William Fox

William Fox was one of the key figures in the early American movie industry. He built a vertically integrated theatre, distribution, and production empire, founded the Fox Film Corporation, and helped establish sound newsreels. His extraordinary rise was followed by a rapid loss of control after his failed acquisition of Loew’s/MGM and the Wall Street crash of 1929.

Early life

William Fox was born Wilhelm Fried Fuchs on January 1st, 1879, to Michael Fuchs and Anna Fried, the owners of a general merchandise store in the rural town of Tolcsva, Hungary. A few months after the birth of his son, 22-year-old Michael emigrated to America in search of a brother who had moved there ten years before. After selling the store, his wife and young son followed six months later.

The move turned out to be a bad one for Michael and his family. They had exchanged a comparatively comfortable life in their homeland for the squalid tenements of New York’s Lower East Side, which were rife with typhus and smallpox. The couple lost seven of their thirteen children, and Michael never found his brother. He spent much of his time out of work and lost the respect of his oldest son, who claimed his father never earned more than $1,000 a year. Fox later recalled, “All I remember of those early years is my father slurping up Mama’s chicken soup at the dinner table.”

A fall from the back of an ice truck resulted in a local dentist removing the elbow joint of his left arm because his father couldn’t afford a doctor. From the age of nine, perhaps realising as a result of that accident and his subsequent disability, that his father was incapable of providing for his family, William worked to support them. He sold sweets for a penny apiece and recruited helpers when he realised he could sell more than he could carry. The following year he dropped out of school and lied about his age to get a job with a clothing company, D. Cohen & Sons; three years later he was promoted to foreman in charge of cutting linings and overseeing a dozen employees. In the evenings, at the insistence of his mother, he attended night school until he was fourteen.

Then, with his evenings free, Fox began visiting vaudeville shows, buying the tickets at a favourable price from shopkeepers who received them for free for carrying ads for the shows in their windows. He and a friend developed a vaudeville routine of their own which they performed for $5 or $10 a night, but he soon realised they weren’t talented enough to make a fortune as performers. Financial stability by any legal means had by now become Fox’s main goal in life, and he became frugal in his habits. When he was fifteen, he started working for G. Lipmann & Sons, another clothing company, but an improved wage only strengthened his resolve to covet every dollar: ”I can recall going out with boys when I was sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen,” he later recalled, “and though I wanted to do the things they did, on checking up the cost I usually did without. I knew the soles of my shoes had holes in them and that was the time to have them repaired, but I delayed it by putting pasteboard in them to save the half-soling.... Every penny was something that I denied myself, with the thought in mind that if I was going forward, I had to have money.”

Although he earned at most a weekly salary of only $17, he managed to save $580 by the age of 20, and on 31st December 1899, the eve of his 21st birthday, he married Eva Leo, whom he’d met at a party when she was 10 and he was 14.

Realising he would never attain the wealth he desired working for someone else, Fox went into business for himself. Staying in the clothing industry, he started the Knickerbocker Cloth Examining and Shrinking Company, a venture that required little start-up money and factory space. While Fox continued to limit his salary to $17 a week, he allowed his partner a weekly wage of $25. When the business realised a profit of $10,000 after its second year, Fox bought out his partner. Shortly after, he sold the business for a profit of $50,000.

Entering the film business

Searching around for his next business venture, Fox noted the growth of nickelodeons and the constant stream of patrons entering these makeshift premises. In 1904, he and two business partners bought a nickelodeon at 700 Broadway for $5,000. It turned out that this new business wasn’t as successful as he had been led to believe: the seller had hired people to make the place look popular. So, to drum up trade, he engaged a magician to perform coin tricks outside who promised his audiences he would finish his act upstairs for free. Within a week, police had to control the crowds willing to pay to see the ‘flickers,’ and soon, Fox and his two partners had fifteen highly profitable establishments. Once again, when he could afford to, Fox bought out his partners.

Business was booming, but Fox realised there was an even greater profit to be made by distributing films to other exhibitors and established the Greater New York Film Rental Company. Dissatisfied with the ceiling on profits he could make from his chain of small nickelodeons, Fox began buying theatres. The first was a dilapidated place known locally as the ‘Bum’ theatre at 194 Grand Street in Brooklyn, which he purchased for $20,000. While renovation was underway, Fox mailed 10,000 neighbourhood residents regular updates on its progress. Fox’s programme of vaudeville acts combined with movies proved popular, and he quickly repaid the theatre’s mortgage.

The next few years saw Fox aggressively expand his empire. In February 1909, he took over William Gane’s newly signed lease on the Family Theatre on 125th Street, offering to cover Gane’s expenses and pay a $10,000 bonus. In May 1909, he formed the City Theatre Company with “Big Tim” Sullivan, a shady New York  politician with underworld connections, his cousin, “Little Tim” Sullivan, and George Kraus to build a 2,500-seat theatre on 14th Street. It opened in April 1910 with Anna Held starring in Miss Innocence, but its programme of live theatre made a loss from the outset. After seven months, having taken out a 21-year lease for sole control of the theatre, Fox reversed its fortunes by switching it to vaudeville and motion pictures.

Around the same time that the City Theatre opened, Fox helped form the Phoenix Amusement Company to build the 1,800-seat Washington Theatre at Amsterdam Avenue and 149th Street, employing emerging architect Thomas Lamb. He also leased the Academy of Music on 14th Street, but its mix of plays, opera, and boxing produced heavy losses. A renovation and the incorporation of shop-fronts finally saw it make a profit. Fox’s troubles with that venture didn’t deter him from starting construction of the 1,800-seat Riverside Theatre at Broadway and 96th, which opened in December 1911 and became an instant attraction. He later gained control of an entire Broadway block by adding the Riviera and Japanese Gardens theatres to the Riverside complex.

