Innate around Los Angeles, California, he was the boy of Darryl Zanuck, the celebrated head of Twentieth-Century Fox studios. At one point in the 1970s, his father installed him as an executive at the studio.

For numbers of years his producing partner was David Brown and they were jointly awarded The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1990. It produced ii of Steven Spielberg's early films, The Sugarland Express (1974) and Jaws (1975), and went in to make such pack professional hits when Cocoon (1985) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989).