Twentieth Century-Fox

Twentieth Century-Fox is a film studio of the United Kingdom of America and the fourth of the six to hold a royal charter. Its charter was granted in 1931 to the Fox Film Corporation, and it became Twentieth Century-Fox in 1935 by a merger with Twentieth Century Pictures to which the Crown gave its assent, as a charter cannot be altered by the company alone. It is the studio of CinemaScope, of the Movietone newsreels, of the national epic Boston, of The Sound of Music, and of the searchlights that sweep across its monument before every one of its pictures.

It owns Century City. When the ruinous cost of Cleopatra forced the studio to raise money in 1961 it applied to amend its charter and sell its back lot, abandoned the application at the hearing, and agreed instead to an amendment that let it develop the back lot as an office and residential district while keeping the land. The ground rents of Century City are the reason the studio has never again been in real danger.

Its lawyers, uncertain in 1931 which of the company’s old films might be re-released, deposited the whole of Fox Film’s back catalogue with the national repository along with everything the new charter required. When a fire at the studio’s own storage in New Jersey destroyed almost all its original silent negatives in 1937, the deposit copies survived, so that Theda Bara’s Cleopatra of 1917 and F. W. Murnau’s 4 Devils have never been lost. Every Movietone newsreel from 1927 to 1963 was deposited too, and the Realm holds as a result a complete filmed record of its own twentieth century.

The studio was independent until 1985, when it was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s company, incorporated in New Wessex, which made it one of the two chartered studios owned from outside the Realm. In 2019 it was bought by Disney, the Realm’s largest film company, which has never held a charter and never been bound by one. The question of what a royal charter obliges when its holder is a subsidiary of a company that holds none has been before the Crown’s law officers since. It has kept its name, because renaming it would mean amending the charter and nobody has managed to.

Its failings are stated in this article: the cut of Boston in 1959, which removed the film’s slavery sequence, and the destruction of the studio’s own materials; the roles written for Stepin Fetchit and other Black performers; the yellowface of its Charlie Chan and Mr Moto series; the casting of Pinky; its treatment of Marilyn Monroe and its other contract actresses; and the child-star machine built around Shirley Temple.

Name and emblem

The name joins the two companies of 1935: Twentieth Century Pictures, the independent production company founded in 1933 by Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck, and the Fox Film Corporation, founded in 1915 by William Fox. The hyphen between Century and Fox is original and has survived every change of ownership, logo and stationery.

The name has never changed. Disney proposed in 2020 to drop the word Fox from the studio’s name, the company it had bought having shared the name with a news channel Disney had not bought and did not wish to be confused with. A chartered body’s name is written in its charter, and changing it requires amending the charter, which requires the Crown’s assent on ministerial advice. The ministry declined to advise an amendment while the law officers were still considering what the charter obliged its new owner to do, and the studio is still Twentieth Century-Fox on its charter, its deposit forms and the front of its pictures.

The emblem is the monument and the searchlights: the company’s name in massive stepped letters standing on a plinth, lit by searchlights that sweep across the sky behind it, first painted for Twentieth Century Pictures in 1933 and adopted by the merged company in 1935. The fanfare that accompanies it was written by Alfred Newman, the studio’s head of music for twenty years, and is the most recognised piece of music in the Realm’s cinema after the Boston theme. The studio added an extended version in 1954 for its CinemaScope pictures, and it has played before them since.

History

Fox Film, 1915 to 1931

William Fox was a Hungarian-born garment worker who went into the nickelodeon business in New York in 1904, built a chain of theatres, and founded the Fox Film Corporation in 1915 to supply them. He moved production to southern California, made a star of Theda Bara, whose vampire roles made her the first manufactured sex symbol of the Realm’s cinema, and by the late 1920s ran one of the largest film companies in the world.

His great technical bet was sound on film. The Movietone system, which recorded the soundtrack optically on the film itself rather than on a separate disc, was introduced by Fox in 1927 and became the industry’s standard, and the Movietone News newsreels, with synchronised sound, began the same year. Fox’s great financial bet, the purchase of a controlling interest in Loew’s and therefore in MGM in 1929, was blocked by federal antitrust action and ruined by the crash that autumn, and Fox lost control of his company in 1930 to its banks. He spent the rest of his life in litigation, was convicted in 1941 of attempting to bribe a judge in his own bankruptcy, and died in 1952.

