242 PATTON
his own men. Frank McCarthy (1912–1986), a staff officer with Gen. George C.
Marshall during World War II and a Hollywood producer after the war, knew Patton
and regarded his story as eminently screen- worthy. When he proposed a Patton film
to his boss, Darryl F. Zanuck, at 20th Century Fox in October 1951, Zanuck gave
the go- ahead, but it would be another 19 years before the proj ect came to fruition.
Patton’s widow and other members of the Patton family obstructed McCarthy, fear-
ing that a Hollywood biopic would caricature Patton and sully his memory (Top-
lin, 1996, pp. 158–159). McCarthy was only able to move forward after Ladislas
Farago’s biography, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph provided a source copious enough
upon which to base a biopic without recourse to family sources. 20th Century
Fox bought the film rights to Farago’s book and to Gen. Omar Bradley’s A Soldier’s
Story. In 1965, after rejecting several script drafts by other writers, Frank McCar-
thy hired an up- and- coming 26- year- old screenwriter named Francis Ford Cop-
pola, paid him $50,000, and gave him six months to carve a coherent narrative
out of Patton’s complex life and military career. Coppola wisely made two tactical
decisions early on that allowed him to create a fine script. After doing his research,
Coppola concluded that “Patton was obviously out of his mind” (Phillips, 2004,
pp. 31–32). A script that celebrated George Patton’s bizarre war- mongering would
be ridicu lous but one that merely vilified him would be rejected out of hand, soGeorge C. Scott portrays General George S. Patton in Frank Schaffner’s epic biopic,
Patton (1970). (20th Century Fox/Photofest)