The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  There was another side to the story, though. Ease of entry into the movie exhibition business reflected a high degree of uncertainty about its future. In 1904, according to a government study, only about fifty thousand people nationwide attended the movies per day—0.06 percent of the total population of eighty-two million—and many observers believed that even this small bubble of enthusiasm would soon burst. Skeptics included Thomas Edison, who claimed credit for inventing the movie camera but who believed that the technology had “no very large practicable possibilities.”

  More to the point for Fox, the only previous attempt to operate a movie theater in Brooklyn had failed. In 1896, W. B. Hurd, who had bought the American rights to the movie projector invented by the Lyon-based Lumière Brothers, began showing motion pictures in a small converted store on Washington Street. Offering no chairs, no decorations, and no piano music, but charging twenty-five cents admission with no reduction for children, Hurd generated no great profit. When the landlord suddenly canceled his lease, he didn’t bother to find another location. Instead, he licensed a promoter to install Lumière technology in vaudeville theaters nationwide, and then gave up on the entertainment business to concentrate on his stock market investments. Since Hurd’s venture, evidently no one had tried to run another movie theater in Brooklyn.

  Ever the optimist, Fox persuaded his two business partners to let him temporarily close down 700 Broadway—the place never did get a name—and convert the second floor into a movie theater. After knocking out the interior walls of the upper floor, which had been designed as a residence, Fox installed a projector, a screen, and 146 seats. For musical accompaniment, he bought a thirty-dollar secondhand piano that had “tones like a tin pan.”

  On October 14, 1904, some five months after the first try, 700 Broadway reopened. “I was put down as the craziest man in the city,” Fox recalled. “ ‘Imagine,’ I heard on all sides, ‘a nut who thinks he can delude us into believing that pictures can be made to move.’ ”

  During the first week, the cynics seemed to be right. Customers still shunned the business. Fox, who already loved the movies, didn’t understand it. “I stood out in front of the place the whole first day, and while I was debating with myself as to what to do, a fellow with a great big western hat came along. He said, ‘What are you worrying about?’ I told him about the establishment and that I had the greater part of my fortune in this place.”

  The man in the western hat went upstairs to look at the theater, then reassured Fox that he could speedily fix the problem. “The next day[,] he came around and asked me if I had any preference as to ballyhoo man. He said he could get a coin manipulator, a sword swallower, or a fire-eater. I told him not to get a fire-eater because I had no fire insurance at that time.” Fox also didn’t want the sword swallower—too dangerous—and hired only the coin manipulator, who turned out to be a short man wearing a black satin suit and a false mustache and goatee. “This man would stand on the stair of the show house and do his tricks, and end up with telling the people that he would finish his performance upstairs. In a week we had such a crowd we had to have police to keep the crowd away.”

  That was one version of the story. In another, the man who approached him was a laid-off Barnum and Bailey circus worker—his job had been to feed the lions and tigers—and he offered to provide a sword swallower for two dollars a night, a fire-eater for three dollars a night, or a coin manipulator who would work for all he could pick from the crowd. “I asked him to get one of each and to make sure that the other two would watch the coin manipulator,” Fox said in a 1927 telling. “The sword swallower did swallow a sword . . . Soon a crowd gathered, and then he said he would conclude his performance upstairs. It was two flights up, and the crowd followed him up.”

  Coin manipulator or sword swallower, whichever one persuaded customers to tromp up the stairs of 700 Broadway, they did—in droves. Suddenly everything changed for Fox. Money flowed in. Finally, he had gotten it right. Movies were wonderful, and when the first set of adventurers bounded back down the stairs of 700 Broadway, they were ready to do his advertising for him. There really was a nickel’s worth of entertainment up there, they told their friends, and their friends told their friends. Soon, although Fox had built a rear stairway to the theater so that exiting patrons would have to walk past the arcade machines to get back onto the street, he realized the penny slot machines weren’t worth the trouble and had them pulled out.

  How much money did 700 Broadway take in? That was another shape-shifting tale. Once, Fox counted his first year’s profit as $40,000 and then as $75,000. Another time, he said that this “little hole-in-the-wall” earned $50,000 in six months; and another time, $250,000 in less than five years. To Fox, facts were important, but a good story always mattered more.

  Whatever the precise amount of the profit, it was a lot, and Fox used as much as possible to acquire more properties. He had to work fast. Others, notably former furrier Marcus Loew, had gotten the same idea, and movie theaters were cropping up all over the city. In Manhattan alone, some two hundred nickelodeon licenses were issued in 1906, and small theaters were also opening in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. That year, the trade journal Views and Films Index reported that “it can safely be said that the cinematograph is now a permanent fixture in New York.” Some of the buildings that Fox took over were tenement houses, where fire regulations required him to evict the tenants and keep the upper floors vacant; he made a profit anyway.

  According to a former employee, “Fox was always a glutton for work. He used to come around to [one theater] at ten in the morning and he’d be in the box office until two the next morning. He was always busy doping out new schemes to improve his shows . . .” Fox rarely had time to watch the movies he showed. “My job was figuring out how far my money would go before someone else got the same idea.”