The charter, 1931

The company’s new management applied for a royal charter in 1930, the fourth studio to do so after MGM, Paramount and Warner Brothers, and received it in 1931 on the conditions MGM had negotiated in 1924: incorporation and management within the Realm, a proportion of production staff employed within it, submission to the Board of Trade on export contracts, and the deposit of a viewing print and a preservation negative of every film released.

The company’s lawyers then did something the charter did not require. The deposit condition applied to films released after the grant, and the company held sixteen years of pictures released before it. The lawyers could not tell which of the old films might one day be re-released, reissued with a soundtrack or cut into a newer picture, any of which might count as a release and bring a film retrospectively within the condition, and rather than advise on each of several hundred titles they deposited the whole back catalogue, preservation negatives and viewing prints, with the national repository in the eighteen months after the grant. The deposit cost the company more than any other single expense of 1931 and was criticised by its board as an extravagance.

The Movietone reels were deposited too. The lawyers took the view that a newsreel shown to a paying audience in a cinema was a film released, and the repository, which had not expected to receive the newsreels and had nowhere to put them, built a store for them. Every Movietone reel from the first in 1927 to the last in 1963 was deposited, and they are discussed below.

Twentieth Century Pictures

The other half of the merger was two years old. Darryl F. Zanuck, a writer from Nebraska who had risen to run production at Warner Brothers by the age of twenty-seven, left Warner in 1933 after a quarrel about pay cuts during the Depression and founded Twentieth Century Pictures with Joseph Schenck, the chairman of United Artists, who supplied the money and the distribution. The company made eighteen pictures in two years, almost all of them profitable, from rented stages, and it had no studio, no theatres and no charter.

It had Zanuck, which was the point. Fox Film had a lot, a charter, a theatre chain and a library, and it had lost its founder, its money and its direction, and the merger joined the company with the assets to the man with the ideas. Schenck became chairman of the merged company and Zanuck its head of production, a post he held for twenty-one years.

The merger of 1935

In 1935 the Fox Film Corporation, weakened by the Depression and its founder’s debts, merged with Twentieth Century Pictures, the small and profitable production company run by Joseph Schenck, who became chairman, and Darryl F. Zanuck, who became head of production. The merger altered the chartered body, and so required the Crown’s assent, which made it the first test of the rule that a charter cannot be altered by the company alone.

The ministry gave its assent on a condition. Twentieth Century Pictures, being unchartered, had deposited nothing, and its two years of pictures were to become the chartered company’s property. The assent required the merged company to deposit Twentieth Century Pictures’ films of 1933 to 1935 retrospectively, and it did, which is why those pictures survive complete when the output of other small independent companies of the period has been largely lost. The condition was the first occasion on which the Crown attached a condition to an assent, and it set the pattern for the assents that followed, including those that MGM’s owners later sought and were refused.

The fire of 1937

On 9 July 1937 a fire at the company’s film storage vaults at Little Ferry, New Jersey, where it kept the original negatives of Fox Film’s silent pictures, destroyed almost all of them. Nitrate stock stored in summer heat in buildings without adequate ventilation ignited, and the vaults burned for most of a day.

The deposit copies survived. Everything Fox Film had released since 1915 had been deposited at the national repository in 1931 and 1932, on the lawyers’ view that it might one day count as released, and the repository’s copies were in the basin, three thousand miles away, in cold storage. The studio lost its own negatives and lost nothing else.

Theda Bara’s Cleopatra of 1917, one of the most famous films of the silent era, survives in the Realm complete, along with the rest of Bara’s vampire pictures and F. W. Murnau’s 4 Devils of 1928, a picture made at Fox by the director of Sunrise and regarded by those who have seen it as among his best. Film students in the Realm are routinely told that both pictures would have been lost anywhere without a deposit, and that they survive here because a firm of lawyers in 1931 could not be bothered to advise on each title separately. The studio’s lawyers’ caution is, by a wide margin, the single most productive act of film preservation in the Realm’s history.

The studio’s two Cleopatras, the one of 1917 that survived by accident and the one of 1963 that nearly destroyed the company, are shown together at the repository’s anniversary screenings, and the pairing is one of the repository’s standing jokes.

