The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Fox later explained that he hired Sheehan because they had become “close and fast friends.” The two had traveled together to Havana, Cuba, in January 1912, although it’s not clear what they were doing there. It was a curious friendship. They had almost nothing in common, especially not personal values. While Fox was at heart an old-fashioned moralist who believed in the family as the stabilizing center of society, Sheehan favored fast, flashy, disposable relationships with showgirls. He drank heavily, told off-color jokes, and had an oily personality—“a stogie-puffing leprechaun,” director Raoul Walsh would later comment.

  Sheehan also reveled in the dishonesty that Fox had endured so uncomfortably with Big Tim Sullivan. Since his newspaper days, Sheehan had been friendly with many of the city’s most notorious gangsters, and evidence strongly suggests that as Police Commissioner Waldo’s private secretary, he became a kingpin in a graft scheme that raked in an estimated $2.4 million annually. Reportedly, while Waldo looked the other way, Sheehan joined with three high-ranking uniformed police officials to centralize and systematize the previously random extortion practices of many on the force. Reportedly, gambling house and brothel owners who wanted to buy immunity from arrest now had to visit a lawyer named George C. Norton, who told influence-seekers that he represented Sheehan. In frequent contact with dangerous characters, Sheehan used as a bodyguard “an election gorilla . . . a heavy set fellow with a bulldog face.”

  Sheehan was even implicated in the July 16, 1912, murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal, the event that destroyed the last of Big Tim Sullivan’s sanity. Rosenthal had told friends that in testifying to the grand jury about police corruption, he intended to expose Sheehan, a one-time friend who had betrayed him by refusing to help after his gambling club was raided. On the night that Rosenthal died outside the Metropole Hotel, on Forty-Third Street, a large gray car very similar to the one driven by the gunmen showed up at Sheehan’s apartment building at 321 West Fifty-Fifth Street. Four men—there were four killers—rushed in and excitedly demanded to see Sheehan. Told by the elevator attendants that Sheehan had gone to visit his mother in Buffalo, the quartet became angry and fled.

  Although Sheehan was called before a city committee investigating police corruption in the fall of 1913, Tammany Hall circled the wagons, and he was never charged with any crime. Instead, under pressure, he and Waldo resigned, effective December 31, 1913. Sheehan didn’t miss a day’s pay. On January 1, 1914, he started work at BOA, which came into existence that day.

  Sheehan now drew $100 a week, a significant boost from his $75-a-week Police Department paycheck and more even than Fox, who would take only $1,000 for the first year. Sheehan had admitted beforehand that he didn’t know anything about the film business and had seen only a few films. “That’s all right, Winnie,” Fox replied. “I’ll send you down some literature.” A day or so later, a small truck delivered a large bundle of documents to Sheehan’s office at Police Department headquarters.

  As mystifying as these events may seem, they actually make sense. Rumors circulated that Sheehan, who paid less than sixty-five dollars a month for his three-room bachelor apartment and didn’t own a car, had invested much of his Police Department loot in Fox’s entertainment businesses and that when he joined Box Office Attraction, he brought along more cash. Fox, for his part, desperately needed BOA to succeed: it was the lifeboat that would carry him over to the independent film camp and give him and his theaters a future in case the government’s antitrust lawsuit against the MPPC failed. Fox also needed a politically shrewd ally. He had just lost his two protectors, now that Big Tim Sullivan was dead and former Justice Department prosecutor Grosvenor was cashing in at his new job on Wall Street. Altogether, Winnie Sheehan probably was the best available candidate for a right-hand-man.

  As for the idea that Sheehan might have taken part in the plot to kill Herman Rosenthal, Fox refused to believe it. If necessary, he said, he would spend $1 million to defend Sheehan.

