User Reviews

. . . must have written (or perhaps Rewritten) this paean to Fox founder and LONGEST DAY producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Dripping with hyperbolic praise, BACKSTORY lauds DFZ as the greatest movie producer ever, and DAY as History's top War Film. Fortunately, there's something called "The Test of Time," and EVERY D-Day movie made since 1962 has far surpassed DFZ's three-hour snooze-fest in all ways imaginable (led, of course, by Steven Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN). When this BACKSTORY episode came out in 2000, it raised such a firestorm of criticism from ACTUAL D-Day veterans (part of a key Fox target audience: the Alzheimer's Crowd) that Fox had to command most of this BACKSTORY crew to produce yet another, 50% longer piece released in 2001 (THE LONGEST DAY: A SALUTE TO COURAGE) detailing that DAY author Cornelius Ryan HATED Zanuck. SALUTE also put a dozen of the long-surviving D-Day vets still in possession of their faculties on-screen to point out DFZ's flick would have been more aptly titled OPPOSITE DAY (that is, he got practically EVERYTHING wrong!). What this 2000 BACKSTORY piece proves is that pernicious propaganda did NOT die with Hitler's Third Reich: it's alive and well at Fox!