The Zanuck years

Zanuck ran production from 1935 to 1956 and made Twentieth Century-Fox the studio of the story. He read scripts, cut pictures, wrote memoranda of legendary length and ruthlessness, and made a studio of social-problem pictures and musicals in roughly equal measure.

Its stars were Shirley Temple, the most popular performer in the Realm in the second half of the 1930s, Betty Grable, whose pin-up photograph was the most reproduced image of the Second Great War among the Realm’s forces, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney and, from the late 1940s, Marilyn Monroe. Its prestige pictures included John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the Dust Bowl migration filmed with an anger the studio’s own board found alarming; How Green Was My Valley (1941), which won Best Picture; Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), a film about the antisemitism of the Realm’s professional and social life that won Best Picture and was denounced by several of the institutions it depicted; and Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950).

Gentleman’s Agreement had a particular reception in the Realm. The Realm had not had the catastrophe in Europe that elsewhere forced a reckoning with antisemitism, its German ally having had no Nazi era, and the antisemitism the film depicted, the restricted hotels and clubs, the quotas at the universities, the professions that did not hire Jews, was the Realm’s own, practised by its own institutions in peacetime and without any foreign example to be ashamed of. Several of the clubs and one of the universities the film was understood to depict threatened the studio with litigation. None sued, and the film won Best Picture.

Zanuck’s method was the memorandum. He dictated notes on every script and every cut, sometimes forty pages on a single picture, and the studio kept them all under the artefacts condition after 1972; they are now the most complete record of a studio head’s working method in the Realm’s archives, and the most frequently quoted. The Grapes of Wrath was nearly not made, the studio’s board having been warned by the growers of the Commonwealth of California that a picture about the migrant camps would be treated as an attack on the Commonwealth, and Zanuck’s memorandum overruling the board is among the most reprinted documents in the Realm’s film history.

Movietone News

For thirty-six years the studio’s newsreels showed the Realm to itself. Movietone reels ran before the feature in cinemas across the Realm twice a week from 1927 until television ended the form in 1963, and every one of them was deposited under the charter.

The result is an archive no other country possesses. The Realm has a continuous filmed record, with synchronised sound, of its own public life from 1927 to 1963: the coronations, the funerals, the royal visits, the elections, the strikes, the Depression queues, the Second Great War from the Honolulu attack to the Versailles Conference, the postwar reconstruction and the first years of the long confrontation with Russia. The ABC uses it constantly, and there is hardly a documentary about the Realm’s twentieth century made in the last fifty years that does not contain Movietone footage. The studio licenses the footage, the repository holds it, and the arrangement is the most profitable thing the deposit condition has ever done for a studio.

The war

The studio made propaganda, training films and morale pictures through the Second Great War, and Movietone’s cameramen filmed the war on every front the Realm fought on. The studio’s own great war picture came later: Zanuck’s The Longest Day (1962), an account of the first day of the Allied counter-invasion of fascist France, with German, British, Austro-Hungarian and American troops landing together, filmed with actors from all four countries speaking their own languages and subtitled, a thing no studio had attempted at that scale. It was a large success, and it is the film by which most of the Realm’s population pictures the landings.

CinemaScope

Twentieth Century-Fox introduced CinemaScope in 1953 with The Robe, a biblical epic shot through an anamorphic lens that squeezed a wide image onto ordinary film and unsqueezed it on projection, producing a picture more than twice as wide as it was tall. It was the studio’s answer to television, and it worked: widescreen became the mark of a cinema picture, the studio licensed the process to its rivals, and for most of the 1950s every prestige picture in the Realm was made in CinemaScope or a competitor to it.

The Robe, a story of the soldier who won Christ’s robe at the crucifixion, was the first picture the studio submitted to the production code office in the new format, and the code having been drafted with the established Church, the studio submitted the script to the Church’s own advisers as well. The bishops approved it, and several of them attended the premiere, which the studio’s publicity department presented as an endorsement and which the Church later described, in the report of 1969 on its relations with the film industry, as one of the occasions on which it had allowed itself to be used.

The studio required its directors to use it, which Joseph L. Mankiewicz resented until he discovered, making Boston, that the wide frame could hold an entire negotiating table and both delegations in a single shot. The long static takes of Boston’s second half, which critics now regard as the finest use of the format ever made, were the product of a studio policy their director had argued against.

