Hollywood Gets a New Power Player: 20th Century-Fox Is Born

On May 31, 1935, Hollywood got a new giant — created not in a studio, but on the stock exchange.

That morning, the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation began trading, the product of a merger between two very different companies. One half was Fox Film Corporation, founded in 1915 by theater magnate William Fox. Fox had been a powerhouse of the silent era, but it had been struggling ever since its founder lost control of the company in 1930. The other half was Twentieth Century Pictures, a company barely two years old — founded in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck, the brilliant young production chief who had just quit Warner Bros., and Joseph Schenck, the former president of United Artists.

Twentieth Century was everything Fox was not: lean, hungry, and profitable, turning out hits for Depression-era audiences. But it had no studio of its own and no theaters — it released its films through United Artists and rented space at the Samuel Goldwyn lot. When Zanuck and Schenck quarreled with United Artists over stock, they went looking for a permanent home, and the struggling Fox — with its big studio lot and nationwide theater chain — was the perfect match. Fox president Sidney Kent and theater executive Spyros Skouras helped broker the deal.

The New York Times guessed the new company might be called "Fox-Twentieth Century." Instead it became Twentieth Century-Fox — with the hyphen. The smaller company's men took charge: Schenck became chairman and Zanuck vice president in charge of production. The new studio kept Twentieth Century's famous searchlight logo and its thundering fanfare, with the name changed.

It worked. Twentieth Century-Fox became one of Hollywood's great major studios, the home of Shirley Temple — its first big star — and, in the decades to come, of everything from musicals to Star Wars. The hyphen was eventually dropped, and the studio still exists today as 20th Century Studios.

That August the new studio even opened a training school, signing 14 young women to six-month contracts on what the press called "the trail of film stardom" — including future stars Lynn Bari and Anne Nagel.

Why it matters: the 1935 merger is a classic Hollywood story — talent plus real estate. Zanuck had the creative fire and Schenck had the business brain; Fox had the lots and the theaters. Put together on May 31, 1935, they built an entertainment empire that has lasted ninety years.

Photo: Theatre Magazine Company, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).