In February 1912, he began building the massive Audubon Theater complex between 165th and 166th streets on Broadway, which comprised a 3,000-seat theatre, a roof-garden theatre, a ballroom, and retail shops. The building opened on 27th November 1912. By early 1913, after investing more than $4 million in land and construction in four years, he had fourteen theatres in the New York area. He had also looked beyond New York, establishing theatre operations in Newark, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

The MPPC and film production

In December 1908, the leading studios, who between them owned the key patents that applied to production and exhibition within the film industry, combined to form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC, also known as the Trust) with the aim of controlling all phases of the industry. In early 1909, they decreed that all distributors must become Trust licensees and each pay a weekly $2 licence fee. Then, in April 1910, the Trust established the General Film Company (GFC) to control motion picture distribution. The GFC quickly bought out the majority of the country’s exchanges; those it couldn’t buy had their licences cancelled. Only Fox held out, refusing to sell and offering to buy feature films from any producer. When the Trust cancelled his licence, Fox sued it for $600,000, arguing it was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Law, which outlawed unfair monopolies. The case dragged on for two years, but in 1913 the Trust settled out of court, paying Fox $350,000.

In 1914, Fox moved into production to ensure a constant supply of good quality feature films to his exchanges and theatres. By doing so, he created an early example of the practice of vertical integration, where an organisation controls the production, distribution and exhibition of its pictures, a practice widely adopted throughout the industry until it was ruled in breach of anti-trust law in 1948. Fox Film Corporation’s first film, a $6,000 romantic drama called Life’s Shop Window, was released on Octobber 20th 1914. It was based on a popular novel, the screen rights to which Fox purchased for $100, and filmed at the former Eclair studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It was in many ways typical of the type of product offered in his production company’s earliest days: social melodramas that revolved around proven plot devices such as infidelity, addiction, crime and suicide, but which also possessed a strong moral viewpoint designed to appeal to the working-class and immigrant populations. Fox said of this policy: “The motion picture did not appeal to the native born. He had other forms of recreation and entertainment. The motion picture appealed mainly to the foreign born, who could not speak or understand our tongue, who had no theatre where he could hear his own tongue. He was a Pole, a Russian, a Slav or of some other foreign nationality. He wanted a diversion and found it in the motion picture. It was the money contributed by the foreign born towards the purchase of tickets that enabled the people in the motion picture business at that time to enlarge their scope until the industry grew to such a size that it had a right to expect the respect of the populace of the world.”

A Fool There Was (1915) was a sensational hit for the early Fox production company and made a star of its leading lady, Theda Bara, who played a manipulative ‘vamp’ who revels in her power to destroy any man who falls under her spell. Bara, whose real name was Theodosia Goodman, was born in Cincinnati, but Fox’s extensive publicity claimed she was the daughter of an Arab and a Parisian actress. This mysterious and exotic invented persona contributed as much to Bara’s stratospheric rise to fame as her performance in the film, and she remained Fox’s biggest star until her popularity started to wane in 1919.

Fox was heavily involved in selecting or approving the plot of each film his studio produced. He said, “No picture ever produced by the Fox Film Corporation was permitted to be viewed by the general public, until every title it contained had been approved and passed by me, and I don’t remember a single picture ever made by the company that the titles contained therein were not corrected, edited and rewritten by me.” He relied heavily on his wife, Eva, an avid reader, for advice on which properties to purchase. Eva would also visit the studio each evening to view the day’s rushes with her husband. Fox also found jobs for his brothers-in-law in the company and put another in charge of the film lab.

In 1916, Fox opened the William Fox Studio in Los Angeles at a site purchased for $180,000 from W. C. Frye and Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman, the book which D. W. Griffith had adapted into The Birth of a Nation (1915). There, Fox filmed Westerns such as The Mediator (1916), starring George Walsh, the brother of director Raoul Walsh, who had joined the studio the previous year, and the two-reel Sunshine Comedies, a series of popular slapstick comedies overseen by Henry Lehrmann. In 1917, Fox expanded the West Coast facilities to accommodate twelve productions simultaneously, meaning that, with Fox producing on both coasts, the studio could release around 70 films per year. Stars that rose to prominence at Fox alongside Theda Bara and George Walsh during this period included Gladys Brockwell, June Caprice, William Farnum, Tom Mix, Virginia Pearson, and Valeska Suratt.

In 1916, Fox produced A Daughter of the Gods, an epic fantasy intended to rival The Birth of a Nation (1915). Fox authorised writer and director Herbert Brenon to film on location in Jamaica, with world-famous swimming champion Annette Kellerman. Dismayed by the escalating budget, Fox was so disappointed with the final result that he ordered it to be re-cut and removed Brenon’s name from the credits. Even the prospect of the shapely Kellerman appearing in the nude (she was actually clad in a body stocking) failed to draw audiences, and in 1920 the film was still $178,000 in the red after a couple of re-releases.

The success of a film became increasingly dependent on its stars; realising this, Fox devised a three-tier level of release. An Excel picture was the most modest picture the company produced. Fox would use these cheaper films to test new talent on audiences. Those the audience warmed to might then be promoted to a Victory picture, the mid-level tier of production. Proven stars with strong audience recognition would appear under the top-level Standard banner.