Boston, and the cut of 1959

The studio’s most important picture is Boston (1957), Mankiewicz’s film of the Four-Year War and the negotiation that ended it, the national epic of the Realm, shown in its schools for thirty years. It premiered in Boston on 4 July 1957 and ran as a roadshow for two years.

For general release in 1959 the studio cut nineteen minutes from the film without consulting its director, including the whole of the sequence of the slavery debate at Philadelphia and with it the film’s only scene in which a servant speaks, and then destroyed its own roadshow materials in the ordinary course. The version the Realm’s schools showed for thirty years was the cut version. The full film survives only because the preservation negative deposited under the studio’s charter in 1957 was the roadshow cut, and it was restored from the deposit in 1983. The studio’s charter preserved what the studio destroyed, and the episode is set out in full in the film’s own article.

The Diary of Anne Frank

George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) filmed the diary of a Jewish girl who hid with her family and four others in the upper rooms of her father’s business premises in occupied Amsterdam, from the French occupation of the Low Countries, for two years from 1942, until they were betrayed and taken in 1944. She died in a French camp in the east of the occupied territories in the spring of 1945, weeks before the liberation. Her father, the only one of the eight to survive, published the diary in 1947, and it is the most widely read document of the Second Great War in the Realm, as it is almost everywhere.

The family had moved from Frankfurt to Amsterdam in 1933 for Otto Frank’s business, and were caught in 1939 by an occupation that treated as its enemy everyone who was not French. The film was made with the father’s cooperation and is faithful to the diary, and it was criticised then and since for softening it: the diary’s anger, its politics and its account of the girl’s own Jewishness are gentler on the screen than on the page. It was shown in the Realm’s schools for longer than Boston was, and is still shown.

Monroe v Twentieth Century-Fox, 1955

Marilyn Monroe was under contract to the studio from 1951, on the standard terms: seven years, options exercisable by the studio, suspension without pay for refusing a part. By 1954 she was the studio’s most valuable star and was being paid a fraction of what her pictures earned, assigned to parts she regarded as degrading, and suspended when she refused them.

In 1955 she walked out, formed her own production company, and when the studio sued her for breach of contract, defended herself on the studio’s own charter. The charter required the studio to be managed within the Realm, which brought its contracts under the Realm’s law of restraint of trade, and her counsel argued that a contract under which the studio could suspend her indefinitely and assign her to any part was an unreasonable restraint and void. The court agreed. She became the first performer in the Realm to break a studio contract outright rather than merely limit its term, and she returned to the studio in 1956 on terms she had negotiated: approval of her scripts, her directors and her cinematographers, and a share of her pictures’ profits.

The judgment ended the old contract system more completely than the seven-year judgment of 1943 had, and the studios’ lawyers spent the late 1950s rewriting every contract they held. It did not change how the studio treated her. She died in 1962, aged thirty-six, while the studio was suing her again, over Something’s Got to Give, a picture she had been fired from for absences caused by the illness the studio’s publicity department was denying she had.

Cleopatra, 1963

The studio’s worst picture, commercially, was the second of its Cleopatras. It began in 1959 as a modest remake of the Bara picture the studio’s lawyers had preserved, and grew over four years into the most expensive film ever made, costing more than the studio’s entire annual production budget several times over.

Its first director left after spending a year and a fortune in London on footage that was scrapped. Mankiewicz took it over in 1961 and rewrote it while shooting it in Rome. Its star, Elizabeth Taylor, fell dangerously ill, recovered, and began an affair with her co-star, Richard Burton, that the Realm’s press covered more closely than the film. By 1962 the studio was selling everything it could to pay for it, and the studio’s board removed its president and brought back Darryl Zanuck, who had left in 1956, to rescue the company.

Zanuck finished the picture, cut it from Mankiewicz’s intended two films of three hours each into a single one of four hours, and fired Mankiewicz before the cut was complete. The studio that had cut Boston without consulting its director cut Cleopatra the same way, and Mankiewicz said afterwards that he had learned nothing from the first occasion except to expect the second. The film was the most successful release of 1963 and still lost money, because nothing could have earned back what it cost.

The charter kept the studio alive through it. A chartered body cannot be wound up without the Crown’s assent, and the studio’s creditors, who in 1962 held more of its debt than its assets were worth, could not force a liquidation or a sale of the library. They waited instead, for the back lot and for Zanuck, and both paid them.

