Darly Zanuck Wrote for CC?????

I was watching the 1st 50 years of 20th Century Fox and they said that Daryl Zanuck started in Hollywood by writing for some famous people, including Charlie Chaplin!?! This is news to me. I even checked out David Robinson's bok and there is no mention of Daryl Zanuck at all. Not even as a competitor. So what gives?

Lori

'I am not a communist.' Charles Chaplin

God only knows.

Connie K.

I have the recently published Zanuck biography, and I'll check it to see if they say anything about a Zanuck/Chaplin connection.

Tom Moran
http://members.aol.com/Feuillade/TomMoran.index.html

My 100 Best Films List: http://members.aol.com/Feuillade/TomMoran21.index.html

Silent Film Screenings in New York City:

Perhaps the reference is to Syd Chaplin?

IMdB

Better 'Ole, The (1926) USA 1926 Black and White

Produced by: Warner Bros. [us] Language: English Genre/keyword: War / Comedy / wwi / based-on-play Sound Mix: Vitaphone Distributed by: Warner Bros. [us] Plot Outline:

The adventures of Old Bill and his friends Bert and Alf in the trenches of the first World War.

Directed by Charles Reisner   Cast (in credits order) Syd Chaplin.... Old Bill

This was listed as a Zanuck writing credit. DFZ started as a writer with Warner Bros.

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George is right.

And then again, he's not.

I checked with the recent Zanuck biography, 'Twentieth Century's Fox' by George F. Custen (New York: Basic Books, 1997)

Custen states (on page 79) that Zanuck was involved with '...both writing and overseeing the Sydney Chaplin comedy hit 'The Better 'Ole.' Zanuck's production was deemed 'a comedy classic' by the New York Tribune...'

So George is right in that respect.

However, on page 193 Custen writes that '... the enmity between [Zanuck] and another [United Artists] partner, Charlie Chaplin, was long -standing and deep. (Zanuck had been a gag writer for Chaplin.)'

*Not* included in the index, however, is this reference, on page 53: 'By early 1922, [Zanuck] had published some tabloid short stories, and had been a gag writer for Mack Sennett and, briefly, for both Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin.'

There's an endnote to this passage. The note (on page 386) reads: 'Because of his social pretensions and the disdainful way he treated writers, Chaplin was one of the few creative figures Zanuck detested. As Zanuck recalled, 'He would love to use words he looked up in the dictionary