20世纪福克斯
维基百科，自由的百科全书
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| 公司類型 | 福克斯娱乐集团 (新闻集团) |
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| 成立時間 | 1935 |
| 總部地點 | 世纪城，美国 |
| 產業 | 电影 |
| 網站 | foxmovies.com foxstudios.com |
20世纪福克斯是美国最大的电影制片公司之一，总部设于美国洛杉矶的世纪城，就在比佛利山西面。片厂为鲁伯特·默多克掌控的娱乐巨头新闻集团旗下公司。
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[编辑] 历史
The company is the result of a 1935 merger of two entities, Fox Film Corporation founded by William Fox in 1915, and Twentieth Century Pictures, begun in 1933 by Darryl F. Zanuck, Joseph Schenck, Raymond Griffith and William Goetz. William Fox, a pioneer in creating the theater "chain", began producing films in 1914. In 1917 he introduced Theda Bara, one of the most popular screen actresses of the time. Always more of an entrepreneur than a showman, Fox concentrated on acquiring and building theaters; pictures were secondary. With the introduction of sound Fox acquired the rights to a German sound-on-film process which he dubbed "Movietone" and in 1926 began offering films with a music-and- effects track. The following year he began the weekly "Fox Movietone News" feature, which ran until 1963. The growing company needed space, and in 1926 Fox acquired three-hundred acres in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City", the best-equipped studio of its time.
When rival Marcus Loew died in 1927, Fox offered to buy the Loew family's holdings; Loew's Inc. controlled more than two-hundred theaters as well as the MGM studio (whose films are currently distributed internationally by Fox -- see below). When the family agreed to the sale, the merger of Fox and Loew's Inc. was announced in 1929. But MGM studio-boss Louis B. Mayer, not included in the deal, fought back; using political connections, he called on the Justice Department's anti-trust unit to block the merger. Fate favoured Mayer; Fox was badly injured in a car crash and by the time he recovered the 1929 stock market crash had taken most of his fortune, putting an end to the Loew's merger.
Over-extended and close to bankruptcy, Fox was stripped of his empire and even ended up in jail. Fox Film, with more than five-hundred theatres, was placed in receivership; a bank-mandated reorganisation propped the company up for a time, but it was clear a merger was the only way Fox Film could survive.
[编辑] 20世纪福克斯基金会
At Warner Bros., production head Darryl Zanuck feuded with studio chief Jack Warner over his salary. When Zanuck asked for his pay to be restored to pre-Depression levels, Warner refused, and he resigned. Days later he announced the formation of a new company Twentieth Century Pictures, in partnership with Joseph Schenck, president of United Artists. Schenck was president and CEO, while Zanuck was head of the studio. Begun in mid-1933, releasing four to six pictures a year through United Artists, Twentieth Century was a success, in part due to financial backing from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Nicholas Schenck, Joe's brother, was president of MGM's parent, Loews, Inc.
[编辑] 二十世纪和福克斯的合并
Two years later, Joe Schenck and Fox management agreed to a merger. Although Twentieth Century was the senior partner in the merger, it was still a dwarf compared to Fox. With this in mind, observers of this mouse-and-elephant combination expected that the new company would be called "Fox-Twentieth Century." However, the new company was called Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, which began trading on May 31, 1935. (The hyphen was dropped in 1985.) Schenck and Zanuck retained their roles as chief executive and head of production, respectively.
Aside from the theater chain and a first-rate studio lot, Zanuck and Schenck felt there wasn't much else to Fox. The studio's biggest star, Will Rogers, died in a plane crash weeks after the merger. Its leading female star, Janet Gaynor, was fading in popularity. Promising leading men James Dunn and Spencer Tracy had been dropped because of heavy drinking. Zanuck quickly signed young actors who would carry Twentieth Century-Fox for years: Tyrone Power, Don Ameche, Henry Fonda, ice-skater Sonja Henie, and Betty Grable. And also on the Fox payroll he found two players whom he would build into the studio's leading assets, Alice Faye and seven-year-old Shirley Temple.
Favoring popular biographies and musicals, Zanuck built Fox back to profitability. Thanks to record attendance during World War II, Fox passed RKO and mighty MGM to become the third-most profitable studio. While Zanuck went off for eighteen months' war service, junior partner William Goetz kept profits high by emphasizing light entertainment; the studio's—indeed the industry's—biggest star was creamy blonde Betty Grable. But when Zanuck returned in 1943 he intended to make Fox's output more serious-minded. During the next few years, with pictures like Wilson, Gentleman's Agreement, The Snake Pit, Boomerang and Pinkie, Zanuck established a reputation for provocative, adult films. Fox also specialized in adaptations of best-selling books and Broadway musicals.