  If neither Fox nor Sheehan knew much about making movies, somebody was going to have to. Fox chose J. Gordon Edwards, the forty-six-year-old former St. Louis stage director whom he had hired in 1910 to run the Academy of Music’s theatrical company and who, over the course of his career, had directed more than five hundred plays. In the summer of 1914, Fox sent Edwards to learn about filmmaking in Europe, then considered the center of movie artistry. Nothing is known about Edwards’s activities overseas—and very little more about Edwards himself.* Born in Montreal and educated at a Canadian military academy, with a tall, slender figure and a dignified yet gentle “prime ministerial” manner, he had started out as a stage actor in New York. He rarely gave interviews, and when he did, he invariably talked about others rather than himself. A friend commented that Edwards “wanted to be left in the background.”

  Upon Edwards’s return from Europe after the outbreak of war, Fox assigned him to direct Box Office Attraction’s first production, an adaptation of the 1907 best-selling novel Life’s Shop Window, about a young wife and mother who, feeling neglected by her businessman husband, runs away with an unscrupulous adventurer. Having bought the novel’s movie rights for $500, Fox allocated a budget of less than $6,000 and sent Edwards and actors Claire Whitney and Stuart Holmes (who would become one of Fox’s favorite screen villains) to make the entire five-reel movie at a rented “little bit of a studio” in Staten Island. Money was so tight that assistant cameraman Yeatman C. Alley had to double as the caterer, with an allowance of only thirty cents per player to provide a lunch of a sandwich, a piece of pie, and a cup of milk or coffee. If he overspent, Alley recalled, “there was the devil to pay when the expense accounts were turned in.” Too busy to visit the set, Fox watched the rushes every day in his office and took a strong hand in shaping the screen story.

  Releasing the movie on November 2, 1914, he touted Life’s Shop Window as a “masterpiece of picturization.”* Reviewers, the few who noticed, disagreed. Nearly everything was wrong, they said. Scenes didn’t make sense due to “faulty direction” and inept editing, photography was blurry, titles were “mutilated and distorted,” the story had no zip, and the musical accompaniment was “unbelievably poor . . . consisting of a low monotonous wail at times verging on the discordant.” Even the promotion was bad, consisting of “false advertising and misleading posters.” (Looking beyond all those flaws, Moving Picture World deemed the movie “excellent,” possibly because Fox was a major advertiser.)

  The movie flopped. Fox opened it with an afternoon showing at his three-thousand-seat Audubon Theatre at 165th and Broadway. He later admitted, “I remember the manager calling me up and telling me what a vast audience we had for the matinee. Later in the afternoon he called me up to tell me that the people were all walking out.” Although Fox tried to salvage his investment by advertising it to exhibitors as a New York sensation—“one of the biggest hits of the year and a sure-fire money-maker”—patrons around the country weren’t fooled.

  Fox recognized his mistake and resolved never to make it again. He had bought a racy novel but then, in his zeal for wholesome family entertainment, had “moralized” all the life out of it. “Unfortunately, we attracted the people who had read the novel,” he commented. “It taught me that when we pictured a book, we should stick close to the text of it. It taught me not to buy a play or book and just use the title of it and misrepresent it to the people.”

  Fox barreled ahead. He started production of his second movie, The Walls of Jericho, in early October 1914, and amid the burgeoning film industry in then-pastoral northern New Jersey, he leased two prestigious facilities: Pathé Frères’ former U.S. studio, which was a remodeled cash register factory in Bound Brook, and the state-of-the-art Willat Studio in Fort Lee. Later that month, just as Life’s Shop Window began to meet its dismal reception, Fox announced that he had acquired movie rights to “fifty of the biggest of the dramatic successes the stage has ever known” along with the rights to several best-selling books. By the end of Novembe
r 1914, he had five directors on staff and contracts with a long slate of Broadway stars, including William Farnum, Charles Richman, Edmund Breese, Wilton Lackaye, Dorothy Donnelly, Edward José, and Robert Edeson. By early December 1914, he had opened fifteen BOA distribution offices nationwide, all with projection rooms so that theater owners could view films before renting them.

  Although most of Fox’s first-year releases were entirely forgettable, one has literally become a national treasure. In November 1914, Fox acquired the rights to a one-reel, five-minute animated film about a gentle, playful dinosaur named Gertie in prehistoric times. Gertie’s creator, Hearst newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay, had used the film in his highly popular vaudeville stage act: dressed in a tuxedo and holding a whip, he would stand in front of a movie screen and interact with Gertie’s projected image. Among his tricks, McCay pretended to toss an apple toward the screen just before Gertie caught a cartoon version of it.