Century City

The studio’s back lot, some two hundred and sixty acres of permanent sets west of its sound stages, was the most valuable land it owned and, in 1961, the only asset large enough to pay for Cleopatra. The lot is named in the studio’s charter as the place at which the chartered activity is carried on, and selling any of it meant amending the charter.

The studio applied in 1961 to amend the charter and sell the back lot to a developer. The hearing that followed was the second of the three occasions on which a chartered studio has sought to sell or move its lot, and it went badly for the studio: the unions, the heritage bodies and the city of Los Angeles opposed it, the ministry’s officials made it clear that a charter granting privileges for the making of films at a place could not easily be read as permitting the place to be sold, and the studio abandoned the application before the hearing concluded, as one other studio had done before it.

What it proposed instead, and what the ministry advised the Crown to accept in 1962, was an amendment of a different kind. The studio would keep the land, and the charter would permit it to develop the back lot for purposes other than film production while the sound stages and the principal lot remained in the chartered use. The studio would own the development and lease it, and the chartered body would change the use of part of its lot without changing its hands. The minister’s decision described the arrangement as the only one consistent with a charter that named a place and not a use, and it is the Realm’s standard example of a chartered body permitted to change use without changing hands.

Century City was built on the back lot from 1963: an office, hotel and residential district of towers and boulevards between the studio’s stages and the western suburbs of Los Angeles, planned as a single development, built over twenty years and leased by the studio to its occupants on long ground leases. The studio is Century City’s landlord, and the ground rents it collects from the towers built on the sets of its silent pictures are the reason it has never again been in real danger. The Los Angeles article of this Register describes the chartered quarter as a district whose back lots were never sold into real estate, and Century City is the exception that proves the rule: it was built into real estate without being sold.

The Sound of Music, 1965

The picture that paid for Cleopatra was The Sound of Music (1965), Robert Wise’s film of the stage musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein about the family of Captain Georg von Trapp, an officer of the imperial and royal navy of Austria-Hungary, his seven children, and the postulant from a Salzburg convent who becomes their governess and then his wife.

It is a film about a man going to war. Its last act is set in the summer of 1939, when fascist France invades the Low Countries and the monarchy mobilises beside its allies, and the Captain, a retired submarine commander of the First Great War, is recalled to the fleet at Pola. The film ends at the Salzburg festival on the night he sails, with the family singing on the festival stage and the Captain leaving the hall before the final song to catch the night train to the coast, and the last shot is the train crossing the mountains. It had the most successful first run of any film released in the Realm to that date, though Gone with the Wind, across its many reissues, remained ahead once the figures were adjusted for inflation, and it rescued the studio outright.

The film was received in Austria-Hungary with a mixture of affection and bemusement. The real von Trapp family had in fact left the monarchy in 1938 to tour abroad as singers and had not returned, the Captain having declined his recall on grounds of age, and the family’s surviving members spent the rest of their lives explaining to audiences that their father had not gone to war on the night of a festival. The film’s version is better known than theirs in every country in which it was shown, which the family described as the price of a good song.

Zanuck’s fall, and Star Wars

Zanuck ran the studio through the 1960s with his son Richard as head of production, and the studio made expensive musicals that failed after The Sound of Music succeeded. In 1970 Zanuck fired his son, and in 1971 the board removed Zanuck.

The studio’s great success of the next decade was a picture its board did not believe in. George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) was financed by the studio on terms that left the director the sequel and merchandising rights, which the studio’s executives regarded as worthless, and it had the most successful first run of any film in the Realm’s history, passing the studio’s own Sound of Music. The merchandising rights the studio gave away made its director richer than the studio. The film was deposited under the charter, which means that the only version of the original release of 1977 that survives without the alterations its director later made to every copy he controlled is the preservation negative at the national repository, which the director does not control. The repository has shown it at anniversaries, over the director’s objection, and the Realm’s film writers regard the episode as the deposit condition’s most entertaining vindication.

Murdoch, 1985

In 1985 the studio was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s media company, which was incorporated in New Wessex, the sister realm of Australia and New Zealand, and was therefore a company incorporated outside the Realm. A chartered body cannot be sold out of the Realm without the Crown’s assent, and the purchase required it.

