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WORK TITLE: The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.vandakrefft.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: Canadian
https://www.vandakrefft.com/contact/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A., M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and entertainment journalist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Vanda Krefft is a writer and journalist. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Communication. Krefft has worked as an entertainment industry journalist based in Los Angeles.
Krefft published The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox in 2017. The book serves as a biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox, who died in 1952. Krefft presents his career as a silent film-era producer and theater entrepreneur juxtaposed with his immigrant background and strained relationship with his father. Krefft chronicles his rise from a single theater in Brooklyn to owning a chain of luxury movie theaters and launching the careers of early stars Tom Mix and Theda Bara. The stock market crash in 1929 coupled with a car crash, though, sent his career into a nosedive that he was never able to recover from as he eventually lost control of the Fox Film Corporation.
In an interview for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Krefft discussed with Robert Siegel Fox’s low profile and public image despite the success of the studio that bears his name. Krefft opined that “very few people have heard of him,” adding that “in film history, he just tends to be—if he shows up at all, he shows up really in a minor way. And this was shocking to me because when I investigated his life and his contributions and his activities, I came to believe he was the most significant of all the studio founders.”
Writing in USA Today, Matt Damsker described the book’s prologue as being “wonderfully cinematic.” Damsker concluded that “life, ever unfair, had its way with the fantastic Mr. Fox. Yet Krefft reminds us, in this big, brassy production of a book, of his grand legacy.” In a review in Washington Post Book World, Chris Yogerst reasoned that “Krefft’s history gives us the whole story, one that shows us the tenacity of a titan instead of the bitter caricature left by his final years. Coupling expert scholarship and the tight prose of a seasoned journalist, The Man Who Made the Movies provides an overdue addition to film history. Krefft captures both the culture of the origins of cinema as a business and the many fascinating personalities at play within the narrative. No longer Hollywood’s forgotten pioneer, William Fox now has the history he deserves.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews claimed that “this hefty narrative is weighed down by excessive details” about Fox’s financial situation. The Kirkus Reviews contributor summarized the book by labeling it “an insightful and solidly documented though often ponderous history of the early days of cinema—of primary interest to film scholars.” Booklist contributor David Pitt found the book to be “a celebration of Fox’s spirit, his determination, and his lasting impact on the motion-picture industry.”
A Publishers Weekly contributor called The Man Who Made the Movies a “huge, dense, yet captivating biography.” The same reviewer admitted that Krefft’s “attention to detail makes for gripping storytelling.” Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dan Friedman commented that “Krefft is fascinated by the construction of the cinema and the central father-son psychodrama that drove Fox to achieve what he did,” appending that “Krefft presents William Fox as a great immigrant success eventually crushed by the machinations of Wall Street finance; it seems a missed opportunity not to delve deeper into his legacy in the present day.” Friedman stated: “When we talk about frames, we are not engaged in some abstract conversation about art or theory—we are talking about the crucial contexts that make content meaningful for our own life. Krefft’s point about Fox is that the ‘man who made the movies’ was more involved in the framing of movies than any other. A sense of the larger issues at stake would have helped readers frame the importance of the facts Krefft lays out with such mastery.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, David Pitt, review of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox, p. 18.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of The Man Who Made the Movies.
Publishers Weekly, September 4, 2017, review of The Man Who Made the Movies, p. 80.
USA Today, December 27, 2017, Matt Damsker, review of The Man Who Made the Movies, p. 1D.
Washington Post Book World, December 5, 2017, Chris Yogerst, review of The Man Who Made the Movies.
ONLINE
All Things Considered, http://www.npr.org/ (December 14, 2017), Robert Siegel, “A Look at the Man Who Started 21st Century Fox.”
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (November 28, 2017), Dan Friedman, review of The Man Who Made the Movies.
Vanda Krefft Website, https://www.vandakrefft.com (May 3, 2018).
