The Crack of Dawn #733

Volume #733

3/4/25

Newsletter #733

The Crack of Dawn

We see the name Fox on TV all the time: Fox Corporation, Fox News, Fox sports, Fox Network, etc. But where did the name Fox come from? It came from William Fox, formerly Wilhelm Fuchs, a Hungarian Jew who immigrated with his parents to America in 1879 when he was nine months old. William Fox formed the Fox Film Corp. in 1915 and was one of the earliest movie moguls. In 1915 Fox hired a popular stage actress named Theda Bara (whose real name was Theodosia Burr Goodman, and was of Jewish-Polish descent). Theda Bara’s first film for Fox (and one of Fox’s first films) was, A Fool There Was (1915), which was a big hit. In the film Bara played a sex-starved, man-hungry woman, which immediately earned her the sobriquet “The Vamp,” which at the time meant an aggressive, sexy woman. In 1917 Fox Films produced Cleopatra starring Theda Bara, one of the biggest moneymakers of the silent era, as well as one of the most famous lost films. There are no extant prints of Cleopatra (although there are still a few clips).

Fox Films immediately became one of the major Hollywood studios. In 1917 Fox hired the cowboy actor, Tom Mix, who became one of the most successful cowboy actors in silent films, along with William S. Hart and Broncho Billy Anderson (who was Jewish, and his real name was Maxwell Henry Aronson).

Warner Brothers is given the credit for making the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), which was only a part-talkie and used the utterly impractical Vitaphone sound system (which was a big shellac record attached to the projector with a chain). When Fox Films introduced the Movietone sound-on-film system, also in 1927, it quickly put Vitaphone out of business and became standard sound system for all films thereafter.

In 1929 William Fox was seriously injured in a car accident. Then came the stock market crash of 1929, which forced William Fox into a seven-year legal battle resulting in his personal bankruptcy, although he was still the head of Fox Films. Then, due to a hostile takeover of Fox Films in 1930 by Loew’s Incorporated (owner of MGM and headed by Nicholas Schenck), Fox Films was acquired in 1935 by the one-year-old studio, 20^th Century Pictures, run by Joseph Schenck (Nicholas Schenck’s brother) in partnership with the wunderkind, Darryl F. Zanuck, who had formerly been the head of production at both Universal and Warner Brothers (and was replaced by Irving Thalberg). The merger of 20^th Century Pictures and Fox Films became 20^th Century-Fox.

When William Fox’s bankruptcy hearing finally made it to court in 1936, Fox not only attempted to bribe the judge, but he also committed perjury. As a result, he ended up serving five years in prison. When he got out of prison in 1941, he was completely ruined. William Fox died penniless in 1952 at the age of 73. His death went totally unnoticed by the film industry; no one from Hollywood attended his funeral. He was interred at Salem Fields Cemetery, in Brooklyn, New York.

Even though William Fox was forgotten by Hollywood, his name lived on.

And that’s the way it was.