The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Sep 1935)

gadgets of picture-making which, if he lives long enough, may make him the richest man in the world, richer than the Maharajah of Hyderabad, richer than Henry Ford, richer than the Rockefellers. Well may he muse with Moliere over "the beautiful eyes of my cashbox." But, before I tell that story, a word about Fox himself. I have known him for a good many years, ever since my cub reporter days on the New York Sun. And then the time came when I went to work for him, getting out a newsreel, scenario editor in Hollywood, assisting in production, beauty hunting in Europe, creating the reference library of the Hollywood studio that once was his, so I think I know the man fairly well. His intense dynamic energy is the most arresting thing about him — the ability to labor savagely and drive or inspire others to almost equal effort. And the second quality of the man is his fanatical devotion to a cause he thinks is just, the same burning fanaticism that clawed him through his long fight with the bankers and nearly cost him his life. And the third quality, as I see it, is real vision — the vision that enabled him to see a marvelous future in pictures at a time when not one business man in ten thousand could view them as anything but evanescent toys, the vision that inspired him to leap into sound and grab the patents I have been speaking of. Nowadays, Fox is a man of medium build, moderately fleshed between the days when he was the czar of his own company and hefted the scales at around a hundred and eighty-five and the days when they were stripping him, as Joseph was stripped, "of his coat of many colors," and he was worn down to a pale, haunted, phantom of a man, scaling under ahundred and fifty. His most familiar photograph of the old days showed him with a dome thinly plastered with black hair, a close-trimmed black mustache, quick, keen, inscrutable black eyes, which could twinkle with fun or glare with rage, and a perfectly sure and confident air. The thin strands of hair are gone now and so is the black mustache. The face is thinner, as well as the body. But the eyes, though disillusioned and perhaps a trifle sad, are scarcely less keen and expressive, and the air no less assured and confident. Such is William Fox at the age of fifty-four or thereabouts, launched once more on a career of which the climax is scarcely predictable. He was born in Hungary, in the village of Tulchva, was brought to this country at the age of nine, had some schooling until he was eleven and then, as a mere kid, went into business as a sort of jack of all trades. He sold stove blacking in the tenement houses of New York's East Side. He peddled candy in New York's Central Park. He worked for a clothing firm before he was knee high to a duck. He went into business for himself, the cloth-examining and shrinking business, and always he saved, saved, saved. Ruthless, relentless thrift— ruthless and relentless to himself — gained him the capital, $50,000, with which he plunged headlong into the amazing, glamorous industry which Thomas A. Edison had started with his kmetoscope, back in 1894. Started with a funny little motion picture hall in Brooklyn, Above: The street-urchins of New York's East Side were enthusiastic patrons of Fox's early "nickelodeons," which offered them bloodcurdling thrillers. Right: A photograph of Mr. Fox in the old days. a "shooting gallery," as they called it, expanded the original into a chain, made money hand over fist and then formed his own production and distributing company, The Box Office Attractions Film Rental Company, years later metamorphosed into Fox Film Corporation. There is no space here to go into the tale of his swift rise as a producer and marketer of motion pictures in the old silent days; of his famous victory over the "film trust" ; of a hundred other episodes of a career which reads like exciting fiction. He was a human snowball of prosperity, rolling along, gaining in bulk with every revolution, until the day came when his company flag flew in every country of the world, when he was one of the four or five dominant personalities of the industry, apparently impregnable, even unassailable. Nor is there time or need to enter here into the story of the adversity which fell upon him, his bitter fight with the bankers, the automobile accident which laid him low in a terrific financial crisis, and of his final retreat from the battlefield with $15,000,000 in hard cash, the promise of $3,000,000 more and the promise also of a $500,000 a year salary for five years. That is water long over the mill, and the only point that need be emphasized is that Bill Fox was the luckiest man in the world when he was shoved out of his own company with an enormous amount of cash and no bag to hold. This story is about those patents, those German, tri-Ergon patents on the photoelectric eye which transforms sound into light and light into sound, those patents which may make Fox a billionaire in very truth if the light holds out to burn. It was in 1925 that he became intensely interested in sound pictures and convinced himself that the silent pictures were dead on their feet. Promptly he acquired the Case patents and went to work on the new idea. Then he heard of the German invention, the patents which turned out to be the biggest plum which ever fell into his lap. Nobody realized their value in those days, eight or nine years ago. They were a gamble out-and-out, but Fox has always been a gambler, a terrific plunger under a hunch. And it was a terrific hunch that came to him now. The first sound pictures were made with the silenium cell and were a flop. Along came three Germans named Engl, Vogt and Massole. In 1919 they took (Please turn to page 50) Directly above and below are two scenes from Mr. Fox's greatest silent film. "Over the Hill" broke hearts and box-office records. An early movie theater — one of the kind that gave the immigrant boy his start. One sign reads, "Only Novelties Shown Here." Below: The vertical lines at the film's edge constitute the sound track, worth $780,000,000. The New Movie Magazine, January, 1935 23