The movie's first credit - white text on black background, like a silent movie caption card - says "A Zanuck/Brown Production". The producers' two names separated - or, more fittingly, joined - by a simple forward slash was the closest they came to a company logo. Although David Brown was eighteen years older and wiser than his partner, he didn't insist on the precedence of alphabetical ordering, and was probably canny enough to realise that the combination sounded better with the two syllable name preceding the single syllable one.
The name Zanuck also had considerable cachet in Hollywood. Richard Zanuck's father was the legendary producer Darryl F. Zanuck, whose career had spanned the Silent Era, the Golden Age and the decline of the studio system. As head of production at Twentieth Century Fox, he oversaw American classics such as John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine, and nurtured the talents of European directors like Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang. His tenure at Fox also saw the introduction of Cinemascope, one of Hollywood's failed attempts to stave off the threat of television - a phenomenon that Zanuck himself initially dismissed by saying "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
With The Longest Day and The Sound of Music he enjoyed critical and commercial success in the early Sixties, and helped to prevent the hemorrhaging of the studio's finances in the wake of Cleopatra. He could perhaps therefore be forgiven for the nepotism he exhibited in appointing his son Richard to the position of company president. In the latter part of the decade Fox suffered from a number of high-profile flops such as Doctor Dolittle and Hello Dolly, and, in keeping with the Hollywood dictum that you are only as good as your last movie, Zanuck's position as chairman was in danger. In a desperate move to save himself, he did what any self-respecting Hollywood producer would do - he fired his son. It was an act that simply delayed the inevitable and Zanuck Senior was soon ousted by his own board.
Richard Zanuck left Fox to form an independent production company with David Brown, who had also been a victim of the boardroom backstabbing. Their partnership, which was to last for a decade and a half, met with immediate success. The 1973 production of The Sting - a movie that reunited Paul Newman and Robert Redford after their 1969 hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - was a smash. Although the movie was credited as being a Richard D. Zanuck-David Brown presentation, they were not the actual producers on the movie, and so were not entitled to collect the Oscars that it won for best picture. Their follow up picture was the relatively small-scale The Sugarland Express directed by a then unknown Steven Spielberg.
This time they did take a full producing credit, which they had now distilled to their surnames (in reverse alphabetical order) with the pre-Internet forward slash sandwiched between them. Their choice of punctuation mark says a lot about their relationship - its main use (unlike many other pieces of punctuation) is to link and join rather than to separate and divide. Two words placed on either side of a forward slash can be seen as mutually exclusive alternatives, like two sides of the same coin.