VandaKrefft7sm.jpg
VANDA KREFFT
Vanda Krefft is the author of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (HarperCollins, November 2017), the first in-depth biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox. A former entertainment industry journalist based in Los Angeles, she has an BA in English and an MA in Communication, both from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
William Fox, the original movie mogul
Matt Damsker
USA Today. (Dec. 27, 2017): Lifestyle: p01D.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Matt Damsker, Special to USA TODAY
Witness the mythic spectacle, digital wizardry and box office dominance of a movie like Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It makes it easy to forget that commercial American cinema was born in grubby penny arcades and nickelodeon halls, with silent images that juddered to life for a few moments.
Yet this novelty of the late 19th century was the very future of show business, as shepherded by a handful of entrepreneurs, most of them from the immigrant streets of New York -- and none more driven or influential than William Fox.
Fox -- born Fuchs, a son of Hungarian Jews who struggled for their place in the ghettos of Lower Manhattan -- went from peddling candies as a child of the 1890s to studio head by 1915.
His empire, with its vertical integration of Fox filmmaking, film distribution and exhibition, was the root of a great brand, 20th Century Fox. By now that brand is buried in the parts of Rupert Murdoch's Fox media monolith just sold to Disney Corp. for $52 billion.
Vanda Krefft tells Fox's tale in her new biography, The Man Who Made the Movies (Harper, 755 pp., ****). A wonderfully cinematic prologue -- "Past the half-block-long ochre-and-slate-colored Spanish Baroque facade, under the marquee that blazed nightly with the power of 4,500 bulbs" -- reveals how Fox lost everything soon after he hit his pinnacle in 1929.
That's when he purchased control of his competitor, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, only to fall prey to the Great Depression, bankruptcy, prison (he served nearly six months for bribing a bankruptcy judge and for perjury) and, later, obscurity. He died in 1952.
It's a complex life, and the book is practically a primer on New York theater leasing rates and the cash thievery of the city's corrupt political machine, which helped Fox finance his early movie palaces. Then there's his battle with Thomas Edison's movie monopoly and the eternal inequity of movie-star salaries ($75 a week for the screen's crowd-pleasing "vamp," Theda Bara, to $1,000 a week for lesser male stars).
"A fighter and dreamer who relied on clear-eyed vision and an indomitable will, he did more than anyone else to make the movies what they are today," Krefft declares.
Fox was loyal and industrious, visionary and flawed. He hated his father for failing to find or hold a job, and he wound up supporting his entire family. He endured the reflexive anti-Semitism of the era (Edison would bemoan the Jews' "almost supernatural business instincts"), though his films were not untainted by boilerplate racism.
Life, ever unfair, had its way with the fantastic Mr. Fox. Yet Krefft reminds us, in this big, brassy production of a book, of his grand legacy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Damsker, Matt. "William Fox, the original movie mogul." USA Today, 27 Dec. 2017, p. 01D. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520627727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d58fe025. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A520627727
Book World: The man who saved movies from Thomas Edison's monopoly
Chris Yogerst
The Washington Post. (Dec. 5, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Chris Yogerst
The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox
By Vanda Krefft
Harper. 944 pp. $40
---
The Hollywood studios that cultivated the golden age of movies almost never got off the ground. Blame Thomas Edison. The great inventor fought to secure royalties from anyone using a film projector, which ultimately crushed many exhibitors. But one industry pioneer fought back. He was William Fox, who used much of his own money to take down Edison's Motion Picture Patents Co. (often referred to as "The Trust") and to secure freedom for film exhibitors to operate without legal harassment.
If not for Fox, Edison's Trust would certainly have delayed the growth of movies.
Frequently passed over as just a footnote in mainstream cinema history, Fox deserves a place among the giants who founded what we call Hollywood. And now he gets that place in Vanda Krefft's new biography, "The Man Who Made the Movies." With a combination of astute archival research and personal stories from Fox's niece, Angela Fox Dunn, Krefft weaves a tale that will engage amateur movie enthusiasts and film historians.
