Background
Fox, William was born on January 1, 1879 in Tulchva, Hungary. Son of Michael and Anna (Freid) Fox. Of German Jewish stock, Fox (then named Fried) was brought to the United States from Hungary before his first birthday.
Wilhelm; Fuchs; Fuch
Fox, William was born on January 1, 1879 in Tulchva, Hungary. Son of Michael and Anna (Freid) Fox. Of German Jewish stock, Fox (then named Fried) was brought to the United States from Hungary before his first birthday.
Brought to the United States in infancy. At eleven years of age he left school to help support his family.
He worked in a variety of jobs, eventually putting his hard-earned savings into a business of his own, the Knickerbocker Cloth Examining and Shrinking Company. Attracted by the lucrative potential of the early motion pictures, Fox bought a penny arcade and by 1904 had opened his first nickelodeon in NewYork. Within a short time he owned a chain of cinemas, and, seeing the greater profits being made by his suppliers, founded the Greater New York Film Rental Company.
Fox was one of the most successful of the independent film distributors who fought the monopolistic practices of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which had a virtual stranglehold on the infant film industry untill 1912. He reacted to the attempt to buy him out for 75,000dollars by asking for ten times the amount and then by initiating a 6,000,000 dollars lawsuit for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Following his legal victory, he entered the field of film production in 1914. His new enterprise, the Box Office Attractions Film Rental Company, was soon better known under its new name, the Fox Film Corporation.
In 1916, Fox followed the westward trend of the American film industry and opened a studio in Hollywood. Among the stars he claimed as his own in the years he headed the studio were Theda Bara and Tom Mix. In the twenties, he imported the prestigious German director F. W. Murnau and helped develop homegrown talents like John Ford and Howard Hawks.
On the technical front, he was responsible for having the first Hollywood studio to adopt a sound-on-film system; in June 1927, nearly four months before the premiere of the so-called first talkie, Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer, the Fox Movietone newsreel allowed Americans to hear as well as see triumphant aviator Charles Lindbergh. The Grandeur 70 mm widescreen process was another, less successful, innovation he attempted to introduce.
Fox’s ambitions for monopoly of the market were, if anything, greater than those of the pioneer producers he had bested in court in 1912. In 1929, having acquired many film theaters, including the world’s largest, the Roxy, and the rights to American and foreign sound-on-film systems, he bought a controlling interest in Loew’s Inc., the parent company of MGM.
On the brink of becoming the most powerful of the movie moguls, several adverse events befell him in fairly rapid succession. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, endangered by the takeover, used his influence with the Hoover administration to have the Justice Department raise the antitrust issue, forcing Fox to relinquish his control of Loew’s. Fox himself was incapacitated for several months as the result of a serious automobile accident. His recovery coincided with the collapse of thestock market. The price of Fox shares fell from 119 dollars to one dollar. The enemies he had made during his rise to power were many and in 1930 he was ousted from his own company.
Following this, various legal proceedings were instituted against him and in 1936, the year after Darryl F. Zanuck’s 20th Century Productions had merged with the Fox Film Corporation, William Fox was declared bankrupt. In 1941 he was convicted of an attempt to bribe a judge at his bankruptcy hearing and he later spent six months in prison. A return to film-making never materialized, but those patents remaining to him after the protracted litigation left him well provided for in his last years.
Mason, K. of Philisophy.
Married Eva Leo, January 1, 1900.