Hollywood: Casualties at Fox

Ever since he took over 20th Century-Fox a month ago and became Hollywood’s newest general, Darryl Zanuck has been playing martial airs to urge his studio into combat. Last week the music stopped and the casualty lists appeared: > Fired were four topFox executives whose brains have been costing the company at least half a million a year.

>Canceled were three pictures on the studio’s production schedule—Promise at Dawn with Ingrid Bergman, Take Her, She’s Mine with James Stewart, and an adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses with Peter Sellers.

>All but closed down was Fox’s Hollywood studio, in a move that will mean the suspension of more than half of the studio’s 600 employees, or “all studio personnel not now actively engaged in editing and completing Cleopatra or assigned to future television projects or preparing screen plays.” It meant that General Zanuck would have fewer troops under his command, but he obviously feels that his army must travel light.