Like his peer moguls, Fox was a Jewish emigre who came from nothing and had big dreams. Unlike many of his peers, Fox was unequivocally loyal to his wife and often credited his success on her unwavering emotional support. Fox was one of the first in New York City to pursue movies as a business, beginning with film exhibition in 1904. His only major competitor during those early years was Marcus Loew, who would eventually own the iconic MGM studio.
As Krefft explains, those early days were tough because, while movies were interesting as a new medium, they did not have a bankable audience. Fox had to lure newcomers into a room with a carnival act to get them in front of a screen. Once inside, audiences would marvel at the moving images.
But Fox also had to battle the negative social stature of movies. For many cultural elitists, the movies were a place for criminals and degenerates. With steadfast faith in the future, Fox opened a 600-seat theater in Brooklyn. He continued to buy or rent property to open movie theaters around Manhattan on a scale unrivaled by his peers, thanks to influential New York politician "Big Tim" Sullivan, his underwriter and investor. In 1911, Fox opened the Riverside with 1,800 seats and in 1912 opened the Audubon, a 3,000-seat movie palace that ran an entire city block and came complete with a roof garden, ballroom and 25 stores. By 1913, Fox owned theaters in Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey and New England.
As the medium grew, Fox organized the Motion Picture Association (MPA) to protect theater owners from Edison's patent attorneys. Without the MPA, Krefft explains, there would have been no MGM, Paramount, Universal or Warner Bros. Taking down Edison's Trust in 1915 changed film history forever but left Fox in a dicey financial situation. However, Fox was able to secure investors, save his assets and move from exhibition into production with the Fox Film Corp. Among his earliest feature films, "A Fool There Was" (1915) starred Theda Bara, one of cinema's first sex symbols.
Krefft chronicles the significant shift that came about at the end of 1915, when Fox sent employees to Los Angeles to helm the Fox West Coast studio. By 1916, 80 percent of all movies were made in Southern California. Fox's West Coast studio was responsible for many important silent films, including "A Daughter of the Gods" (1916) - an epic that trumped "Birth of a Nation" (1915) in scale and budget but is largely forgotten today because no print survives. The next film, "Cleopatra" (1917), was a star vehicle for Bara and an advertising project for the famed "Father of Public Relations" Edward Bernays.
While Fox was fortunate to have vaulted one of cinema's first starlets to fame, Krefft argues that the mogul was more interested in housing great directors. John Ford completed "The Iron Horse" (1924) and "3 Bad Men" (1926) with Fox. The studio also brought in the celebrated F.W. Murnau, famous for directing "Nosferatu" (1922) in Germany. The Fox studio was also home to the rising talents of Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks and Allan Dwan.
Always looking for a new investment, Fox was one of the first major moguls to invest in sound technology. While Warner Bros. substantiated the sale of talking movies with its sound-on-disk format, Fox's venture into sound-on-film, Movietone, would ultimately become the industry standard. (Murnau's critically acclaimed "Sunrise" [1927] would be an early user of Movietone.)
After a horrible car accident coupled with the economic collapse of 1929, Fox was unable to keep Fox Film Corp., Fox Theaters and Fox News (a newsreel outfit that is now Rupert Murdoch's Fox News). In what became possibly the largest legal fiasco in U.S. history, Fox was forced to sell the controlling share of his company while facing several lawsuits, constant threats of receivership and angry creditors. He went down swinging, lobbing lawsuits in every direction to keep hold of something in the film industry and solidifying his reputation as a cold, greedy business executive.
Krefft's history gives us the whole story, one that shows us the tenacity of a titan instead of the bitter caricature left by his final years. Coupling expert scholarship and the tight prose of a seasoned journalist, "The Man Who Made the Movies" provides an overdue addition to film history. Krefft captures both the culture of the origins of cinema as a business and the many fascinating personalities at play within the narrative. No longer Hollywood's forgotten pioneer, William Fox now has the history he deserves.
