by Vanda Krefft
Underneath Fox’s pragmatic manipulation lay genuine conviction. He seems truly to have been shocked by the scowling hubbub, insisting that he never had any interest in appealing to audiences’ “sordid curiosity” and that he, too, fully disapproved of “salacious” sex dramas. Indeed, in real life he had refused to pick up easy money by providing inducements to sexual promiscuity. At his Audubon Theatre entertainment complex on Broadway at 165th Street, the huge, second-floor Danse d’Hiver dance hall served no liquor even though most competitive venues did. “I don’t want that kind of money,” Fox said. “I don’t want to cater to the class that regard [sic] alcoholic drinks as a necessary dancing inspiration.” Further to his “clean policy,” about a dozen chaperones and floor managers (middle-aged women and husky men) in plainclothes routinely monitored crowds as large as fifteen hundred for inappropriate behavior. As one newspaper reporter noticed, the slightest trace of suggestive dancing immediately provoked a hushed but firm warning of “Please be careful. That is not allowed.” One young man who had casually draped his arm across the back of a young woman’s chair was discreetly advised to remove it.
That was the way people ought to behave, Fox believed, but his movies would not turn a blind eye to the way people actually did behave. As a July 1915 trade publication ad explained, “[O]ur pictures deal with Life. The Fox features don’t adopt a sugar-and-water attitude towards the facts of existence. They are real pictures of real men and women, not pictures of sweet-scented substitutes for human beings, behaving as no mortal beings ever did or ever will. That is why William Fox features are so immensely popular. Because they are real, and sincere.”
Real and sincere and also “pre-eminently moral.” Peppering his movies with biblical quotes such as “The wages of sin is death,” Fox vigorously defended even Theda’s movies. These, he claimed, were updated versions of classic tragedy, with the modern siren enchanting the hapless male so that “he forgets, like the old Greek voyagers, wife, child, home, everything but her and her charms. And, as in the old Greek dramas, the victim is carried swiftly, surely, relentlessly, pitilessly to a tragic end.” That might have been overdoing it, but Fox truly believed that contemporary audiences wanted hard truth rather than fluffy fantasy.
Motion pictures were growing up, he understood. His detractors—those sore-head old-timers who “can’t make the money they used to with any old catch-penny feature since William Fox entered the field and showed them what real pictures are”—ought to wake up. As he put it, “That dull rumbling in the distance is the Doomsday bell sounding the knell to big profits on junk pictures.”
Another challenge during the feature film’s formative phase was the way that a story’s meaning might change through adaptation from another medium. Who was watching and the way they were watching mattered. As Fox discovered, mass-market interpretation could override creative intent to the point of violence.
He really meant no harm by The Nigger (1915). In fact, he meant to do some good. Recognizing that racial prejudice was “a modern problem that must be faced fairly and squarely by the people of the United States,” Fox hoped the movie would function as a plea for racial harmony. He had good reason to think so. The source material was a play of the same name written by Harvard graduate Edward Sheldon for the New Theater, the so-called “millionaire’s playhouse” on Central Park, where it had been named the best American play for 1909. Among that theater’s patrons, The Nigger was considered to have a progressive message. Even NAACP president W. E. B. Du Bois found the play unobjectionable.
Although Fox’s The Nigger has been lost, reviews indicate the movie version followed the text of the play closely. Assigning William Farnum to the lead role, Fox sent the production to film near Augusta, Georgia, with a reported budget of $100,000. No one considered whether material that had passed easily by a privileged, culturally homogenous elite might prompt offense among patrons with more diverse life experiences—or whether people who had paid coins rather than dollar bills for their tickets, and who were looking at images of people on a screen rather than real people on a stage, might feel less constrained in expressing negative reactions. In fact, the only people Fox expected to nettle were Southern segregationists, and so the movie was filmed under the bland title The New Governor.
There was another way to view the story. Farnum played Philip Morrow, a law-and-order sheriff from an aristocratic background who becomes governor of a Southern state after a campaign financed by political boss and distillery owner Cliff Noyes. Soon after taking office, Morrow signs a Prohibition bill that he hopes will protect the Negro race from its own supposed weak nature. This enrages Noyes, who sells his cheap whiskey primarily to blacks. Noyes gets revenge by telling Morrow the alleged terrible truth about his, Morrow’s, heritage. Ads for the movie quoted the confrontation:
PHIL: Are you tryin’ to tell me with a straight face, Cliff, that my gran’mothah was a niggra?
NOYES: What I’m tellin’ you is not only that yo’ gran’mothah was a niggah, Phil, but that yo’a niggah too. Now you’ve got it square between the eyes!
According to ads, Morrow is “crushed, but not broken by the fearful revelation of his ‘nigger’ ancestry,” and “faces the blow manfully.” After confessing “the taint” to his fiancée, he demonstrates “heroic self sacrifice” by breaking off their engagement and resigning from the governorship in order to “devote the remainder of his life to the uplifting of the negro.” The movie included scenes of a “fiendish, mouth-frothing” black man about to attack a white girl to commit “the usual crime,” presumably rape, and then getting chased by bloodhounds. (Reports varied as to whether the subsequent lynching was actually shown.) Other scenes depicted mobs of drunken whites and blacks killing each other in race riots.
