Abstract
Wilson, the biographical film (biopic) about America’s twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, was produced by the studio mogul Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox in 1944. Costly and ambitious, the movie was a prestige production for the studio and a personal crusade for Zanuck. Wilson marked the first time Hollywood had tackled the life of a recent president and its cast of characters included many real-life principals who were either still alive or remained vivid in popular memory.1
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Notes
Leonard J. Leff and Jerold Simmons, “Wilson: Hollywood Propaganda for World Peace,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3 (1983): 4. For a synopsis of the movie, see Harry Keyishan, Screening Politics: The Politician in American Movies, 1931–2001 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 180–3.
Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943).
Thomas J. Knock, “History with Lightning: The Forgotten Film Wilson (1944),” American Quarterly 28 (1976), reprinted in Peter C. Rollins, ed., Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context, rev. ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
For biographical detail, see Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (New York: Pocket Books, 1972).
Leonard Mosely, Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of a Hollywood Tycoon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985); and Thomas Thackerey Jr, “Darryl F. Zanuck, Last of the Movie Moguls, Dies at 77,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1979, 1.
Joel Finler, “Darryl F. Zanuck: Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking,” in Ann Lloyd, ed., Movies of the Sixties, (London: Book Club Associates, 1984), 41.
Norman Zierold, The Hollywood Tycoons (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), 256–60.
For the Zanuck-Willkie relationship, see John B. Wiseman, “Darryl F. Zanuck and the Failure of ‘One World,’ 1943–1945,” Historical Journal of Radio, Film and Television 7 (1987): 279–87.
Donald E. Staples, “Wilson in Technicolor: An Appreciation,” in Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s White House: The American Presidency in Film and History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 118.
Rudy Behlmer, ed., Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century Fox (New York: Grove Press, 1993).
Leff and Simmons, “Wilson: Hollywood Propaganda for World Peace,” 4; Chris Fujiwara, The World and its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 26.
Knock, “History with Lightning,” 96; Alexander Knox, “On Playing Wilson,” Hollywood Quarterly, 1 (1945), 110–11.
For historical discussion, see Robert Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
Lloyd Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
and Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
For an explanation of Lodge’s position, see William Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
Leff and Simmons, “Wilson: Hollywood Propaganda for World Peace,” 5; Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 142.
John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983).
See too Stephen Graubard, Command of Office: How War, Security, and Deception Transformed the Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New York: Basic Books, 2004), chapter 6.
Peri Arnold, Remaking the Presidency: Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, 1901–1916 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).
John Dos Passos, USA: Vol. 2: 1919 (Boston: Mariner Books, 1919). For Wilson the reformer, see Richard Hofstader, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948).
and John M. Blum, The Progressive Presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson (New York: Norton, 1980).
Leo A. Handel, Hollywood Looks At its Audience: A Report on Film Audience Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 170.
Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People, 1939–1945 (New York: Putnam, 1973), 236.
Michael Coyne, Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 61; emphasis in the original.
Mark Wheeler, Hollywood: Politics and Society (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 163.
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© 2011 Iwan W. Morgan
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Wheeler, M. (2011). Darryl F. Zanuck’s Wilson. In: Morgan, I.W. (eds) Presidents in the Movies. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117112_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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