  Unfortunately, McCay lacked one important fan: his boss. When the show opened in Chicago in early February 1914, William Randolph Hearst objected to his employee’s moonlighting. Ordering McCay back to his desk, Hearst forced the cartoonist to sign a new contract restricting his stage appearances to the Greater New York area. The shy, diminutive McCay didn’t argue. A mostly self-taught artist, he had worked in a sawmill as a boy and began his creative career making colored woodcuts for traveling shows and painting street signs and theatrical posters. He had no business sense, he said, only “an absolute craving to draw pictures all the time.”

  So might have ended Gertie, for which McCay had personally done every one of the ten thousand drawings. Fox, however, seized the opportunity that Hearst had discarded. He offered to make a movie version of McCay’s stage act and paid to shoot another seven minutes of live-action scenes to bookend the original footage.

  In the opening sequence of Gertie the Dinosaur, McCay and several friends are out for a “joyride” when a flat tire sidelines them in front of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. They enter—thanks to Sheehan’s political influence, this was the first time the museum’s directors had ever allowed movie cameras inside—and view a dinosaur skeleton some seventy feet long and twenty feet high. McCay bets one friend that he can make the dinosaur come to life. After six months of work, at a dinner meeting of the group, he displays the results, a cartoon.

  The drawings, still charming despite their simplicity and the passing of many decades, portray Gertie as a joyful, childlike character who laughs, cries, eats rocks and trees, swings Jumbo the elephant around by his tail, and dances on her hind legs. At the end of the animation, a cartoon version of McCay, tuxedoed and carrying a whip, appears and announces via an intertitle, “Gertie will now show that she isn’t afraid of me and take me for a ride.” Gertie helps him onto her back, where he stands waving his whip in the air and bowing while she ambles out of the frame. Then, in the closing live-action scene, McCay’s friend pays for the dinner and all the guests stand and toast the cartoonist’s victory. To promote the twelve-minute movie’s release, on December 28, 1914, Fox advertised Gertie the Dinosaur as “the greatest comedy film ever made” and McCay as “the greatest cartoonist in the world.”

  Reviewers and audiences responded warmly, and the film became an animation landmark. As the first cartoon animal with a personality, Gertie helped inspire the work of Walt Disney, who credited McCay as a major influence. In 1991, the Library of Congress’s National Film Preservation Board chose Gertie the Dinosaur as one of twenty-five films to be added that year to the National Film Registry. The movie is also part of the film collection of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

  While Fox was gearing up to make movies during the summer of 1914, World War I began in Europe. Although militarily the United States remained neutral, the outbreak of war had devastating financial consequences that turned Fox’s plans upside down. “The Great War threatened the United States with financial disaster,” writes William L. Silber in When Washington Shut Down Wall Street. Fearful of war’s tremendous expense and desperate to preserve their wealth in the safest possible form, European investors rushed to sell off their American stocks and convert the proceeds to gold, as they were entitled to do under the gold standard. During the last week of July 1914, Europeans carried away more than $25 million in gold from the United States. Financial experts feared the trend would escalate into catastrophe. If European investors were to liquidate only 25 percent of their $4 billion in U.S. securities, they would entirely deplete the U.S. gold supply, destroy the gold standard, and ruin the country’s ability to repay foreign debts.

  Investors fled the market. On July 28, 1914, U.S. stock prices dropped 3.5 percent, and two days later they fell another 6 percent—the biggest one-day drop since March 14, 1907, which had presaged the “Bankers’ Panic” seven months later. To avoid another crisis, on the morning of July 31, 1914, U.S. Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo closed the New York Stock Exchange indefinitely. It would remain closed for more than four months. (Previously, the longest time the Stock Exchange had shut down was ten days, during the Panic of 1873.)