---
Yogerst is the author of "From the Headlines to Hollywood: The Birth and Boom of Warner Bros."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Yogerst, Chris. "Book World: The man who saved movies from Thomas Edison's monopoly." Washington Post, 5 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517510926/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=53ecaaa4. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517510926
A Look At The Man Who Started 21st Century Fox
Born: 1879 in Tulchva, Hungary
Died: May 08, 1952 in New York, New York, United States
Other Names: Fried, Wilhelm
Nationality: American
Occupation: Movie producer
All Things Considered. 2017.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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HOST: ROBERT SIEGEL
ROBERT SIEGEL: The Walt Disney Company is planning to buy much of 21st Century Fox, the entertainment giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family, for $52 billion. The purchase does not include Fox News, and it still needs approval of regulators. The sale of 21st Century Fox, which used to be 20th Century Fox, to Disney raises this question. We know who Walt Disney was, and we know what the 20th century was. So who was Fox? Well, for the answer to that question, we turn to Vanda Krefft, who's the author of a new biography "The Man Who Made The Movies: The Meteoric Rise And Tragic Fall Of William Fox." Welcome to the program.
VANDA KREFFT: Thank you very much, Robert.
SIEGEL: Who was William Fox?
KREFFT: William Fox was the founder of the Fox Film Corporation, which was the forerunner of 20th Century Fox. And he founded Fox Film in 1915.
SIEGEL: Tell us a little bit about him. His family had been named Fuchs. They're Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Is that right? And the name Fox came along with entry into the U.S.
KREFFT: Yes, that's correct. The family came over in 1879. And William Fox was the eldest son. He was at that point only 9 months old. So he was raised entirely in the United States on the Lower East Side of New York in really horrible conditions in the slums. But William Fox was extremely ambitious from an early age. He always saw himself as doing something great. Initially he was in the clothing business. And then he was frustrated by the lack of opportunity to rise to the very top in that industry, and that led him into the fledgling motion picture industry.
SIEGEL: So what was the moment that inspired this man in the garment business in New York to go into what had to have been a fledgling industry of movies?
KREFFT: Well, he was walking along 14th Street in New York City and saw crowds forming outside the Automatic Vaudeville Company, which was an arcade with various amusement machines. And he thought, well, that looks like a good sideline business. And that was the moment when he decided to go into the entertainment business.
SIEGEL: So he becomes very successful. He makes successful and famous movies. That's the meteoric rise part of his life. What's the tragic fall part?
KREFFT: Oh, the tragic fall is very sad. The tragic fall - in 1929, he put himself at risk in trying to merge with Loew's Incorporated, the parent company of MGM. And in that ensuing chaos following the stock market crash, he lost control of his - of both his companies, both Fox Film and Fox Theaters.
SIEGEL: I'm curious. You know, I've heard over many years stories about Louis B. Mayer or Samuel Goldwyn. I hadn't heard of William Fox. I mean, is he a peculiarly little-known character, or is this just a hole in my knowledge?
KREFFT: No, no, no, no. I think very, very few people have heard of him. You know, people have heard of course of the Fox Studio. But when I would mention William Fox, people would say, well, who's that? And then I would have to say, well, you know, the Fox Studio. And then, oh, OK, I didn't realize that there was a person. And in film history, he just tends to be - if he shows up at all, he shows up really in a minor way. And this was shocking to me because when I investigated his life and his contributions and his activities, I came to believe he was the most significant of all the studio founders.
SIEGEL: Vanda Krefft, who wrote a biography of William Fox, "The Man Who Made The Movies," thank you very much for talking with us.
