Death of a Major

EMPLOYEES AFFECTIONATELY DUBBED THEIR STUDIO’S logo “the monument.” Sitting atop an Art Deco skyscraper and spelling out in huge carved letters, on separate platforms, “20th” and “Century” and “Fox,” it truly is a monolith. For 85 years, matte artist Emil Kosa Jr.’s majestic graphic, with searchlights slashing through the skyline, joined with house composer Alfred Newman’s soaring fanfare to feel stirringly modern, mythic, and mysterious. In 1935, film fans knew that the studio’s name resulted from Darryl F. Zanuck’s independent 20th Century Pictures (cofounded with Joseph Schenck in 1933) merging with the Fox Film Corporation, founded in 1915 by William Fox, who was deposed in 1930 when creditors who financed his dreams of industry domination turned on him as their loans came due.

On January 17, reported that the Walt Disney Company, which had acquired the parent company 21st Century Fox from Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp last March, was “dropping the ‘Fox’ Adam B. Vary theorized that the “irreverent and provocative” programming of Fox TV (for example, ), and the “conservative partisanship” and multiple sexual misconduct cases at Fox News “proved to be anathema to Disney’s scrupulously maintained family friendly brand.”