  More broadly, American exporters became terrified about their formerly lucrative markets in Europe. Who would buy American products, and how would they pay for them? How could goods be shipped safely? With German warships patrolling the seas—one claimed to have sunk thirteen British merchantmen during the first few weeks of war—most U.S. export trade halted. Nearly every industry suffered. Farmers experienced a downward spiral in prices because they couldn’t sell their surplus crops overseas; the copper, steel, meat, and oil industries saw their foreign trade paralyzed. Facing job losses, many Americans started hoarding money and stopped spending, causing a severe nationwide business depression.

  For Fox, the sky was falling. In the latter half of 1914, he was spending profusely to establish himself as a film producer, and he was also still shouldering the considerable expenses of legal action against the MPPC. He had personally invested $360,000 in BOA and didn’t have enough cash on hand to meet his creditors’ demands for payment. The company “needed more money and there was none available,” he recalled. Many banks had stopped lending altogether and some New York savings banks required depositors to give sixty days’ notice before withdrawing any amount greater than small change.

  Realizing that he was about to go under, Fox had to ask for help. Reluctantly, because it meant compromising his independence, he sent Sheehan across the Hudson River to the Newark, New Jersey, offices of investment bankers Eisele & King, which had helped finance Fox’s acquisition of studio space in northern New Jersey. Now, Fox asked Eisele & King to reorganize BOA with a new name and find outside investors to provide a cash infusion.

  Thus began the Fox Film Corporation, incorporated on February 1, 1915, in Albany, New York. The new company had a capitalization of $500,000, four-fifths of which came from a group of ten individual investors. Eisele & King partners John C. Eisele and Nathaniel King each bought in personally, and the other eight represented some of the biggest names in New Jersey financial and political circles. Leading the group with a $200,000 investment was Col. Anthony R. Kuser, president of the South Jersey Gas and Electric Lighting Company and a director of Prudential Life Insurance, founded by his wife’s late father. Another $50,000 each came from two men considered largely to run New Jersey: Uzal H. McCarter, the president and controlling stockholder of the state’s biggest bank, the Fidelity Trust Company, and his younger brother, Thomas N. McCarter, president of the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, a massive, statewide utility conglomerate. Fox himself contributed the remaining $100,000.

  Fox was virtually guaranteed control of Fox Film. In addition to a preferred stock distribution, investors received a total of 100,000 shares of “bonus” common stock. Only the bonus common stock had voting rights, and because those shares were divided fifty-fifty between Fox on the one hand and the ten investors on the other, Fox would need the support of only one other person t
o win any point. Five investors joined Fox Film’s board of directors, including John C. Eisele,* who also became Fox Film’s treasurer. No stock would be sold to the public, so there would be no pesky interference from uninformed, amateur investors.

  One question arises from this tidy arrangement. Given the shambling condition of the U.S. economy in early 1915, why were the ten conservative New Jersey financial titans willing to risk so much money on a highly speculative venture such as film production and, in particular, to back someone who had not yet made a hit movie? The answer may have been that the money didn’t seem real to them. On January 25, 1915, just seven days before Fox Film came into being, several of the largest investors participated in a $3 million windfall profit from a stock manipulation scheme they perpetrated through Prudential Life Insurance and Fidelity Trust, which they mutually controlled through interlocking directorates.*

  Although the partnership with the New Jersey investors allowed Fox to stay in business, he never stopped regretting it. At heart, he knew, these men really weren’t all that much different from Big Tim Sullivan and his cronies. They just lived in bigger houses and managed to operate on the right side of the law. Nearly two decades later, he would say, “If there had not been a war, there would not have been a share of that stock sold. There never would have been a public participation in it. It was because of the war in 1914 and because my creditors were pressing me that I was obliged to sell this [partial] interest.”

  A founder who had made his name by allying himself with the most corrupt political machine in American history, a general manager who had helped run a multimillion-dollar police graft scheme and who was probably involved in a murder plot, seed money from corporate stock manipulators—these were the people who launched the Fox Film Corporation. It wasn’t the way Fox wanted to do business, but it was, he believed, the way he had to do business. For the next fifteen years, he would work with superhuman energy to scrub away those stains and to create a clean, bright, new life for himself and his namesake company.