After the war, audiences drifted away, and the arrival of television hastened the process. Fox held on to its theaters until a court-mandated divorce; they were spun off as Fox National Theaters in 1953. That year, with attendance at one-half 1946's level, Fox gambled on an unproven gimmick. Noting that the two movie sensations of 1952 had been Cinerama, which required three projectors to fill a giant curved screen, and "Natural Vision" 3-D, which got its effects of depth by requiring the use of polarized glasses, Fox mortgaged its studio to buy rights to a French anamorphic projection system which gave a slight illusion of depth without glasses. In February, 1953, Zanuck announced that henceforth all Fox pictures would be made in CinemaScope. To convince theater owners to install this new process, Fox agreed to help pay conversion costs (about $25,000 per screen); and to ensure enough product, Fox gave access to CinemaScope to any rival studio choosing to use it. Seeing the box-office for the first two CinemaScope features, The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire, Warners, MGM, Universal and Columbia quickly adopted the process.
CinemaScope brought a brief up-turn in attendance, but by 1956 the numbers again began to slide. That year Darryl Zanuck announced his resignation as head of production. Officially attributed to burn-out, rumors persisted that his wife had threatened divorce (in community-property California) after discovering Zanuck's affair with actress Bella Darvi. Zanuck moved to Paris, setting up as an independent producer; he did not set foot in California again for fifteen years.
[编辑] 制作以及财务问题
His successor, producer Buddy Adler, died a year later. President Spyros Skouras (who had succeeded Schenck in 1942) brought in a series of production executives, but none had Zanuck's success. By the early 1960s Fox was in trouble. A remake of Theda Bara's Cleopatra had begun in 1959 with Joan Collins in the lead; as a publicity gimmick producer Walter Wanger offered one million dollars to Elizabeth Taylor if she would star; Taylor accepted, and costs for Cleopatra began to escalate.
Meanwhile, another remake - this one of the 1940 Cary Grant hit My Favorite Wife was rushed into production in an attempt to turn over a quick profit to help keep Fox afloat. The unoriginal romantic comedy, titled Something's Got To Give paired Fox's most bankable star of the 1950's - Marilyn Monroe - with Dean Martin, but with a troubled star and belligerent director (George Cukor) causing delays on a daily basis, it quickly descended into a costly debacle. As Cleopatra's budget passed the ten-million dollar mark, Fox sold its back lot (now the site of Century City) to Alcoa in 1961 to raise cash. After several months of very little progress, Marilyn Monroe was fired from Something's Got To Give, although somewhat controversially Elizabeth Taylor's highly disruptive reign on the Cleopatra set continued unchallenged.
With few pictures on the schedule, Skouras wanted to rush Zanuck's big-budget war epic The Longest Day into release as another source of quick cash. This offended Zanuck, still Fox's largest shareholder. After it became clear that Something's Got To Give would not be able to progress without Monroe in the lead (Martin had refused to work with anyone else), Skouras finally relented and re-signed her. But days before filming was due to resume, she was found dead at her Los Angeles home and the unfinished scenes from Something's Got To Give were shelved. They wouldn't see the light of day for nearly 40 years.
At the next board meeting Zanuck spoke for eight hours, convincing directors that Skouras was mis-managing the company and that he was the only possible successor. He was installed as chairman; then named his son Richard Zanuck as president. This new management group seized Cleopatra and rushed it to completion, shut down the studio, laid off the entire staff to save money, axed the long-running Movietone Newsreel and made a series of cheap, popular pictures that luckily restored Fox as a major studio. The biggest boost to the studio's fortunes came from the tremendous success of The Sound of Music (1965), a handsomely produced adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, which became one of the all-time greatest box office hits.
Zanuck stayed on as chairman until 1971 but his last years saw several expensive flops, resulting in Fox posting losses from 1969 to 1971. Following his removal, and after an uncertain period, new management brought Fox back to health. Under president Dennis Stanfill and production head Alan Ladd, Jr., Fox films connected with modern audiences. Stanfill used the profits to acquire resort properties, soft-drink bottlers, Australian theaters, and other properties in an attempt to diversify enough to offset the boom-or-bust cycle of picture-making.
