The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  As evidence of the movie’s “sweetness and goodness,” Fox got full approval from the National Board of Review censorship agency, which he had consulted frequently during the editing process. Probably not coincidentally, it was in November 1916, just a few weeks after Daughter’s triumphant New York premiere, that the Board began to pressure Fox Film for a $400 monthly contribution to its “educational” fund. As further reinforcement of respectability, the studio arranged for President Woodrow Wilson and his wife to attend the movie’s Washington, DC, premiere at the Belasco Theatre on their first wedding anniversary. It was the first time Wilson had seen a movie in a public theater. He described the film as unusually beautiful.

  Reviews around the country were uneven. “A meaningless hodge podge of pseudo-allegorical absurdities as . . . in a nightmare or conceived in a madhouse,” groused the Boston Transcript. A staff reporter for the Tucson Daily Citizen walked out during the intermission because of the movie’s “lasciviousness.” Still, A Daughter of the Gods built up an impressive track record, playing forty weeks in New York, twenty-two weeks in Chicago, eighteen weeks in Philadelphia, and fourteen weeks in Boston. On the extravagant big-city road shows, Fox made a profit, after production and distribution expenses, of about $150,000. That was a disappointing figure in view of his massive investment, yet he had never meant to make his real money from the road shows. Their purpose was to show off the movie and enhance its value in wide release.

  While revenue figures aren’t available for the movie’s performance in regular movie theaters, it’s safe to assume they reached rich heights. Fox kept A Daughter of the Gods in circulation for two years, refusing to allow it into any theater that had fewer than a thousand seats or that charged less than a dollar as the top admission price. In the spring of 1917, A Daughter of the Gods began to travel the world. First it went to England, where it did well despite wartime conditions—the movie was the first ever reviewed by the London Times. Eventually, A Daughter of the Gods even went into the interior of China, thanks to a Chinese American entrepreneur who bought the rights from Fox in 1918 and planned to spend five years touring the largely non-electrified country with a custom-made dynamo* that ran off the engine of his truck.

  Triumph wasn’t enough for Fox. He had set aside his professional demeanor with Brenon. Instead of a boss, he had tried to be a friend, a mentor, and a father figure. He had loved Brenon and had told him so. Humiliated by the failure of their relationship, he had to see his former “dear boy” fail.

  Brenon had started Herbert Brenon Productions so confident of success. With partners Lewis J. Selznick, the founder and former general manager of World Film, and Stanley Mastbaum, owner of a prestigious chain of more than forty Philadelphia-area theaters, he had signed a five-year lease on the brand-new Ideal Studios and Laboratories, in Grantwood, New Jersey. In early August 1916, about a month after leaving Fox Film, he began work on the company’s debut production, an adaptation of the hit play War Brides, starring Russian stage actress Alla Nazimova, whom he had reportedly agreed to pay $30,000 for thirty days’ work. On the stage walls, Brenon tacked up a notice: “This studio means as much to the artist as the church does to the devout worshipper.”

  Hastily, Fox threw together The War Bride’s Secret, aiming to create confusion in the marketplace and siphon off Brenon’s audience. “A rotten trick,” Brenon’s former secretary Minola De Pass would write to Brenon decades later, “A grave blow to your first independent venture.” Again Brenon sued Fox, this time claiming copyright infringement of both the title and the story line, and asked the court to enjoin Fox from releasing The War Bride’s Secret.

  Again Brenon lost. A judge ruled that there was no evidence that Fox Film intended any deception. Furthermore, it wasn’t clear that titles could be copyrighted, and the two movie plots were substantially different. War Brides told the story of a young widow in an imaginary kingdom who kills herself and her unborn child to protest a new law requiring unmarried women to marry soldiers going off to war. Fox’s The War Bride’s Secret, which starred Theda Bara look-alike Virginia Pearson, was essentially a domestic drama about a young farm wife in Scotland struggling to cope with her greedy father’s demand that she marry a rich man after her beloved husband is reported as a battlefield casualty.

