There’s a certain hidden tension in that advice. “Make a picture that people want to watch” conjures up images of filmmakers absent in their own worlds making pretentious, esoteric films with extremely limited viability instead of leaning on crowd-pleasing material, and that tension has fueled generations of storytellers for the entire history of Hollywood, giving rise to the “one for me, one for them” mentality that drove several mainstream filmmakers in the 1990s and 2000s (before the landscape evolved to the point that that mentality was essentially swept away and Most filmmakers, unless they are working in the indie space, are left with nothing but “their own”).
As for who the “boss of Fox” was at that time, this interaction occurred in the mid-1920s, before Fox merged with Twentieth Century Pictures and became 20th Century Fox, so William Fox was still the sole owner of the studio. But since William Fox was based in New York, it seems likely that the person Hawks was actually talking to on that golf course was Sol M. Wurtzel, whom Fox had put in charge of its West Coast operations in Los Angeles in the early days of the company.
Regardless of who actually gave him the advice to “create a photo that people want to look at,” Hawks took the lesson to heart. In addition to the aforementioned credits, he also directed such classics as “Only Angels Have Wings” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and was at least partially responsible for 1951’s “The Thing From Another World.” which inspired John Carpenter’s 1982 film “The Thing”, itself among the best science fiction films ever madeNot bad, really.
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