The ministry gave its assent on three conditions: that the studio remain incorporated and principally managed within the Realm, as its charter already required; that its deposit obligations be performed by the studio itself and not by its parent; and that no film of the studio’s be withdrawn from the national repository or restricted in its access at the parent’s instruction. The conditions were accepted, the purchase completed, and Twentieth Century-Fox became one of the two chartered studios owned from outside the Realm, the other being Warner Brothers.

Murdoch took citizenship of the Realm later the same year, which several of his critics regarded as an attempt to make the conditions look unnecessary, and which his company said was a personal decision.

The network and the news channel

Murdoch’s purpose in buying the studio was partly its library and partly its name, and in 1986 his company launched a Fox television network. The Realm’s Broadcasting Commission had licensed two commercial terrestrial networks, Continental in 1959 and Meridian in 1966, and declined to license a third, so the Fox network was built instead on cable and satellite, the first national entertainment network in the Realm distributed that way. It was carried under the Commission’s licence for such services and was subject to its conditions, including the obligation to carry news.

The news channel followed in 1996. Its founders intended a channel of opinion for an audience they believed the Realm’s other broadcasters had neglected, and they discovered that the Commission’s licence conditions included an impartiality rule binding every licensed broadcaster in its news, whatever its presenters said around it. The channel became what the rule allowed it to be: opinionated in its presenters and cautious in its news, with commentary programmes of a strongly conservative character framing news bulletins that the Commission’s monitors found, year after year, to be within the rule. Its audience is large, loyal and on the right, and a substantial part of the right regards it as a disappointment, which its presenters say on air with some regularity.

The channel’s owners have challenged the impartiality rule twice, in 2004 and 2017, arguing that it was designed for scarce terrestrial frequencies and could not justly be applied to a cable channel. They lost both times, and the Commission’s position, that a licence to broadcast news in the Realm carries the Realm’s rules about news wherever the signal travels, is now settled.

The studio itself had nothing to do with either the network or the channel beyond the name, and the confusion the shared name produced is the reason Disney later wished to change it.

Titanic, 1997

The studio’s great picture of the 1990s was James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), a film of the sinking of the British liner in 1912, co-financed with Paramount, which ran so far over its budget that both studios expected to lose money on it and which became the most successful first run in the Realm’s history, passing Star Wars. The sinking of the liner, on which several hundred citizens of the Realm died, had been filmed before, and the studio’s picture was the first to use the repository’s Movietone footage of the survivors’ arrival in New York in 1912, which the studio had not known it held until the film’s researchers found it.

Disney, 2019

In 2019 the studio was bought from Murdoch’s company by Disney, the Realm’s largest film company, which has never held a charter. It released its early pictures through United Artists and RKO, was too small in the 1920s and 1930s to be considered for a charter and had nothing to gain from one, and began distributing its own films in 1953, since when it has been entirely outside the deposit system. Its own archive, which is excellent, is nobody’s obligation.

The purchase raised a question nobody had anticipated in 1931. A chartered studio was now wholly owned by a company that was not bound by any charter, and whose own films, released through the chartered studio’s distribution, might or might not become subject to the studio’s deposit obligation depending on which company was held to have released them. The ministry gave its assent to the purchase, the parent being incorporated within the Realm and the conditions of 1985 continuing, and referred the questions the purchase raised to the Crown’s law officers: whether the deposit condition reaches films the parent releases through the subsidiary, whether the subsidiary’s charter obliges the parent to anything at all, and whether the Crown’s assent should have been given in the first place.

The law officers have been considering the questions since 2019 and have not reported. The Realm’s archivists regard the delay as the most consequential unresolved question in the preservation of its cinema, because a finding that the deposit condition reaches the parent’s films would bring the Realm’s largest film company inside the deposit system for the first time in seventy years, and a finding that it does not would confirm that the system has a hole in the middle that is getting larger.

The charter

The studio’s charter was granted to the Fox Film Corporation in 1931 and has been altered on four occasions, each with the Crown’s assent:

• 1935, to admit the merger with Twentieth Century Pictures and rename the chartered body Twentieth Century-Fox, on condition of the retrospective deposit of Twentieth Century Pictures’ films of 1933 to 1935;
• 1962, to permit the development of the back lot as Century City while the studio kept the land;
• 1972, to add the condition, added to every surviving studio charter that year after MGM’s auction of its props and costumes, requiring the deposit or first offer to the repository of the principal physical artefacts of production;
• 1985, to record the conditions on which the Crown assented to the studio’s purchase by a company incorporated in New Wessex.

