Washington D.C.Letters from listeners nationwide are piling up at NPR's Washington studios in reponse to a recent Fresh Air interview with veteran film producer Richard Zanuck (Jaws, The Sound of Music, Sweeney Todd) , son of early-Hollywood mogul Darryl Zanuck (All About Eve, The Grapes of Wrath, The Longest Day.) NPR listeners were "tickled pink" by the way the elderly studio magnate called movies "pictures" - a word pulled from "motion pictures" which originated in the early days of cinema when naive audiences were bedeviled by films they assumed were photographs in motion.
A favorite word of film historians, former Hollywood players and Peter Bogdanovich, calling movies "pictures" is considered a quaint anachronism from cinema's heyday.
Richard Zanuck is famous for his crisp dialect, a product of a privileged upbringing in Los Angeles. Combined with the ravages of aging and decades of self-promotion, Zanuck's voice now resembles a kindly, grandfatherly sound - which NPR listeners loved to hear say again and again about various movies, "I was particularly proud of that picture." Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, can be particularly proud of "that interview."
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