[编辑] 鲁伯特·默多克
With financial stability came new owners, and in 1978 control passed to the investors Marc Rich and Marvin Davis. Three years later, Rich sold his shares to Rupert Murdoch's Australian media group, News Corporation. In 1984, Davis sold his half of Fox to News Corp., giving Murdoch's company complete control. To run the studio, Murdoch hired Barry Diller from Paramount; Diller brought with him a plan which Paramount's board had refused: a studio-backed, fourth commercial television-network.
But to gain FCC approval of Fox's purchase of Metromedia's television holdings (once the stations of the old DuMont network), Murdoch had to become an American citizen. He did so in 1985, and in 1986, the new Fox Broadcasting Company took to the air. Over the next twenty years the network and owned-stations group have expanded to become extremely profitable for News Corp. The film studio has prospered too, although Fox has backed away from its reputation for literary adaptations and adult themes to concentrate on "popcorn" movies such as the Star Wars trilogies (1977-1983 and 1999-2005), and others.
Since January 2001, this company has been the international distributor for MGM/UA releases, and as of 2006, the worldwide video distributor for the MGM/UA library.
[编辑] 主要影片
Among the studio's notable films:
[编辑] 1930年代
- Cavalcade (drama, 1933, Academy Award winner, "Best Picture")
- State Fair (comedy, 1933)
- Stand Up and Cheer! (1934)
- In Old Chicago (drama, 1937)
- Alexander's Ragtime Band (drama, 1938)
- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (comedy-drama, 1938)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
- Young Mr. Lincoln (drama, 1939)
[编辑] 1940年代
- The Mark of Zorro (1940)
- The Grapes of Wrath (drama, 1940)
- How Green Was My Valley (drama, 1941)
- Blood and Sand (drama, 1941)
- The Pied Piper (drama, 1942)
- The Song of Bernadette (drama, 1943)
- The Ox-Bow Incident (drama, 1943)
- The Gang's All Here (1943)
- My Friend Flicka (drama 1943)
- Heaven Can Wait (comedy, 1943)
- Laura (drama, 1944)
- Wilson (drama, 1944)
- Jane Eyre (1944)
- State Fair (1945)
- Leave Her to Heaven (drama, 1945)
- Anna and the King of Siam (drama, 1946)
- Gentlemen's Agreement (1947)
- Miracle on 34th Street (comedy-drama, 1947) (and its remake in 1994)
- A Letter to Three Wives (drama, 1949)
[编辑] 1950年代
- All About Eve (drama, 1950)
- Cheaper by the Dozen (comedy-drama, 1950) (plus remake in 2003 and sequel in 2005)
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (science fiction, 1951)
- Viva Zapata! (1952)
- Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
- The Robe (1953) (the first film in CinemaScope)
- How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
- Carmen Jones (1954)
- Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954)
- The Seven Year Itch (1955)
- The King and I (1956)
- Anastasia (1956)
- Bus Stop (1956)
- The Girl Can't Help It (1956)
- Peyton Place (1957)
- An Affair to Remember (1957)
- The Fly (1958) (plus remake in 1986 along with its sequel in 1989)
- South Pacific (1958, distribution only)
- The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)
[编辑] 1960年代
- The Millionairess (196])
- The Hustler (1961)
- 最长的一天 The Longest Day(1962)
- 埃及艳后Cleopatra (1963)
- Zorba the Greek (1964)
- 音乐之声 The Sound of Music(1965)
- The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)
- The Sand Pebbles (1966)
- Doctor Doolittle (1967) (1998年重拍，2001年，2006年推出续集)
- Valley of the Dolls (1967)
- 人猿星球Planet of the Apes (1968)(1969,1970,1971推出续集，2001年重拍)
- Hello Dolly! (1969)
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
[编辑] 1970年代
- M*A*S*H (1970) (plus TV remake in 1972)
- Patton (1970)
- Myra Breckinridge (1970)
- The French Connection (1971) and sequel (1975)
- The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
- The Paper Chase (1973)
- Young Frankenstein (1974)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (UK, 1975) (distribution only)
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
- The Omen (1976)
- Silver Streak (1976)
- Wizards (1977)
- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), at the time, it was just called Star Wars.