KREFFT: Thank you very much, Robert.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Look At The Man Who Started 21st Century Fox." All Things Considered, 14 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520339440/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=87dfd8bd. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A520339440
Krefft, Vanda: THE MAN WHO MADE
THE MOVIES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Krefft, Vanda THE MAN WHO MADE THE MOVIES Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $40.00
11, 28 ISBN: 978-0-06-113606-1
A biography of the silent film-era producer and theater entrepreneur whose name lives on through the major
studio he founded.In her ambitious first book, former magazine and newspaper journalist Krefft aims to
resurrect the reputation of the pioneering though largely forgotten studio mogul William Fox (1879-1952),
whose background story is similar to those of many of the founding fathers of film: tirelessly driven men
whose families emigrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century. Their stories, including Fox's, were
vividly recounted in Neil Gabler's An Empire of Their Own (1988). However, unlike many of his
Hollywood contemporaries, Fox would maintain his residence in New York, and his contributions were
encapsulated within the silent film era. Yet his achievements were significant. He built a multimillion-dollar
empire of luxury movie theaters beginning with one small theater in Brooklyn. As a studio head, he had the
vision to leverage several new revenue outlets, including the foreign market. He launched the careers of
early stars such as Theda Bara and Tom Mix and was responsible for producing a number of highly
regarded films, including F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927). In 1929, he suffered a series of disastrous events,
beginning with a car accident that summer and the Wall Street crash, which derailed his attempt to merge
Fox theaters with Loews releasing company. This would contribute to his losing control of the Fox Film
Corporation, leading his career and personal fortune into a downward spiral. Krefft provides an in-depth
overview of the early film industry and a lucid assessment of Fox's role in advancing the technology, art,
and business of making films. Though her end goal is ultimately achieved, this hefty narrative is weighed
down by excessive details surrounding her subject's financial dealings. Yet Fox the man remains somewhat
elusive. The author's writing lacks the storytelling verve that a more seasoned film historian like David
Thomson brings to his work. An insightful and solidly documented though often ponderous history of the
early days of cinema--of primary interest to film scholars.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Krefft, Vanda: THE MAN WHO MADE THE MOVIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217546/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=57a239db. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217546
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524511117293 2/4
The Man Who Made the Movies: The
Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William
Fox
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p18+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox. By Vanda Krefft. Nov.
2017. 944p. Harper, $40 (9780061136061). 791.43.
A man who grew up in "appalling poverty," with minimal education, claws his way up the power ladder to
become one of the giants of Hollywood; then he buys a large stake in a rival company using borrowed
money, only to have the Great Depression tear his life and career into shreds. William Fox is the man, the
founder-owner of Fox Film, the third-largest studio in the early days of Hollywood, and in 1929 he bought a
substantial number of shares in the Loews cinema chain, which also happened to own MGM, Hollywood's
second-biggest studio. The son of an Hungarian immigrant, Fox was a bit of a dreamer, but he was
determined to make a success of himself, parlaying an investment in a small movie theater in 1904 into
ownership of a major studio. He also, by fighting an antitrust lawsuit, laid the groundwork for the studio
system. That this inventive, indefatigable man ended his career in defeat is a real downer, but the book is
not. It's a celebration of Fox's spirit, his determination, and his lasting impact on the motion-picture
industry.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Pitt, David. "The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox."
Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 18+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=20b12b2b.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776076
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524511117293 3/4
The Man Who Made the Movies: The
Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William
Fox
Publishers Weekly.
264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p80.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall
of William Fox
Vanda Krefft. Harper, $40 (944p) ISBN 978-006-113606-1
Journalist Krefft's huge, dense, yet captivating biography highlights the early Hollywood mogul whose
name long out lived his legend. Unlike Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner, William Fox was effectively out of
the movie business by the 1930s, leaving only his name on the company that would soon merge with
Twentieth Century Pictures. While the story of his fall from grace is dramatic, his rise is just as fascinating.
A Jewish immigrant from Hungary, he scrapped his way up in New York, eventually opening one of the
first movie theaters in Brooklyn in 1904, when the new craze seemed likely to be a bursting bubble. Instead,
Fox's gamble paid off, and subsequent successes enabled him to found the Fox Film Corp. in 1915. Like
many of his contemporaries, he built his empire on both production and distribution, and his attempt to take
over the Loew's theater chain led to an antitrust battle. Krefft seems to have uncovered nearly every fact or
story about Fox extant. (Was it a sword swallower or a coin manipulator who attracted customers to Fox's
first theater? With no way to know, Krefft gives us both versions.) Whether Krefft is describing how Fox
built his studio, ushered in the talkies, or weathered a litany of troubles--bankruptcy, jail time for trying to
bribe a judge, and poor health--in his later years, her attention to detail makes for gripping storytelling.
(Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox." Publishers Weekly,
4 Sept. 2017, p. 80. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468117/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=679a1923. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468117
Framing Our World: On Vanda Krefft’s “The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox”
By Dan Friedman
106 0 0
MARCH 15, 2018
TODAY, SCREENS SHAPE the world. How that came to be is, in part, the subject of Vanda Krefft’s magisterial The Man Who Made the Movies. More specifically, the subject is William Fox, the Hungarian-Jewish founder of the Fox movie and TV empire. Krefft is fascinated by the construction of the cinema and the central father-son psychodrama that drove Fox to achieve what he did. In a book that mostly eschews speculation, she insists on Fox’s contempt for his immigrant father Michael, who held on to romantic views of the old country and blamed his failure on his adopted home.
But there is more to Fox’s story than a family drama. We live in an era when the Fox cinema company is being sold to Disney for over $50 billion, and when Fox News reaches through the screen to shape the thoughts of a president. Krefft presents William Fox as a great immigrant success eventually crushed by the machinations of Wall Street finance; it seems a missed opportunity not to delve deeper into his legacy in the present day.
¤
Krefft tells the story of Fox, the founder of Fox Theaters and Fox Film Corporation (from which came the merged Twentieth Century Fox), in exhaustive detail. By her account, Fox was central to the development of American film art as well as the American movie industry. Pioneered in its recognizable form by the Lumière Brothers in the 1890s and superseded by the internet in the 21st century, film was the quintessential art form of the 20th century. But its ascent was not assured.
Fox’s emergence from poverty on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to become one of the world’s most important movie moguls is inspiring. Through a series of jobs in the garment industry, he began providing for his family as a young teen, before finding his way into entertainment. From an investment in slot machine arcades he stumbled into the nascent world of cinema, surviving wrangles with the corrupt politics of Tammany Hall and the more established players in the world of movies.
Krefft’s thesis is that, over decades, and unlike other cinema titans, Fox established and maintained control of his company, never ceding it to the banks, and was deeply involved in both the production and distribution of his films. He made money from movies but also did much more. From editing scripts to choosing actors; from the use of nationwide marketing campaigns to the standardization and installation of sound reproduction technology; and from choosing movie theater locations to the details of their interior designs, it was Fox, more than any other single human in the first half of the 20th century, who determined what movies you saw and how you saw them. This meant that his influence on both movies and the movie industry was vast.
Other moguls might have endured longer or made more money, but none were as deeply involved with the construction of the movie industry as we know it. Examples include making Theda Bara Hollywood’s first “vamp,” producing many of John Ford’s early Westerns, and making it a maxim that movie theaters — previously viewed as tawdry venues — should always be as luxurious as possible.
The power of his achievement is evidenced in part by absence — more precisely, by our inability to imagine the movie-making and -going experiences in a radically different way. Obviously it wasn’t Fox alone who made movies the way they are, and the tale of his fall is testament to his limitations, but it’s also difficult to overestimate his influence on our current ways of seeing.
The tragedy of Fox’s final, abject loss of control to bigger financial players — partly as a result of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, well beyond his control — meant that the technical, dramatic, and theatrical knowhow Fox had obtained through a quarter century of top-level experience was lost to a trade increasingly run by unscrupulous money men, disinterested in art or truth. Though the two organizations bearing his name have only a tenuous connection to his actual work, they preserve the legacy of a man who shaped the silver screen.
And what is that legacy? More on that later.
