) and “serious pictures,” this process was doubly complex. Not surprising, Custen concentrates primarily on the latter via case studies of Zanuck’s more influential and critically acclaimed productions. He argues quite persuasively, in fact, that Zanuck was largely responsible for several important movie cycles, including the gangster films of the early Depression era, the historical biopic of the late 1930s and the “social problem” dramas of the 1940s.

This focus has its drawbacks. A good deal of Fox’s hokum and blatantly commercial output is simply ignored. The studio’s hugely successful Betty Grable musicals and Tyrone Power action-adventure fantasies, for instance, receive scant attention; the two longtime Fox stars themselves, both fixtures in the annual Top 10 box-office polls, are mentioned only in passing. More important, Custen repeatedly finds himself countering those who would suggest that “The Grapes of Wrath” and “How Green Was My Valley” might be seen as “John Ford films,” or “A Letter from Three Wives” and “All About Eve” as “Joe Mankiewicz films.” This scarcely deters Custen, however, who argues just as strenuously for Zanuck’s individual authorial status. “Taking nothing away from the other creative people upon whom these films depend for their collective lives,” says Custen of the two Ford-directed classics, “on the whole it was Zanuck who afforded the world of each film its definitive contours.”

The wording here is typically slippery, although Custen does provide ample evidence of Zanuck’s active, vital participation in the creation of these and dozens of other films. The danger, however, is the onset of a “produceur theory” as reductive and romanticized as the “auteur theory” that Custen implicitly assails. As Zanuck himself once stated in a memo to director William Wyler, any Fox script “must, before it goes into production, represent the combined viewpoints of the writer, the director, and myself.” Custen quotes this memo but hardly honors its intent, instead reasserting Zanuck’s absolute control and authority--and thus, implicitly, his sole authorship--at every possible opportunity.

Custen’s canonization of Zanuck also extends beyond the filming realm and here, too, the effort is somewhat strained at times. While he is correct to condemn the Senate’s treatment of Zanuck for alleged abuses of his military status (as a colonel in the Signal Corps during World War II), for instance, Custen’s defense of Zanuck’s actions in the face of HUAC and the blacklist simply doesn’t wash. And although Custen’s decision to avoid extensive treatment of Zanuck’s “private life” is in some ways commendable, the producer’s reputation as a sexual predator and “casting couch” hustler not only was well documented but also, one can argue, was a key motivating force in his “professional life” as well.

I have a few other minor quibbles, beginning with the book’s title, which is catchy but inaccurate: We’re over halfway through the book before the Twentieth Century-Fox merger even occurs. The text also suffers from the overuse of subheads, which crop up every two or three pages and are too often given to glib word play--”Making the Earth Stand Still and Learning All About Joseph Mankiewicz,” for instance. (And, dammit, it’s Warner Bros., not Brothers.)

But the book’s assets far outweigh such minor liabilities. As Custen aptly notes in closing, “Previous histories of Hollywood have misread both Zanuck’s character and, with less justification, his ability.” Zanuck’s biographers have been among the worst offenders, and “Twentieth Century’s Fox” provides a lively, convincing corrective. What emerges, finally, is a view of Zanuck as both a product and a producer of what Custen terms “the culture of Hollywood,” an infinitely confident and resourceful industry player who managed to “reinvent” himself and his production agenda when changing social and industrial conditions warranted. But Zanuck’s luck, pluck, and inventive genius ran out in Hollywood’s decade-long postwar decline, when TV, suburban migration, the baby boom and a Supreme Court ruling dismantled the studio system.

The studios have survived, of course, but both the system and figures like Zanuck are simply unimaginable in the present-day culture of Hollywood with its conglomerate structure, hordes of management personnel, ever-shifting relations of power and revolving door to the executive suites. While Custen, as biographer, is inclined to attribute Zanuck’s success to his individual talent and initiative, a deeper message is that stable, capable management was the key to Hollywood’s Golden Age.