  Not everyone shared his vision. One day, Edmund Rothchild, one of Fox’s former bosses from the garment industry, stopped by to see the show. He pleaded with Fox to come to his senses. “Is this a business?” Rothchild chided. “Giving pictures of people shooting off guns and murdering each other? All this foolishness about people falling down and breaking dishes! Is this a business?” He urged Fox to get out while he could, and even offered him his old job back.

  Fox could brush off such criticism, but his partners Brill and Loeb began to have second thoughts. Motion picture theaters had a disreputable aura among the middle and upper classes, due largely to frequent newspaper articles portraying them as dens of sin and schools for crime.* Even venerable social welfare organizations joined in the attack. Reporting on “the pernicious moving-picture abomination,” the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children claimed, “The child who steals her first 5 cents from home [to attend a motion picture show] is already on the high road to destruction as surely as the simple girl who yields to the ‘kind’ strange man who takes her to the pictures. The records of the Children’s Court sadly prove that this new form of entertainment has gone far to blast the lives of girls and has led many boys to criminal careers. Boys have admitted to the Judges that their skillful house-breaking was suggested by these pictures.” In a New York World interview, the society’s chief investigator, Vincent Pisarro, described nickelodeon managers as “an exceedingly low type . . . made up of the offscouring of the theatrical business, racetrack touts, cheap gamblers, and even of ex-criminals.” Brill and Loeb told Fox they regretted having gone into business with him. Their wives were being socially ostracized, and people treated them as if they were “running a house of prostitution or a gin mill.”

  Fox bought them out; all they wanted back was the amount of their original investment. Continuing alone, he did well enough that in February 1908 he decided to expand by acquiring the sixteen-hundred-seat former Unique Theater at 194 Grand Street in Brooklyn. The place was tottering on the brink of ruin, having been shut down permanently in January 1904 after fire department officials assessed it as a potential
firetrap. “When I went to visit the premises it was winter,” Fox recalled. “The agent said for me to bring along a pair of rubber boots when we made this inspection. I did, and we walked in snow and water up to the knees. The roof was open to the skies. It was the most terrible looking sight I ever saw.”

  Still, the Unique was the best large property he could afford. In fact, to manage the $20,000 purchase price for the land and the building, he took back Brill and Loeb as partners, giving them a 50 percent share. They had asked to come back; they, or their wives, had changed their minds about the movies. Throughout his career, Fox would display a remarkable ability to forgive those who disappointed him in business, regarding their lapses less as personal affronts than as the result of limited vision. If they came to their senses, he was usually willing to give people another chance. For him, very few rifts were unbridgeable.

  Renaming the building the Comedy Theater, Fox began extensive repairs and launched a public relations campaign to refurbish the image of the theater, which had been nicknamed “the Bum” by area residents because of all the social cast-offs who congregated near its crumbling walls. To “assure the people of the neighborhood that this was to be a theater for nice people,” Fox mailed out ten weekly newsletters with progress updates to ten thousand nearby residents.

  When the Comedy opened in April 1908, Fox presented a then-unusual “split pea” program combining vaudeville acts with movies and notched ticket prices up to ten cents because “it was in our eyes a real palace.” It was the right formula for the time—the inclusion of live entertainment offset the dangers of an unpredictable supply of movies and helped transition larger audiences to screen entertainment. Fox and his partners soon paid off the mortgage and collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in dividends. Living modestly, Fox plowed most of his profits into more theaters.

  Although he usually didn’t have time to watch the movies, Fox went to his theaters to study his customers. Typically, they were non-English-speaking immigrants, often from Poland or Russia or some other Slavic country, who had no native-language theater in New York City. Most came in after working hours. They wanted diversion, Fox realized, not exactly to escape the dismal conditions of their lives, but to glimpse brighter possibilities elsewhere. They also wanted inclusion, a public social experience that connoted kinship with strangers, to replace the isolation of their differentness. Most important, Fox realized, movie patrons aspired upward. As a result, while many other exhibitors ran shabby theaters that matched the circumstances of their patrons’ lives, Fox aimed to touch their dreams. He aggressively catered to a family audience and strove to provide a visible sense of order along with a cheerful ambiance. “I tried to make my theatres as well ventilated, well-managed and as clean as possible. It meant twenty-four hours work out of the twenty-four but it was worth it.” As managers, he usually hired men with a good voice who could encourage audiences to sing along with the “illustrated songs” that were often shown before the movie and during reel changes.*

  “A bit of good luck . . . without it I don’t know how anybody succeeds very well,” Fox later observed. Indeed, he benefited from his time and place in history and especially from the launch of a new mass-market industry. Early twentieth century America, with its rapid modernization, welcomed bold, creative ambition, while broad social and economic changes (the persistent urban influx, rising wages, shorter working hours, the emerging concept of leisure time) coalesced to deliver eager customers to Fox’s theaters. Some of his patrons didn’t even care about entertainment. They were shoppers and mothers with children who just wanted to leave the street and sit down for a while. As Moving Picture World observed in 1907, after equipping a movie theater with the basics, all that the average owner had to do was “open the doors, start the phonograph [for musical accompaniment] and carry the money to the bank. The public does the rest.”

