Free Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris

Los Angeles and his father spent most of his time in New York and Europe, the two were in frequent contact, and the younger Zanuck began hiring screenwriters and developing a slate of modestly budgeted comedy and action films that would bring some life back to the lot and get movies flowing through the pipeline to theaters again.
    The Zanucks were taking Fox into a new era of moviemaking, but cautiously. They would sometimes bring in projects from outside producers, as United Artists and Columbia were doing, and they also moved Fox aggressively (and wisely) into television production. But Cleopatra did not occasion a fundamental rethinking of Fox’s approach to movies: Like most studios, its lineup would continue to consist of westerns, war films, comedies, “filler” (usually low-cost horror flicks or beach party movies), and, once in a while, a bigger roll of the dice on a grand-scale historical epic or musical. These movies, known as road-show pictures, were long, large, and lavish: They opened initially in a limited number of huge movie houses, sometimes with two or three thousand seats, in engagements that offered reserved-seat tickets at significantly higher prices than the national average; only after those engagements had played out did the films move into first-run neighborhood theaters and smaller cities. Handled wrong, these movies could turn into Cleopatra or Mutiny on the Bounty. Done right, they were The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur , money machines that could often play theatrically for more than two years before exhausting their audience.
    When Arthur Jacobs showed up with his proposal for Doctor Dolittle , Fox was in the market for a road-show movie. The studio already had The Sound of Music in the works, but its release was still a year away, and Dick Zanuck knew he had to start thinking about another hard-ticket spectacular that could follow it, maybe in 1966. Zanuck liked the idea for Dolittle , he knew that Jacobs, with whom he had worked on What a Way to Go! , could deliver a movie, and he felt comfortable with the proposed budget: Although $6 million wasn’t cheap, it was a long way from Cleopatra. On March 9, 1964, Jacobs met with him in Los Angeles, then flew to New York, where the following week he met with Darryl Zanuck at the St. Regis Hotel and finalized a deal for 20th Century-Fox to make the film. 40 Jacobs and the studio began to hammer out some early financial details: Alan Jay Lerner would, as the writer and co-producer, earn $350,000, the first $100,000 of which would come when he turned in a treatment; Rex Harrison would receive $300,000 (a 50 percent increase from My Fair Lady ); Jacobs himself would take $100,000, plus $50,000 in overhead to set up shop for himself on the Fox lot. Since Lerner’s longtime partner, Frederick Loewe, had decided to retire, an additional $50,000 to $100,000 was earmarked for a composer. 41 By May, Jacobs had found one: André Previn, who had written scores (and occasionally songs) for two dozen movies, agreed to compose and supervise Doctor Dolittle ’s music for $75,000. 42
    On May 1, just two weeks before his six-month window of opportunity to make a deal was due to close, Jacobs nailed down an agreement with the Lofting estate. He now owned the exclusive movie rights to the Dolittle books, and Lofting’s widow, Josephine, was to receive 10 percent of net profits from the film. 43 Fox’s publicity department started drafting press releases immediately, trumpeting the involvement of Lerner, Harrison, and Vincente Minnelli and announcing that “Doctor Dolittle is planned for world-wide release for Christmas 1966!—Hollywood’s Christmas present to the world! We visualize Doctor Dolittle as a classic international musical film which will be re-released in an orderly pattern every several years for many a year.” 44
    Jacobs had only one thing to worry about: As the Dolittle deal was closing, one of the key members