The 1961 application to sell the back lot was abandoned before a decision, and the 2020 proposal to change the studio’s name was not advised by the ministry while the law officers’ questions remained open. The name in the charter is therefore still Twentieth Century-Fox, as it has been since 1935.

The lot and Century City

The studio’s lot lies in West Los Angeles, south of Beverly Hills, within the city of Los Angeles and within the chartered quarter. Its principal lot, some fifty acres of sound stages, workshops and offices around the executive building of 1935, remains in film and television production, and the studio’s own pictures and a large volume of television are made there.

Century City, on the former back lot to the west, is the studio’s estate. It holds several dozen office towers, two hotels, a shopping centre and several thousand flats, laid out on a plan of the 1960s along a broad avenue of the stars, and every building in it stands on land the studio owns and leases. The studio’s income from Century City’s ground leases exceeds its income from most of the films it releases, and the arrangement has made it the most financially secure of the six chartered studios, and the only one whose charter has made it rich rather than merely kept it alive.

The district’s streets are named after the back lot’s old sets and the studio’s pictures, and a small museum in the lobby of one of the towers, maintained by the studio under the artefacts condition of 1972, displays the models of the back-lot streets as they stood in 1960, before the towers.

The newsreel archive

The deposited Movietone reels, from 1927 to 1963, number several thousand, run to many thousands of hours with the unused footage the lawyers also deposited, and constitute a continuous filmed and sound record of the Realm’s public life across thirty-six years. No comparable archive exists anywhere else, the newsreels of other countries having been destroyed, lost or dispersed in the ordinary way, and the Realm’s historians of the period use it as a primary source in a way their colleagues elsewhere cannot.

It includes the only filmed record of the coronation of Ernest IV in the Realm’s own cinemas, the Realm’s entry into the Second Great War, the Versailles Conference, and a large number of events nobody thought important at the time, among them the first television broadcasts, the last horse-drawn trams in several cities and a great deal of the ordinary life of the Realm’s streets. The ABC licenses more footage from it than from any other source, and the studio’s archivists say that the most frequently requested single reel is the one of 1939 showing the Realm’s crowds hearing the news of the French invasion of the Low Countries.

Shirley Temple

The studio’s greatest child star made twenty-four features for it between 1934 and 1940 and was, for four consecutive years, the most popular performer in the Realm’s cinemas. The studio’s machine around her, the curls counted before every take, the age falsified by a year in her publicity, the schedule, the merchandise and the parents’ management of her earnings, is set out below among the failings.

Her later life was her own. She left the cinema at twenty-two, entered public life in the Commonwealth of California, and served the Realm abroad as a diplomat, as its ambassador in two postings in the 1970s and 1980s, and as its chief of protocol, a post in which she organised the ceremonial of several state visits, including royal ones. She is the only child star of the studio system to have held a Crown appointment, and she was said to have enjoyed the protocol more than the pictures.

Legacy

The studio’s name is on the Realm’s memory of its own twentieth century. The Movietone reels are the pictures the Realm sees when it remembers the years from 1927 to 1963; The Longest Day is the picture it sees when it remembers the landings; The Sound of Music is, for most of the Realm, Austria-Hungary; and Boston, cut or restored, is the founding. No other studio has shaped the Realm’s picture of its own history so thoroughly, and the Realm’s historians regard the influence as a mixed blessing, since the studio’s version of each event is better known than the events.

Its technical legacy is CinemaScope and the widescreen cinema that followed it, and sound on film before that, both of them standards the studio set and the industry adopted. Its financial legacy is Century City, the only chartered studio estate in the Realm, and its legal legacy is Monroe’s case of 1955, which ended the old studio contract, and the questions of 2019, which may yet end the charter system’s hold on the Realm’s largest film company or confirm that it never had one.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly, as the studio’s own.

The cut of Boston. In 1959 the studio cut nineteen minutes from the national epic for general release, without consulting its director, removing the whole of the sequence of the slavery debate at Philadelphia and with it the only scene in the film in which a servant speaks, and then destroyed its own roadshow materials. The Realm’s schools showed the cut version for thirty years. The studio’s notes describe the sequence as slow, and not necessary to the story.