  Inevitably, a backlash occurred. As much as American culture was radically transforming, the entrenched ruling class still believed itself entitled—obligated, even—to defend traditional standards and values. At stake, the old guard believed, was the very foundation of American life. To them, this strange new practice of moviegoing, caught up as it was with so many other elemental societal changes, seemed ready to destroy the old order.

  Part of the problem was the suddenness of the change, the voraciousness with which movies were consuming both real estate and leisure time. From those early days in 1904, when barely anyone had seen a motion picture, the new medium had exploded in popularity. By 1907, the United States had three to five thousand nickelodeon theaters drawing more than two million patrons per day, and more small, cheap movie theaters were opening every week, “multiplying faster than guinea pigs,” according to Moving Picture World. There had been no time to study the impact of movies, no opportunity to consider the social costs of these gaudy, giddy amusements.

  The composition of the audience presented another cause for alarm. The poor, the uneducated, unassimilated foreigners, and children: these were society’s most unpredictable and most unstable elements, and they were also the groups to whom the movies appealed most powerfully. The malevolent influences of movies, whatever exactly they might be, would therefore strike in the places most likely to induce social disorder. Among large groups of strangers packed together in the dark in movie theaters, even a spark of trouble could ignite panic. In April 1906, for instance, at the West End movie theater on 125th Street, a capacity crowd fell into “wild disorder” after one patron accidentally dropped his watch and accused the man next to him of stealing it. The second man seized the first by the throat; both began punching each other, causing women to scream at the top of their lungs and faint. Evidently assuming that a fire had broken out, the entire crowd dashed for the exits.

  And then there was the raucous sensory assault on public space. Visually, early movie theaters tended to shriek for attention with bright lights and loud decorations. Fox wasn’t the only exhibitor who used his sidewalk frontage for noisy come-on attractions. Many hired barkers with megaphones or set up phonographs outside. Others were even more inventive. In front of one small New York City movie theater, a man dressed in an Indian costume and war paint whooped and swung a tomahawk around, then pointed to nearby posters and motioned for the crowd to follow him through the entrance. Another exhibitor set a cage of monkeys near his front door. In formerly sedate neighborhoods, adjacent business owners became incensed by the disruption of their trade.

  By the early 1900s, New York had run out of patience with upheaval. In recent decades, the city had been hit with cataclysmic shifts in landscape and population, smashing the traditional sense of place. Between 1900 and 1907, the city’s population increased from 3.4 million to 4.2 million. Of the 1907 figure, about 37 percent were foreign born. “The city had the air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control,” observed Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of Presidents John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively, after visiting New York in November 1904.

  Anxious to stabilize the center, clergy members (mostly Protestant) took action. Initially they folded their objections against the movies into a general complaint about all public amusements operating on Sundays. New York State law had long prohibited any business or entertainment on the Christian Sabbath, but the regulation had so many holes in it that it was widely flouted even by staid organizations such as Carnegie Hall and the YMCA. Expressing the typical sentiment, Dr. John Wesley Hill, pastor of the Metropolitan Temple, railed, “Disregard for the Sabbath means national decrepitude and ruin. When the Sabbath goes down, the republic goes with it.” To fight for Sunday “blue” law enforcement, church leaders formed the Interdenominational Committee of the Clergy of Greater New York for the Suppression of Sunday Vaudeville, and mobilized other organizations, such as the Federation of Churches and Christian Organizations in New York City, where one honorary vice presid
ent was J. P. Morgan. On November 30, 1906, a group of leading Protestant ministers wrote to Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., demanding that he end all Sunday theatrical entertainments or risk losing his job.

  Movie theater owners watched in dread. The controversy was no mere philosophical issue. Sunday was their biggest revenue day because, with the average person’s work schedule still including hours on Saturday, it was the only day that most people had completely free. On Sundays, theater owners could fill seats from morning till night and make up for an otherwise bad week. For some, Sunday was the one day of the week that kept them in business.

  For the next year, through 1907, a series of skirmishes took place between New York City’s small movie theater owners and Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham, to whom McClellan had handed off the Sunday-closing issue. A former army engineer whose military career ended in 1904 at age forty-six when a derrick fell on him at a harbor works project, crushing his leg and necessitating amputation, Bingham had no sympathy for either movie exhibitors or the bulk of their patrons. He detested immigrants and regarded Jews, who constituted a large proportion of theater owners, as “burglars, firebugs, pickpockets, and highway robbers—when they have the courage.”* After Bingham ordered police officers to arrest anyone found working in a theater on a Sunday, most exhibitors shut their doors on the seventh day and hoped that someone would change the law.

  Fox decided to be that person. He had more at stake than just revenues from his nine theaters in Brooklyn and Manhattan and from his recently started distribution agency, the Greater New York Film Rental Company, which obtained movies from film producers and supplied them to theater owners. Movies were a place to dream and to build, and they were going to make his name. Swiftly, Fox helped organize the city’s small theater owners into the 110-member Moving Picture Association (MPA), with himself as the chairman of the executive committee. Then he maneuvered his lawyer, Gustavus Rogers, into the position of the MPA’s legal counsel.