¤
While Krefft could have done even more to address Fox’s significance for today — that is, why it matters to have been the man who made the movies — she does offer a penetrating psychological analysis of his motivations, namely, his repudiation of his father Michael in favor of his idealized mother:
Michael Fox had always blamed his failure to provide for his family on the difficulties that America set up against the immigrant outsider. Still, he seemed neither to acknowledge the burden he’d placed on his son nor to appreciate the rewards of his son’s efforts.
Michael Fox romanticized his past, claiming that he had left a picturesque Hungarian village in order to find a better future for his family. William despised this myth and was disgusted with his father’s personal ineffectiveness. Years later, Fox sent his news team to film Hungarian villages, and Krefft speculates that he told them to find the most squalid ones, to give the lie to his father’s self-pitying fantasy. “The most visible symbol of Fox’s conflict between past and present,” Krefft writes, “was his father”:
One evening at Fox Hall, Fox escorted his father and other family members into the estate’s private theater, with its red damask-upholstered Louis XV fauteuils lined up in rows, its tapestry-covered walls, and long red-velvet draperies. “Here is your village,” he told his father, indicating the screen. “Just as you left it.” As the gruesome images cascaded onto the screen, Michael Fox shrank into his chair. When the segment ended, he stood up and walked out silently. It was ruthless of Fox to shatter the one idea that, although a delusion, gave his father a sense of dignity. Ruthless, but effective — Michael Fox never again spoke to anyone in the family about his beloved homeland.
This brings us back to our present situation. For Fox himself, there may have been a clear distinction between features and newsreels, such as the Hungarian footage, but he was already using that footage for manipulative ends. While Krefft mentions the news project, she does not treat it with the same scrutiny as she does other parts of Fox’s empire. She records the creation of Fox News in October 11, 1919, as an attempt to redeem the studio’s flagging reputation and discusses how Fox put an exclusive interview with Mussolini on the same bill as his expensive and ambitious 1927 feature Sunrise (directed by F. W. Murnau) to try to boost viewers. But we aren’t shown Fox’s involvement in the news (or his deliberate lack of involvement, if that was the case) apart from the Hungarian village reel.
By 1929, when the finances began to come crashing down, Fox had already written quite a story for himself. It was “one over which Fox continually marveled,” Krefft tells us. “Twenty-five years before he had been a nobody. Now he was shaping American culture.” Krefft’s scholarship will provide an invaluable future resource for those more inclined to draw further conclusions, and she is convincing about Fox’s central role in “making the movies.” But the significance of the “man who made the movies” and shaped American culture lies well beyond 1929 or even May 8, 1952, the day of Fox’s death, where Krefft ends her story.
In fact, from Nixon’s television speech in September of that year, to Facebook’s effect on the 2016 presidential election, screens and the powerful — heavily manipulated and manipulative — stories they tell have been central to American and global politics. As 21st Century Fox discusses its proposed merger with Disney, one of the original “big six” studios will probably adopt a name that is synonymous with cartoonish fantasy. And Fox News, which for the past two decades has been building a spectacular bullshit mountain, has reached a pinnacle now that its particular brand of propa-tainment is taken as true by the president of the United States. William Fox shaped the screen, and today the fantasies of the screen are shaping our world.
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Decades ago, when I was teaching high school, I offered a compulsory seminar with a module called “Frames.” The idea was to explore context. We looked for objects and framed them with our attention. We took that attention and made photographs. We took those photographs and made large physical frames for them. We took those framed photographs and told stories about them. With each new framing, the object changed, the world around it changed, and, sometimes, the students changed.
When we talk about frames, we are not engaged in some abstract conversation about art or theory — we are talking about the crucial contexts that make content meaningful for our own life. Krefft’s point about Fox is that the “man who made the movies” was more involved in the framing of movies than any other. A sense of the larger issues at stake would have helped readers frame the importance of the facts Krefft lays out with such mastery.
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Dan Friedman is the executive editor of Forward.com, a contributing editor to 8by8Mag.com, and author of a new eBook about 1980s rock group Tears for Fears.