The next time you watch a TV show on the Fox Network, cheer or hiss a talking head on Fox News, see a movie produced by Twentieth Century Fox (or any studio for that matter), or visit the Fox Theater in Atlanta, then spare a thought for the forgotten man who made it all possible, for, without William Fox, the history of American movies would be very different.
When we hear about the classic Hollywood studio heads, Louis B. Mayer is the first name that usually is mentioned followed by Jack Warner and then Adolph Zukor. That is only natural as they were the heads of the 3 most powerful and successful studios in Hollywood (MGM, Warner Brothers, and Paramount).
Then there’s Darryl F. Zanuck who started at Warners, formed Twentieth Century Pictures in 1933, and merged it with Fox Film in 1935 to create 20th Century – Fox which he ran off and on for the next 30 years. But before Zanuck there was William Fox who not only founded Fox Film and made the movies the way we know them today but he almost changed the course of movie history.
William Fox was born Wilhelm Fuchs in Hungary in 1879. After coming to New York City with his immigrant parents, he Americanized his name and worked a variety of jobs in the garment industry. In 1906 he opened his first nickelodeon and by 1912 he owned a number of movie theaters along the East coast. In order to exert quality control over what he showed and to ensure a steady product for his theaters he founded the Fox Film Company in 1915.
That same year he cast a small time stage actress named Theda Bara in a movie called A Fool There Was based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling. It cost less than $100,000 to make and grossed well over a million. Bara, who was born Theodosia Goodman the daughter of a tailor in Cincinatti, became an overnight sensation and the word “vamp” (short for vampire because she drained her victims of their resources) entered the national lexicon. She was a dark haired, dark-eyed angel of destruction, the antithesis of Mary Pickford, who went unpunished for her misdeeds.
Fox suffered no consequences either as the success of Fool and other Bara pictures like it enabled him to produce the more artistic fare to which he was inclined such as adaptations of A Tale of Two Cities (1917) and Count of Monte Cristo (1922) without having to worry whether or not they made money. The popular Westerns of cowboy star Tom Mix added to the coffers.
Fox was a hard-nosed businessman who built up an empire of movie houses (like the Fox Theater in Atlanta) which kept the profits rolling in. But, unlike the others, Fox was also a visionary who anticipated the coming of sound long before it happened and invested heavily in a sound on film process which became the soundtracks we know and still use today. Warner Brothers beat him to the punch with The Jazz Singer and their sound on disc Vitaphone system, but the Fox Movietone system became the industry standard.
In 1927 Fox invited the great German filmmaker F. W. Murnau to Hollywood and gave him carte blanche to make any movie of his choosing with full artistic control. The eventual result Sunrise (my DVD pick for this month) was the first movie to feature a soundtrack and was a huge artistic if not financial success. By the end of the decade, four legendary Hollywood directors, Murnau, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Frank Borzage, were working at Fox and producing movies that made money and were well received.
However it was also the end of the 1920s that proved to be Fox’s undoing. Seeing an opportunity to acquire one of his biggest business competitors, Fox attempted to take control of Loews Inc. They had a national theater chain to rival his own and were the parent company of MGM which was headed up by Louis B. Mayer. Mayer threw as many stumbling blocks in Fox’s way as he could and then Fate intervened. In the summer of 1929, Fox was badly injured in a car accident and then right after that the Stock Market crashed and he lost all his money. The following year he was ousted as head of his own company by the stockholders.
For the next several years Fox fought bankruptcy but an attempt to bribe a judge in 1941 landed him six months in jail. When he got out, he was treated in Hollywood as a pariah and never worked there again. Fortunately he owned the rights to the patents of the Fox Movietone system and he and his family were able to live in relative comfort until he died in 1952 at the age of 73. No one from Hollywood came to his funeral. He was buried in a lesser known cemetery in Brooklyn.
Although William Fox has been forgotten, his legacy and name are everywhere. Not only are there the various media outlets but several of the movie palaces, whose construction he oversaw, are still standing and operating. The same cannot be for MGM so in the end perhaps William Fox has the last laugh. It’s interesting to speculate that had he been able to take over MGM back in 1929, what would Hollywood have been like?