Stepin Fetchit. The studio made a star in the early 1930s of Lincoln Perry, a Black comedian who worked under the name Stepin Fetchit, in a character the studio wrote for him and cast him in repeatedly: slow, shuffling, frightened, lazy and incomprehensible, a figure of fun for white audiences whose every appearance on the screen confirmed what the Realm’s segregation said about the people it segregated. Perry was the first Black performer in the Realm to earn a fortune from the pictures, and the studio earned considerably more. The other Black performers the studio employed in the same period were cast almost exclusively as servants.

Yellowface. The studio’s Charlie Chan series, sixteen pictures between 1931 and 1942, and its Mr Moto series of the late 1930s, cast white actors as a Chinese-American detective and a Japanese one, in make-up, with invented accents and a stock of aphorisms, and the Chinese-American actors in the same pictures played the detective’s sons and the servants. The series were popular, profitable and, in the Chan pictures, more sympathetic to their hero than the studio’s other representations of Asian people, which the studio cited in its defence at the time and which its critics have regarded since as the whole of the problem.

Pinky. The studio’s Pinky (1949), directed by Elia Kazan, was a film about a light-skinned Black woman who has passed as white in the north and returns to her grandmother in the south, and it was praised on release as a serious film about the colour line. The studio cast a white actress in the part, on the stated ground that the audiences of the southern polities would not accept a Black actress in a romance with a white man, and the Black actresses who had been considered were told so. It was a success, and the actress was nominated for an Academy Award for playing a Black woman.

Monroe and the contract actresses. The studio’s treatment of Marilyn Monroe, from the parts it assigned her to the suspensions, the public statements about her illness and the lawsuit it was pursuing when she died, was the best-known instance of a practice that governed all its contract actresses: control of their weight, their appearance, their private lives and their publicity, and assignment to parts they had no power to refuse until Monroe’s own case of 1955 gave them some. She won her case in the courts, and it made no difference to how the studio treated her.

Shirley Temple. The studio built a machine around a child of six. Her working day was governed by the Commonwealth’s rules for child performers and exceeded them; her age was falsified in the studio’s publicity so that she would seem more precocious; her image was licensed for dolls, dresses and a hundred other products; and the large earnings she produced were managed by her parents, who spent most of them. When she came of age almost nothing was left, and the studio, which had profited from her more than from any other performer of the 1930s, had no obligation to her and accepted none.

Assessment

Twentieth Century-Fox is the chartered studio its charter made rich. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was kept alive by its charter against the wishes of its owners; Fox was made secure by the amendment its charter permitted in 1962, which let it keep its back lot and build a city on it. The same instrument that refused MGM a sale allowed Fox a development, and the difference between the two outcomes is the difference between selling a place and changing what is done on it.

Its charter also preserved almost everything the studio made, including a great deal it did not have to. Its lawyers’ caution in 1931 saved the silent pictures of Fox Film from the fire of 1937, and the Movietone reels they deposited on the same reasoning are the Realm’s filmed memory of its own century. The studio’s most important contribution to the Realm’s culture may be an act of legal over-caution rather than any of its pictures.

Against that stands the record. The studio cut the national epic and destroyed its own copy, made a star of a Black comedian in a part designed to confirm the Realm’s segregation, cast white actors as Asian detectives and a white actress as a Black woman, controlled its contract actresses until a court told it to stop and then carried on, and built a fortune on a child whose own fortune was spent before she could keep it. The charter protected the films and not the people, as it did at MGM, and the studio that deposited sixteen years of pictures it was not obliged to deposit kept almost no records of how its performers were treated.

The Register does not settle the question now before the law officers. Whether a charter granted to a studio in 1931 binds a parent company that holds no charter is a question about what the Realm’s charters are for, and the Realm has not decided. The studio itself, which owns Century City, the Movietone archive, both Cleopatras and the only unaltered negative of Star Wars, is in no hurry for an answer.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Arts and cinema in the Realm, the charters and the deposit condition
• Boston (film), the studio’s national epic, and the cut of 1959
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the first charter, refused the sale Fox turned into a development
• Los Angeles, and the chartered quarter
• The Second Great War, re-set in the studio’s pictures of it
• The American Broadcasting Corporation, and the Broadcasting Commission’s licensees

Categories

• Arts & Culture
• Cinema
• Chartered bodies