Screen Mirror (Jun 1930 - Mar 1931)

Harold B. Franklin, today President of Fox West Coast Theatres, one of the world’s greatest theatre circuits, began his career as an office boy for a theatrical producer. Attending school in his spare time, he graduated from College of the City of New York to become manager of a theatre while only nineteen years of age. engaged the actors, ten per cent commission for each week of the entire engagement. Harold, with a pocket full of shoestrings, and a heart full of hope . . . was the manager — as long as the natives kept coming. In one spot, Staten Island, the going was unusualy tough. Public utility companies just won’t take promises for electric light bills . . . sheriffs, with gruff voice and shiny badge — put up padlocks and shut off the current. But you can’t stop Harold . grocery store on the corner has kerosene oil and tallow candles ... the show must go on. It did . . . the natives got quite a kick out of it . . . the first few times . . . but, then — a bump on the shin is, after all, a bump on the shin, and who wants to find his seat, third row center on the aisle, in the dark? Well . . . That was that. All the time Old Lady Opportunity . was hanging around. Harold got a job ... a real one this time . . . salary every week; no dodging sheriffs ... no bouncing checks — manager of the Lafayette Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Not much money, but, what there was of it was good. • Experience teaches ... the years of strife, of always trying, that Franklin had gone thru as a kid declared dividends in Buffalo. Unconsciously, maybe, he kept up the same pace working for somebody else that carried him thru the lean years between office boy and manager. About this time Mike Shea, pioneer western New York showman, was building the first de luxe theatre outside of New York. He called it the Hippodrome . . . 4000 seats, vaudeville and movi's. Franklin moved in as manager. What any other showman did with other theatres Franklin did differently . . some claimed ... he did it better Anyway — the Hippodrome was a success ... a wallop ... a sock. Franklin got the credit nationally . . . thru trade paper and magazine — the East started to recognize the manager of Shea’s Hippodrome in Buffalo. Adolph Zukor, for instance .... just starting a national chain of movie houses. Zukor sent for Franklin . . . Franklin went to work. In a few years there were Paramount Theatres all over the country — but well tied together . . . cemented with system . . . linked with ideals — riveted with loyalty. Within a stone’s throw of the office where the punk kid, fresher than paint, was an office boy — Franklin built the Paramount Theatre ... a monument to man’s ambition ... a shrine consecrated to the art of the motion picture. We’re going fast now — this isn’t an eulogy nor a “poor boy makes good” story . . . it’s fact ... I did know him when . . . when he was an office boy and I was a billposter (that’s the lowdown name for advance agent with a melodrama) for Charles E. Blaney. • 1927 loomed . . . California ... a great string of movie houses called the West Coast Theatres . . . needed new ideas — fresh energy ... at least that’s what the bankers said. Franklin came out . . . to inject the serum. He did. Then it boomed over the country . . . “William Fox takes over the West Coast Theatres” He did. 1930 now . . . The original circuit that needed the injection . . . recovered and waxed strong. From a California institution only the circuit has leaped from Mexico to Canada . . . east to the Mississippi River. From eighty-odd theatres the string has grown well past 500. An ex-office boy . . . and a darn fresh one . . . did it, and did it well. Maybe Horatio Alger was right, and again — maybe Franklin has something that Disraeli had . . . maybe he can figure Robespierre somewhere back in the family tree . . . He’s got something . . . that’s a cinch . . . and me, who knew him when . . . to me, he’s just as tough as the president and general manager of Fox West Coast Theatres as when he was an office boy for Sam Harris — it’s just as tough to get past him.