Disney, having engulfed the movie division of Fox, is renaming its acquisition: 20th Century Fox will now be called 20th Century Studios. It’s hard to blame Disney’s executives for disconnecting the studio’s productions from the Murdoch-run company that spun it off, though it’s unfortunate that the move involves eliminating the reference to William Fox, when it’s precisely as the founder of a great studio that he entered history. (It would be especially appalling if Disney rewrote history and replaced the title cards on the older Fox movies that it acquired.)
William Fox’s story is no less extraordinary than the roster of films that he produced. His career was brief—he started as a movie-theatre owner in 1904, began producing films around 1915, and left the industry in 1930. In those fifteen years, he fostered the careers of several great directors, such as John Ford (who made dozens of silent films under Fox’s aegis in the nineteen-teens and twenties, such as “Just Pals,” “The Iron Horse,” and “Four Sons,” as well as a batch of talking pictures in that medium’s early days) and Frank Borzage (such films as “Lazy Bones” and “Seventh Heaven”). Fox launched the careers of Howard Hawks (with such silent films as “Fig Leaves” and “A Girl in Every Port”) and John Wayne (in Raoul Walsh’s “The Big Trail”); he produced the primordial New York gangster feature, Walsh’s “The Regeneration,” from 1915; he brought the revelatory German director F. W. Murnau to Hollywood for a series of films that includes “Sunrise,” which inevitably ranks high on critics’ lists (including my own) of the best films ever made. But, in 1930, Fox was ousted from the company that bore his name; a few years later, under new management, it was merged with Twentieth Century Pictures, and it has continued to make movies without him ever since. He died in obscurity in 1952.
Fox’s rise and fall is related in illuminating detail in a well-researched biography by Vanda Krefft, “The Man Who Made the Movies,” from 2017. But there’s another book that tells his story—a book from 1933—that told it first, and that does so in an idiosyncratic, radically modern form. It was written by one of the most famous and politically confrontational novelists of the time, Upton Sinclair—best known for “The Jungle,” a fictionalized exposé of the filthy and exploitative conditions of Chicago stockyards. The book, “Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox,” is a three-hundred-and-seventy-seven-page tome based principally on thirty-six days of interviews that Sinclair did with Fox, recorded by two stenographers and yielding—as the author says in his prologue—seven hundred and fifty-eight pages of typescript. (The book is readily available online.)
“Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox” is a sort of documentary film in book form—and its author knew it and built that idea into the text itself. He subtitled the book “A Feature Picture of Wall Street and High Finance in Twenty-nine Reels with Prologue and Epilogue,” and its table of contents calls the book’s chapters “reels.” (The book evokes a form of documentary that, oddly, didn’t exist at the time, the interview-film: no studio, in the early years of talking pictures, made movies centered on journalistic interviews done on its soundstages.) It’s a vividly peculiar book, one that ranges from the passionately engaging to the pathologically obsessive. Parts of it I would defy anyone but a historian to read at all, or anyone but a relative of Fox’s to read with pleasure.
Sinclair, of course, was one of the original muckraking authors, and he proudly lays claim to that motive in his prologue: just as he had revealed the underbelly of the meatpacking business in “The Jungle,” he sought, with the help of Fox, to reveal the squalid corruption of American finance and politics as seen in the big-business takedown of the Fox corporation. Sinclair was a Socialist (who’d run for governor of California on that ticket in 1926 and 1930), and he bares his motives throughout the book. What’s more, he was so motivated to divulge the story that he did so on his own dime, self-publishing the book and vowing to funnel any profits into providing libraries with sets of his own works.
Fox sought out the novelist to tell his story; Sinclair had no intention of fictionalizing it but decided to write a “fact story,” which would be based on Fox’s narration as well as accompanying documents—in effect, a literary documentary dominated by its subject’s first-person, directly quoted speaking voice. The irony of that premise is rooted in the cause of Fox’s problem, which Sinclair cites up front: the great shakeup in the movie industry that resulted from the transition from silent to talking pictures, and the major financial consequences of that technological advance.
The book’s twenty-nine “reels” run from Fox’s birth, in Hungary, in 1879, through his childhood as a hustling Jewish kid growing up in tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he arrived in infancy with his parents. His entrepreneurial nature was revealed early on, when, at the age of ten, he hired a group of children to sell candy on commission in Central Park. He dropped out of school at eleven and worked as a fabric cutter, had a short career as a comic actor, and opened his own fabric business. (Sinclair savors the practical details and odd anecdotes emerging from these various professions.) Around the turn of the twentieth century, he saw an Automat—an arcade, featuring coin amusements—and, in 1903, opened one of his own, in Brooklyn, and, soon thereafter, turned the upstairs rooms into a movie theatre. He then opened more theatres, and, in 1915, he began producing movies that he showed in his own chain of theatres. By the nineteen-twenties, Fox had extended his theatre chain nationwide and distributed his films internationally, too.
Technology is at the story’s center: early in his career, he successfully challenged, on antitrust grounds, film-equipment patent holders who were stifling movie exhibition and production by demanding enormous fees; facing competition from radio, starting in 1921, Fox “began to watch the experiments being tried with talking pictures” and invested heavily in developing the new format. In 1928, he anticipated the rise of television and responded by making theatres with huge, ninety-foot-wide screens (in effect, IMAX) and producing movies in the 70-mm. format that were meant to be shown on that scale (such as “The Big Trail”).
But, by that time, he had already sealed his fate. First, the rise of talking pictures required a major investment, both in the retooling of studios for production and in the installation of new equipment for theatres. Second, Fox sensed that the international market would be greatly diminished by talking pictures (he didn’t foresee dubbing) and, to compensate for the anticipated loss, he planned to buy out Loews, the movie-theatre company that also owned M-G-M. He wanted to cut duplicate staff and facilities, increasing his production and his profits. To do so, he needed to borrow fifty million dollars from an investment bank.
Meanwhile, Fox had to have his deal cleared by the federal government on antitrust grounds, which is how Herbert Hoover comes into the picture. Fox was a Republican (in national elections, but, he said, a Democrat locally in New York) and had been crucial to engineering Hoover’s nomination in 1928. Irony of ironies, Fox says that he told a banker and Hoover supporter to inform the candidate
