The Man Who Lost the Movies

I liked to look over the orchestra below and then sit back with the opulent feeling of being entertained. I might as well have been in ancient Rome—although Rome itself would not have satisfied my 12-year-old’s Foxite craving for the grandiosity of the wide screen. It never occurred to me that Fox was the name of a man who invented the experience I could not live without or that it nearly killed him when the moment of doom descended with the realization that he would lose everything he had put into making my day.

Not yet a year old, William Fox (1879-1952), born Wilhelm Fuchs, came with his mother to the United States four months after his father Michael, a Hungarian Jew, landed at Castle Garden in the port of New York and immediately Americanized the family’s last name. William Fox, with no memory of his native land, never dreamed of living anywhere except America, even though his feckless father often denigrated the United States and extolled the village life he had left behind. Michael, a poor provider, essentially turned over family responsibilities to young William, who never shirked his obligations and never forgave his father’s derelictions. Years later, at the height of his Hollywood reign, William Fox sent a camera crew to Hungary to film the grim conditions of village life. He showed the footage to his father and family; Michael Fox never spoke of heavenly Hungary again. At his funeral, his multimillionaire 57-year-old son spit on his casket and said, “You son of a bitch.”

“In many ways, the father’s failures were father to the man,” writes Vanda Krefft in her monumental new biography. It is a fitting beginning for the story of a self-made American who believed in his own genius and took to heart his mother’s exhortation to push forward no matter the obstacles and setbacks. For William Fox, the movies represented the American promise of greatness for any man willing to work hard enough and long enough for himself and his family. Early on, Fox developed a reputation as a ruthless competitor. Krefft suggests he was no more relentless than other movie moguls of his generation—but something, to be sure, was different about him. Something accounts for the astounding fact that no biography of him, other than an as-told-to book by Upton Sinclair, was ever published. Something has to account for Fox’s crucial role, now largely forgotten, in creating the movie industry.

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Making flicks—as they would come to be called because of the flickering projection lights—at the turn of the 20th century took capital, the cooperation of friends and family, and a willingness to take risks way beyond what was required in the garment industry, where on New York City’s Lower East Side many of Fox’s contemporaries began their business careers. It was a good place to break into the movie racket—considered low-grade entertainment—for a glove salesman like Samuel Goldfish (who changed his name to Goldwyn), as long as you could get investors to buy the nickelodeons, essentially five-cent peep shows, the affordable entertainment for immigrants and the lower classes. But Fox, beginning in 1904, used only his own savings, his sweatshop earnings, amounting to less than $2,000, to get into the movie business. He kept expanding without, for the most part, relying on bank loans. As he later famously said, bankers lend you an umbrella when the sun is shining and then ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Where, then, did Fox’s money come from? Profits from his business did not generate enough to underwrite his acquisition and building of more and more theaters and production facilities. Other than loan sharks, which Fox apparently shunned, only Tammany Hall politicians had the resources to back him. Mayors, judges, and other local officials had access to funds that helped Fox remain in business without partners. Even better, they stood behind him as he took on Thomas Edison, who sought to monopolize the movie business, claiming that his invention of the movie camera and projector entitled him to control the making and distribution of motion pictures. Going up against Edison meant risking fights in the street with his thugs and legal battles with his lawyers. A fearless Fox took on Edison and won.

Krefft, a diligent reporter, follows Fox’s murky maneuvers, patiently sifting and evaluating evidence. Some readers may balk at the plethora of detail in her magnificently researched book, wishing instead for a 300-page biography that briskly tells them what they want to know. But in this case, what is at stake is our understanding of the intricacy of the business deals that made the man. If Fox had been interested only in making money, Krefft’s book would indeed be tedious—but as she shows again and again, Fox loved the movie business. He wanted his customers to have a good time, and sometimes to feel uplifted and inspired.

Part of Fox’s obscurity—who knows anything about him compared to Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn, for example?—has to do with his unwillingness to promote his own persona, and part is due to his desire to go it alone in a maniacal quest to monopolize the movie industry. Until the 1929 crash, he succeeded. As much as anyone he had created movie stars, especially his “vamp” Theda Bara, the made-up name of Theodosia Burr Goodman, a Cincinnati girl given a fake biography as an exotic European actress appearing in silents such as Siren of Hell, The Devil’s Daughter, and Sin (all released in 1915) but also in films of literary classics such as Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (also 1915). That list illustrates Fox’s high and low ambitions. Although Krefft dredges up accounts of these films, many of them have been lost, and with them much of the legacy of Fox’s early innovative efforts to transform the movies into not just a national entertainment but an indispensable contribution to American culture and identity.