Protests over the noxious title preceded the movie’s New York City opening, causing Fox to bill it as The New Governor when it premiered at the five-thousand-seat Hippodrome theater on March 29, 1915. However, when the studio sent the movie out into nationwide release shortly afterward, some copies were titled The Nigger.
Across the country, rage erupted kaleidoscopically. Everyone, it seemed, found a different reason to detest the movie. In Augusta, where some fifty thousand residents had taken part in the film’s mob scenes and the mayor had appeared in a small part on the assumption that it was a different movie, many felt betrayed and, although the idea soon withered, talked about trying to prevent exhibition of The Nigger throughout the South.
Nationwide, African Americans were appalled by the movie’s premise that black skin denoted inferiority. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, a near-riot occurred when a black clergyman and the editor of a black newspaper stood up in the crowded Proctor’s East Jersey Street theater and asked the audience to leave. The theater manager called the police, who arrested the two protesters. In Portland, Maine, where the movie played at the Keith’s Theatre, a black minister, Rev. W. H. Lamar, charged that both the title and the plot were offensive and likely to incite racial prejudice. Protests also occurred in towns as varied as Anaconda, Montana; Newport, Rhode Island; Gary, Indiana; St. Paul, Minnesota; and New Bedford, Massachusetts. Fearing violence, some communities banned the movie. Most notable was the entire state of Ohio, where, in mid-April 1915, after The Nigger opened in Cleveland, Governor Frank B. Willis revoked the movie’s permit statewide. Pittsburgh also banned the movie. “I pray to God I may never gaze on such again,” the Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, wrote about the movie. “There is nothing but brutality, crime and race-hatred displayed throughout the play. This play is intended to teach the weak minded of the white race to keep alive the acts of the old ante-bellum days.”
Was it really that bad? Surprisingly, the NAACP didn’t think so. National secretary Mary Childs Nerney described the movie, even with the title The Nigger, as “sympathetic to the colored man” because “Motive for all crimes laid to drink and not to race.” Besides, the NAACP had bigger fish to fry. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nati
on was in theaters at the same time, and the organization chose to focus its protests on that “really outrageous” movie instead.
Fox was stunned by the uproar over The Nigger. He let the movie play itself out and then quietly put it back on the shelf. He didn’t give the matter much more thought. He had a future to build.
Overall, though, these early years were an exciting time. Experimenting, improvising, innovating, Fox and his colleagues were helping to invent the American feature film. There were no rules.
Once, behind in his release schedule, Fox bought a pile of scrapped film footage from another production company and spliced the scenes together into an entirely new story. “The aunts became grandmothers and the grandmothers became friends, and . . . where we were missing anything, we just substituted a title,” Fox recalled. “It was previewed, and the trade papers all agreed that it was a fine picture. It was a success.” (The movie was probably A Woman’s Honor, directed by Roland West and starring Josie Collins, which Fox purchased in the spring of 1916 from his friend Marcus Loew.)
Another time, after an unexpected blizzard dumped snow onto the Spanish set of a planned Theda Bara movie, director Raoul Walsh suggested, “Well, Mr. Fox, I think that if we put a few domes on the set, we can change it to a Russian picture.” Fox agreed, and after Walsh made the movie in less than a month, the sales force arrived in New York for previews. Walsh recalled, “Some fellows from Cincinnati were saying, ‘Gee, we advertised a Spanish picture. Where the hell is it?’ ”
With his business still on a manageable scale, Fox could get directly involved in production. He was particularly good at solving problems with actors because, although he had failed as a stage performer, “I knew the actor’s habits, his ideals, what he hoped to accomplish.” Rather than just issue orders, he usually reached for a more imaginative solution. On the set of Princess Romanoff (1915), star Nance O’Neil refused to shriek in horror when her character learns that her fiancé murdered her beloved husband ten years before. O’Neil insisted that the woman would show no emotion because she cared only about the future. After director Frank Powell spent more than a week shooting the scene unsuccessfully, Fox went to the set and had a few words with the leading man. On the next take, the actor stared hard at O’Neil and swore, “You damned rotter, you!” O’Neil shrieked, went into a frenzy, and fainted onto the ground. When she revived, she was furious at the trick and stormed off. No matter. That was the last scene to be filmed, and critics praised O’Neil’s acting in it.
A short while later, director J. Gordon Edwards asked Fox to take him off The Blindness of Devotion, because he didn’t know how to tell Robert Mantell, the renowned Shakespearean stage actor, that his very noticeable limp was ruining the look of the picture. Don’t worry, Fox reassured Edwards, he’d think of something. The next morning, Fox advised Edwards to stage a fight scene in a club where Mantell’s character got shot in the leg. “Mantell did not know what the purpose was of this shooting, but of course he was told he was shot in the leg and would have to limp. Of course, he did it very naturally,” Fox recalled.
A more complicated challenge occurred with vaudeville star Valeska Suratt, who was filming her movie debut in Fox’s The Soul of Broadway in 1915. Fox had negotiated for months for her services and agreed to pay her a handsome salary. Then Suratt and director Herbert Brenon argued about his instructions for a scene in which her character sees a former boyfriend doing hard labor. “She was supposed to be happy at the idea that he was out there chopping those stones into small pieces,” Fox recalled. “Miss Suratt turned around and said, ‘Herbert, dear, I can do anything but sneer at a prisoner. I will laugh at him, but I will not sneer.’ ”
Brenon held firm, so Suratt walked off the set. Having been forewarned about the actress’s headstrong nature, Fox had taken precautions. With the movie 90 percent complete, he announced to the press that The Soul of Broadway was ready for release.
“What is this rubbish about the picture being published?” Suratt demanded, barging into Fox’s office.
“Mr. Brenon is very angry and he has decided that the play is complete without any more scenes,” Fox replied, deflecting responsibility for the choice that had actually been his. Then, reminding her of a scene in which she rolled down a flight of stairs, he explained, “Of course, you got up and walked away, but the camera only photographed you as you lay on the ground and so we entitled it, ‘And poor Suratt died from this fall.’ ” Suratt got the joke. Throwing her umbrella and handbag into the air, she started laughing and agreed to return to shoot a real ending. “From then on, she was one of the most obedient performers we had.”
In his whole life, Fox said years later, he’d enjoyed nothing more than producing these early movies.
CHAPTER 13
A Daughter of the Gods (1916)
Even people who knew him well often described Fox’s confidence as imperturbable. It wasn’t. It bothered him to be considered a sex merchant, a corrupter of morals, and a danger to small children.
Essential though money was, Fox realized, it would never be enough. As profits flowed in, he thought about the purpose of his life and the nature of the legacy he would leave. Did he want, he asked himself, to live mainly for monetary gain, only to end up “buried under an imposing pile of stone”? No, he decided. He wanted to make movies that would earn his name “the respect and attention of educated, well-bred people for generations to come.” He wanted to develop screen artists on a par with writers such as Galsworthy, Maeterlinck, Dreiser, Wharton, and Gorki.
This was not to say, however, that Fox was prepared to give up his winning formula of sex and violence. For one thing, he still didn’t see what was wrong with those movies. For another, their profits kept Fox Film going. But now he could afford to take chances—the sort of chances that wouldn’t really be chances if he knew his audience as well as he believed he did.
Fox defined the challenge primarily in terms of scale and splendor. To win respectability, he would do as all the great American entrepreneurs had done: impose his vision spectacularly on the landscape of his industry. His great movies would be long movies, lavish-looking movies, magnificently presented movies. They would deal with big, important subjects and would win over even the skeptics who refused to admit that film could ever be an art.
Again, timing benefited Fox. He had entered the industry when it was willing to welcome anyone with a surfeit of energy and enthusiasm, and now the restlessly expanding American economy wanted the movies to be big. By the mid-1910s, movies had become the nation’s fifth-largest industry (after agriculture, transportation, oil, and steel), representing a $500 million investment and drawing a weekly audience of ten million Americans—one-tenth of the population. Nineteen fifteen was the pivotal year when the industry turned away from shorter, two- and three-reel movies and began concentrating on five-reel features that ran at least an hour long.
Nineteen fifteen was also the year of the first great American blockbuster. Premiering in Los Angeles in February 1915 and in New York City the following month, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour The Birth of a Nation became an extraordinary success. Despite its two-dollar top ticket price and relentless controversy over its demeaning depiction of African Americans, the movie packed theaters coast to coast, month after month. “How soon will we have another Birth of a Nation? That little inquiry can be heard rather generally these days,” reported the trade paper Wid’s Daily in November 1915. “There is not so much doubt any more about there being another coming: it is more of a question, ‘Who will do it?’ ”
Actually, for Fox that wasn’t much of a question. He was already at work answering it. To prepare the market, in the spring of 1915 he had ordered all his branch offices not to rent movies to any exhibitor who charged less than ten cents a ticket. As Winnie Sheehan explained, why should a studio invest in a great movie “only to make it possible for a person to walk into a theater by laying down a nickel and see that picture put on the screen to the accompanim
ent of an orchestra of twelve pieces and a $40,000 pipe organ? It’s all out of reason.”
By the summer of 1915, Fox had begun preproduction on the first of a series of spectacular movies that would trample the industry’s existing boundaries and confirm the “event” movie as an integral element of American moviemaking. He went about it with his characteristic practicality. First, he jotted down a list of the five most successful movies to date, identifying their biggest dramatic moments and most thrilling sequences. Next, he estimated each movie’s budget. Then, studying the information, he resolved to produce a movie that would outdo all of them in cost and scale. His movie, he declared, would be “so gigantic, so immense in scope,” that for at least the next ten years, no one would dare try to rival it.