- Julia (1977)
- Norma Rae (1979)
- Alien (1979) (and its three sequels in 1986, 1992, and 1997)
- Breaking Away (1979)
- All That Jazz (1979) (co-production with Columbia Pictures)
[编辑] 1980年代
- 星際大战前传五:帝國大反擊 (1980)
- Nine to Five (1980)
- Cannonball Run (1981) (plus sequel)
- History of the World, Part I (1981)
- Porky's (1981, Canada) and its sequels (1983 and 1985)
- 星際大战前传六:絕地大反攻Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)
- 火与冰Fire and Ice (1983)
- 喜剧之王The King of Comedy (1983)
- Romancing the Stone (1984)
- Revenge of the Nerds (1984) (plus sequels in 1986, 1992, and 1994)
- The Flamingo Kid (1984)
- Ladyhawke (1985)
- Cocoon (1985)
- Less Than Zero (1987)
- Raising Arizona (1987)
- 华尔街(电影)Wall Street (1987)
- Broadcast News (1987)
- Big (1988)
- Die Hard (1988) (and its 3 sequels in 1990, 1995, and 2006)
- Working Girl (1988)
- Say Anything (1989)
- The Abyss (1989)
[编辑] 1990年代
- 小鬼当家Home Alone (1990) (1992,1997,2002推出续集)
- Edward Scissorhands (1990)
- Only the Lonely (1991)
- Hot Shots! (1991) (1993年推出续集)
- Prelude to a Kiss (1992)
- The Sandlot (1993) (与Island World合作) (2005推出续集)
- Rookie of the Year (1993)
- The Good Son (1993)
- The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) (与1960年代同期电视剧同名)
- Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) (2006推出续集)
- Ghost in the Machine (1993)，(1994)
- Bad Girls (1994)
- 生死时速Speed (1994) (1997推出续集)
- Baby's Day Out (1994)
- 真实的谎言True Lies (1994)
- Far From Home: The Adventure Of Yellow Dog (1994)
- The Pagemaster (1994) (co-Production with Turner Pictures)
- French Kiss (1995)
- Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)
- 独立日Independence Day(1996) (与Centropolis Entertainment合作)
- 罗密欧与朱丽叶Romeo and Juliet (1996)
- Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie (1997) (co-production with Saban Entertainment)
- 泰坦尼克 (1997) (co-production with Paramount Pictures)
- Doctor Dolittle (1998) (and its two sequels in 2001 and 2006)
- There's Something About Mary (1998)
- Ever After (1998)
- 星球大战前传I:鬼魅危机Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
- Fight Club (1999)
[编辑] 2000年代
- Big Momma's House (2000)
- X-Men (2000)
- 浩劫重生Cast Away (2000)
- 紅磨坊Moulin Rouge! (2001年)
- 冰河世紀Ice Age (2002年) (与蓝天工作室合作) (续集2006年上映)
- 星球大战前传2:科隆人的进攻 Star Wars Episode II:Attack of the Clones (2002年)
- X2 (2003年)
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
- 明日之后The Day After Tomorrow (2004年)
- 加菲猫电影版系列Garfield: The Movie (第一部2004)(第二部2006) (其中開頭的20th CENTURY FOX變成20th CENTURY CAT，還為20th CENTURY CAT申請是專門用於加菲貓電影的商標)
- 机器人 (2005年)
- 星球大战前传III:西斯的复仇Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005年)
- 史密斯夫妇Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005年)
- 神奇四侠Fantastic Four(2005)
- 为你钟情 Walk the Line(2005年)
- Eragon (2006年)
- The Omen 666 (2006年)
- X-Men 3 (2006年)
- The Sentinel (2006年)
- Flicka (2006年)
- Big Momma's House 2 (2006年) (co-producti on with Regency Enterprises)
- Andrew Henry's Meadow (2006年)
- The A-Team (2006年)
- The Deep Blue Goodbye (2006)
- Garfield's A Tale of Two Kitties (2006)
- Die Hard 4.0 (2006)
- Josiah's Canon (2006)
- Reckless (2006)
- The Star Chamber (2007)
- Hitman (2007)
- Gangsta M.D. (2007)
- Charlie Chan (2007)
- Battle Angel (2007)
- The Simpsons Movie (2007年上映电影)
[编辑] 20世纪福克斯在大中华区
[编辑] 中国大陆
20世纪福克斯在中国大陆的业务主要由设在北京东方广场的新闻集团中国代表处负责。20世纪福克斯家庭娱乐与2006年11月13日在广州成立了中国代表处，负责与中凯文化合作在中国大陆发行DVD、VCD事宜。