  That wasn’t enough for Fox. In early October 1916, only about a week before Brenon planned to start sending out publicity material in preparation for the November 1 opening of War Brides, Fox sued Brenon for $100,000. He claimed that Brenon was perpetrating fraud through his advertising campaign. In a slew of consumer press and trade publication ads, and on the masthead of his new company’s stationery, Brenon claimed credit not only for A Daughter of the Gods—“conceived, written, and produced solely by him,” one ad asserted—but also for all his other Fox movies. By listing the titles of the works along with the names of their stars, Fox alleged, Brenon was intentionally deceiving the public into thinking that he owned the rights to those movies and that he managed those actors.

  One hundred thousand dollars wasn’t all that Brenon stood to lose. On October 13, Fox got a temporary injunction prohibiting Brenon from publicizing his Fox Film credits. The director now faced the possibility of having to spend $90,000 to reprint all his promotional literature, including billboards and lobby exhibits, and to delay the opening of War Brides.

  Fox didn’t really want to ruin Brenon. He showed this when, in settlement talks, he quickly agreed to let Brenon take credit for writing and directing his Fox movies as long as he didn’t claim to have produced them. As a result, War Brides was able to open more or less on schedule, on November 12, 1916, at the Broadway Theatre at Forty-First and Broadway, just one block away from A Daughter of the Gods. Mainly, Fox seems to have wanted to abase Brenon to regain the ascendancy he regretted having given away.

  Brenon’s War Brides wasn’t a bad movie. The New York Herald deemed it greater than The Birth of a Nation, and the trade paper Wid’s Daily predicted a huge hit. Conversely, Fox’s The War Bride’s Secret wasn’t an especially good movie. “Old stuff,” critics said, unoriginal and slow moving. Still, Brenon’s movie foundered while Fox’s thrived. In addition to having a much larger marketing organization and far greater sales expertise, Fox had more accurately gauged public sentiment. Amid growing evidence that the United States would sooner or later join the war in Europe, Brenon’s movie argued that all wars are bad. By contrast, The War Bride’s Secret allowed that some wars are necessary, even noble, and it reassured audiences that families could be put back together afterward. The heroine’s presumed-dead husband returns home, and the young couple lives happily ever after.

  It got worse for Brenon. Weakened by the stress of the previous year and a half, he became critically ill with typhoid in January 1917. Then, after the United States declared war on April 6, 1917, federal authorities denounced War Brides as unpatriotic and urged state and local censors to ban it as harmful to recruitment efforts. In October, Brenon suffered an attack of appendicitis and required an operation.

  Somehow Brenon managed, despite all these troubles, to direct his next big production, The Fall of the Romanoffs. Reportedly, he spent $250,000 in the hope that it would become the definitive American movie about the Russian Revolution, then a topic of great interest in the United States. He had joined forces with a hotheaded, thirty-seven-year-old Russian émigré named Iliodor (actually, the former Sergei Trufanov), who had been a sidekick to the mad monk Rasputin and a rival for the favor of Czar Nicholas. After failing in his plot to murder Rasputin, Iliodor repudiated the whole Romanoff clan, became a revolutionary, and in June 1916, fearing for his life, hotfooted it to the United States, where he pitched his story to the movies and threw himself into the bargain as an actor. Given Iliodor’s darkly handsome looks and his proven ability to charm a crowd, Brenon cast him in a lead role as the saintly “Father Iliodor,” who saves Mother Russia from the drunk, illiterate Rasputin and the corrupt, oppressive czar.

  Fox sti
ll didn’t want Brenon to get back up on his feet. Assigning J. Gordon Edwards to direct from a script by Metropolitan Opera stage director Richard Ordynski, Fox cast Theda Bara in The Rose of Blood (1917), as a Russian peasant girl whose unhappy marriage to a despotic prince causes her to become a revolutionary; it was a film complete with bomb plots, poisoned wine, and sultry sex appeal. Naturally, Fox and Brenon weren’t the only ones to recognize Russian history’s dramatic potential. William A. Brady, head of the World Film Corporation, beat both of them to market with Rasputin, the Black Monk, which opened in New York on September 12, 1917, eleven days ahead of Brenon’s movie* and about two months before Fox’s.

  Fox’s movie proved the most successful of the three Russian Revolution movies. He had simplified history for mass consumption, representing it as a maelstrom of human passions in which the sex instinct reigned supreme. One ad for The Rose of Blood asked, “Did a woman totter this Russian throne? Ask Theda Bara, she tells everything in this picture.” Some exhibitors paid record fees to book The Rose of Blood, as much as $1,000 for a three-day run in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Overshadowed, Brenon’s movie languished. It was sabotage, Brenon’s secretary, Minola De Pass, decided. She never would forgive Fox.

  After the failure of The Fall of the Romanoffs, Herbert Brenon Productions fell apart. It wasn’t all Fox’s fault. Brenon was a terrible businessman, far too absorbed in creative matters to keep an eye out for all the industry’s fast shufflers. Calamitously, he had hired Alexander Beyfuss, a young, handsome, seemingly capable go-getter, as his business manager. Beyfuss promptly overextended the company’s financial commitments, and when the bills came due, he disappeared.* Narrowly avoiding bankruptcy, Brenon dissolved his company in early 1918.

  It felt like “the END of everything,” Brenon would recall. Curiously, although Fox helped derail Brenon’s career at what might have been its greatest height, the director ultimately refused to blame his former friend and employer. The rift had been his fault, too, Brenon acknowledged in a letter to his nephew in 1951, seven years before his death in Los Angeles. He had been arrogant about his work, dictatorial on the set, uncooperative with authority. And others had helped precipitate his fall, he believed: “underlings and the jealous sycophants” such as Abraham Carlos had alienated Fox from him in order to enhance their own power.

  Over the years, Brenon forgave Fox. He missed their friendship. It had been the real thing, Brenon realized, complicated but also full of genuine affection. No one else had ever had such faith in him or had given to him so generously. Toward the end of his life, too late to do any good, Brenon acknowledged his true feelings. Always, Brenon wrote to his nephew, “I DID respect and even loved Fox.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “The Greatest Showman on Earth”

  I can assure you that my greatest ambition has always been to make better pictures than anyone else . . .

  —WILLIAM FOX, 1917

  For all the anguish involved in producing A Daughter of the Gods, Fox remained proud of the result and confident about film’s potential as an art form. The latter point would eventually seem obvious, but it wasn’t at all during the 1910s, when movies were still widely regarded as lightweight entertainment with no lasting value. Financial incentives encouraged that view. Pure silver was one of the main ingredients of motion picture film, and by mid-1918, demand for raw film had escalated so rapidly that the Eastman Kodak Company was churning through more than two tons of silver weekly. Thrifty producers could recapture some of their investment by sending played-out movies off to the industry’s equivalent of the glue factory, the silver recovery vats. Preservation, by contrast, involved considerable expense and risk because of flammability; as yet, attempts to develop fire-resistant film stock had yielded only film so brittle that it easily cracked and broke into pieces.

  To Fox, movies were alive with the breath of dreams. In December 1916, he pledged $1 million to build an independent movie museum to house a permanent collection of the world’s best films. At personal expense, he commissioned prominent Philadelphia architect John Frederick Harbeson, who drew up plans for a large fortress-like structure made of New England granite and ornamented with huge bronze doors, a sculptural frieze depicting great historic events around the world, and broad steps flanked by two granite sphinxes. Fox planned that any producer would be able to submit movies with historic value, and each year an expert board of trustees—scientists, historians, and various public leaders—would choose ten for inclusion in the museum’s collection. To prevent decomposition, movies would be stored in airtight containers in fireproof vaults. A sixty-by-one-hundred-foot projection room would host public screenings, and a library would collect film literature. This would have been the first American institution to recognize the artistic value of film and it would have ensured the preservation of important early American movies, less than 20 percent of which are estimated to have survived into the twenty-first century.

  Envisioning Central Park as the ideal location, Fox sent a representative to New York City park commissioner George Cabot Ward, who quickly rejected the idea. The city had far too little green space as it was, Ward said, with only one public park acre per 1,745 residents compared to, for instance, Philadelphia, which had one park acre per 206 residents. In Washington, DC, federal lawmakers also refused to support the museum. The New York Times called the plan “preposterous.” Fox dropped the idea. Not until 1935, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art founded its Film Library, would film gain its first official recognition as an art form.