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Although the Warner brothers are credited with leading the transition from the silents to the talkies beginning in 1927 (hear Jolson in The Jazz Singer!), Krefft makes a powerful argument for Fox’s primacy in financing the creation of sound film. Whereas the Warners relied on the cumbersome syncing of recorded disks to film, Fox patiently invested in integrating the soundtrack with the film threaded through a projector. This tricky technical problem took a few years to work out, but Fox persisted and his system prevailed. As a reward, he expected the companies that developed his patented inventions to work exclusively with him, but he never obtained their agreement in writing, relying instead on verbal assurances. It was an odd, baffling mistake for such a shrewd man to make, and Krefft never quite explains his apparently naïve faith in his business associates—except to present Fox’s blunder as a matter of character. He liked to believe that for all his going it alone, he had the good faith and good will of those he treated fairly in business. Because what he did was not just good for William Fox but also good for the industry, he did not expect to be met with duplicity and opposition.

Fox’s failure to realize, beginning in 1929, even before the crash, that his effort to monopolize the movie industry for its own good was doomed is attributable to his isolation. He stayed in New York even when movie production began to shift significantly to the West Coast. He continued to rely on family members and the Fox Film executives he encouraged but also badgered about budgets. His business was growing at such a rate that it attracted the machinations of various Wall Street investors not especially interested in the movies but eager to control the wealth Fox had accumulated. But Fox always thought he could overcome opposition by building bigger production facilities and acquiring a larger distribution network. In the heady days leading up to the crash, he had gone all out to acquire the Loew’s theater chain, arousing the anxieties of rivals like Adolph Zukor at Paramount, one of the industry’s pioneers, determined to do his part in bringing down the Fox empire.

While Fox had his rivals, Krefft realizes that her subject became paranoid. He saw conspiracies against him everywhere, especially among nefarious bankers and studio heads in cahoots with them. For Fox, the struggle to control his business was as melodramatic as any movie made on the Fox lot. He lost control of the Fox theaters and his production company, a victim of overextending himself, buying too many shares of Loew’s stock on margin and paying as little as 10 percent of the stock’s value. When brokers demanded payment for the full value of the stock, Fox incurred huge debts. Even then, the resourceful Fox almost fought his way out of trouble, finding short-term backers in businesses that he had patronized, but he never recouped enough to vanquish the combined forces of bankers and some of his own executives who could no longer abide his dictatorial methods and were eager to cash in on the lucrative capital and operating funds of the Fox theater chain and production units. So they outvoted him and took control of his businesses. Plenty of villains appear in Krefft’s account, but she never indulges in Fox’s own habit of blaming his failure only on his betrayers, although he proved right that the hostile takeover would simply raid Fox of its funds and virtually destroy the company that had been his life’s work.

Fox lived another two decades after losing his movie empire. He schemed to get it all back, and he had resources, keeping intact his personal wealth of several million dollars. But he could never content himself with an advisory role. In 1935, the merger of the ailing Fox Film with Twentieth Century, a small company, was conducted without William Fox’s involvement, and no one in the new combined studio wanted anything to do with the man who had made the movies. The new production team, headed by Darryl Zanuck, restored the studio to its glory days. Meanwhile, Fox retaliated against the industry by engaging in patent-infringement lawsuits aimed at accruing power that would force movie corporations to license his inventions, effectively exercising veto power over film production. He paid off corrupt judges to enforce judgments in his favor. But in the end these crooked deals were exposed, and Fox spent five and a half months in prison, convicted of perjury.

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Amid the welter of financial transactions and movie productions, Krefft never loses sight of the man. For much of his life Fox remained a devout Orthodox Jew who believed that God was on his side. He never lost his faith, but he abandoned the idea that his own mission had been somehow blessed. More and more he came to rely on his wife, even during his most fateful business decisions; sometimes listening to her led to disaster. He looked after his family but did not know how to express affection, except for lavishing $100 bills on relatives who came to visit him. These kinds of details make a biography and Krefft has an abundant supply of them.

The biographer also proves her case. If there is one man who made the movies, it is William Fox. He knew, for example, that the sound system pushed by Warner Bros. could not prevail in the marketplace. He was confident that movie theater owners would invest in his product, which made the golden age of Hollywood sound film possible. He knew that those movie palaces like the Fox in Detroit required his personal attention. Fox was not emotionally close with family other than his wife and daughters, and he had unhappy and often distant relationships with others in his industry, but he could empathize with his customers, and he sought to create that thrill and appetite for grandeur that could be purchased in the splendor of a Fox Theatre seat. He brought the world to moviegoers, housing the dreams and aspirations that are, in the end, more than money can buy.

Carl Rollyson is the editor of the Hollywood Legends biography series from the University Press of Mississippi and the author of Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress.