LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Fred Zinnemann: Work
built 629 days ago
Zinnemann is often regarded as striking a blow against "ageism" in Hollywood. The story (which may be apocryphal) goes that, in the 1980s, during a meeting with a young Hollywood executive, Zinnemann was surprised to find the executive didn't know who he was, despite winning two Academy Awards, and directing dozens of Hollywood's biggest movies. When the young executive callowly asked Zinnemann to list what he had done in his career, Zinnemann delivered an elegant comeback by reportedly answering, "Sure. You first." In Hollywood, the story is known as "You First," and is often alluded to when veteran creators find that upstarts are unfamiliar with their work. [1]
Source:
The proliferation of honours heaped on Zinnemann have not helped his reputation in the critical community, especially when more daring artists among his contemporaries like Nicholas Ray, Jacques Tourneur and Anthony Mann received relatively little recognition. Naysayers have found his work variously overdetermined, humourless, linear, too symmetrical and clean-cut, didactic and more schematic than implacable. Andrew Sarris fired the strongest volley in his seminal work, The American Cinema, with his longstanding provocation that Zinnemann's “true vocation remains the making of antimovies for antimoviegoers” (16), while a few pages later praising the visually static works of Edmund Goulding, such as The Razor's Edge (1946).
Source:
Though not an auteurist, the New Yorker's noted (and notorious) critic Pauline Kael dropped Zinnemann completely in the late 1950s, singling out his "glossy, middlebrow" approach, and the fact that "he does all the work for you as an audience." Other film historians and critics, such as David Thomson, have discussed the "disposable qualities" of Zinnemann, "diligence instead of imagination, more care than instinct." Talk to young and current critics today about Zinnemann's status as a filmmaker, and you'll get the following pejorative adjectives, plodding, uninspired, humorless, and emotionally distant—if they remember who he is. (My undergrad film students at ASU and UCLA are prime examples—Zinnemann who???)
Source:
The commentary apparently worked like this: Zinnemann and Sargent sat down in a sound studio, and watched the movie while making random remarks. At the end of two hours, they took their pay checks and left.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Work