  Fox couldn’t wait to get where he was going. By early 1917, as Fox Film prepared to enter its third year of business, the New York headquarters had expanded to occupy four full floors of the Leavitt Building on Forty-Sixth Street, and twenty-three sales offices dotted the United States and Canada. In California, having quickly outgrown the one-acre property it had rented in Edendale in December 1915 for thirty employees, the company now had a total of thirty acres staffed by five hundred employees. The main West Coast studio occupied eighteen acres in the center of Hollywood on both sides of Western Avenue, just below Sunset Boulevard. Other property included a ranch in Calabasas. For 1917, Fox announced, the studio would increase production from fifty-two to seventy feature films; and henceforth, his two biggest stars, Theda Bara and William Farnum, would appear only in “super de luxe” productions costing between $100,000 and $300,000.

  Although the fight over A Daughter of the Gods had brought out the worst of Fox’s competitive instincts, that ravening desire to cripple director Herbert Brenon’s independent career, it had simultaneously intensified the loftier side of his ambition. He would outdo himself. He had to. He didn’t yet have the lasting monument to himself that he craved. In no small part because of all those early months Fox had spent extolling him as a genius, critics had credited the success of A Daughter of the Gods almost entirely to Brenon.

  In early 1917, abandoning plans to conjure five or six more movies out of the 213 reels of leftover footage from A Daughter of the Gods, Fox began work on another gigantic production that he hoped would establish him as the greatest showman on earth.

  “Colossal, stupendous, spectacular,” ads for Theda Bara’s Cleopatra (1917) would proclaim. “The most sumptuous film production on Earth.” Although Fox Film promotional copy often ran headlong into extremes—almost every movie was earth shattering in one way or another—in this case, the claim was accurate.

  Fox’s decision to make Cleopatra almost certainly evolved from the necessity of having Theda Bara star in his next extravaganza. A follow-up to A Daughter of the Gods with Annette Kellermann was out of the question. Stung by Brenon’s scathing comments about her talent and eager to return to her popular vaudeville diving act, where she could earn $3,000 a week, Kellermann turned down Fox’s offer of a five-picture deal. She would go on to make only one more Fox movie, the unremarkable Queen of the Sea (1918).

  Cleopatra was perfect for Theda. By now, Fox understood that she was never going t
o be the actress that he, or she, had hoped. Skilled in a very narrow range of characterization, with a face that the camera loved but only from certain angles and only in a blaze of passion, she had developed no discernible versatility throughout the eighteen movies she’d made for Fox by the end of 1916. As one critic complained, “It is not sufficient to arch the eyebrows and look devilish.” Sometimes, even the generally tolerant audience at Fox’s Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street burst out laughing at her performances.

  The more she tried to break through her limitations, the worse she seemed to get. “I believe I have beheld her worst picture,” quipped syndicated columnist “Mae Tinee” about Theda’s early 1917 release, Her Greatest Love, in which Theda played an ingénue who wore short, schoolgirl dresses. “If you ever in your life saw anything funnier than Theda Bara so garbed, rolling around her beblackened eyes in horror at the sight of her harridanlike mother lighting a cigaret or Theda Bara in supposed misery at the sight of a one piece bathing suit . . . I miss my guess.”

  The story of Cleopatra would not only exploit Theda’s spurious Egyptian heritage and further develop her vamp persona, but also provide a broad exotic canvas to offset her tendency to overact. One could always look instead at the scenery and the costumes, or rather the lack of costumes. Alexandria’s proximity to the equator hadn’t escaped Fox’s attention.

  If A Daughter of the Gods had gone awry because of inadequate forethought, Fox learned from the experience. Especially for its time, Cleopatra was an extraordinarily well planned movie. Officially, about four months went into preproduction, with little left to the vagaries of creative intuition as they had been with Brenon. Fox directly supervised a team of researchers who studied historical records and artifacts to ensure the accuracy of sets and costumes. Screenwriter Adrian Johnson compiled a 211-page script, using sources such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Plutarch’s Lives, Sardou’s 1890 play Cleopatra, H. Rider Haggard’s novel Cleopatra, and British Egyptologist Arthur Weigall’s 1914 book The Life and Times of Cleopatra. Theda herself made frequent visits to study the Ancient Egypt collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.