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 sonthen 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.

Warner Bros.-Seven Arts has Kenneth Hyman, 39, as its executive vice president in charge of production. Like Dick Zanuck, Ken Hyman was to the studio born: his father Eliot is chairman of the board of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. Married to an English girl, Ken Hyman is a relaxed Anglophile who openly wishes his work would allow him to live in London. As a compromise of sorts, he had his script-cluttered Hollywood office decorated in dark-paneled English-club style. Hyman first earned his stars as an independent producer in 1965 with The Hill, an acerbic antiwar film that starred Sean Connery in one of his few impressive non-Bond roles. Hyman moved up to the big time with The Dirty Dozen, one of the top grossers of 1967. That movie made him a millionaire. To join Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, he actually took a cut in pay (to $250,000 a year). But he is no slouch at spending. He has already granted Bill Cosby’s corporation —which started with a capital investment of $150—a five-picture, $12 million contract. Hyman also signed Paul Newman to his first directing assignment, Now I Lay Me Down, and has purchased the screen rights to Tennessee Williams’ new play, The Seven Descents of Myrtle.

Paramount has put Vice President Robert Evans, 37, in charge of production. A reformed clothing manufacturer and failed actor, Bob Evans invaded the Hollywood hierarchy like a character from a ’30s scenario. The co-founder of the fashion firm Evan-Picone, Evans was lounging by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel one day in 1956, when Norma Shearer gave him the eye; she just knew that he was the ideal man to play her late husband, Irving Thalberg, in a movie called The Man of a Thousand Faces. For three years Evans sleepwalked his way through the kind of pretty-boy roles that George Hamilton now gets, then went back to fashions. In 1959, Revlon purchased Evan-Picone in a deal that eventually made Evans rich enough to return to Hollywood as an independent producer for Dick Zanuck at Fox. Two years ago, when young Millionaire Charles Bluhdorn (TIME, Dec. 3, 1965) bought Paramount and began raiding other studios for talent, his first recruit was Evans. Unlike Zanuck and Hyman, who make the deals and handle the creative side of moviemaking, Evans is responsible only for the production schedule, which now includes some 70 projects. Twice-divorced, Evans works an 18-hour day, rarely appears at Hollywood functions. With good reason: Paramount is probably the most backward of the major studios (it received precisely one 1967 Oscar nomination). Trade rumors have it that Evans may soon be ousted, but so far he has proved as unbudgeable as the Hollywood Hills.

It is too early to tell whether the new young men are princes or pretenders. The old caliphs already have credit for a string of masterpieces, from Citizen Kane to Shane, while their successors still have most of their pet projects in scenario or on camera. Hollywood is waiting to see whether they are merely doing cosmetic surgery or whether they can truly change the town.