The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Even as he reached upward for the next rung on the social ladder, Fox could be happy right where he was.

  CHAPTER 17

  “The Finest in Entertainment the World Over”

  A special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children, and the United States of America.

  —OTTO VON BISMARCK

  Fox’s ambitions for Fox Film were boundless: he wanted everyone everywhere to love his movies. Once again, history opened a door for him. In overseas markets, the war in Europe obliterated almost all competition for American film producers.

  Soon after the outbreak of fighting in the summer of 1914, most combatant nations shut down nonessential industries. France, which had led the field in pursuing international movie sales, stopped production immediately and resumed on only a limited basis in 1915. Spain also shuttered its studios. Initially, Italy stayed out of the conflict, and as a result, its film industry surged briefly; however, after that country took up arms in April 1915, it severely curtailed production. In Britain, movie production fluctuated throughout the war years, but the nation had already embraced American movies: by 1914, some 50 to 60 percent of movies shown there were American.

  On the other side of the battle lines, Germany actually expanded its film industry during the war years, with the number of production companies increasing from fewer than 30 to 250 between 1913 and 1919. Most important of the new studios was UFA, which began under government auspices. However, German film sales increased almost entirely within domestic borders. International business fell off steeply, even though Germany tried to hold on to its South American customers by shipping films through Spain and distributing them through German commercial travelers or giving them away for free to theaters.

  A few other countries were still exporting movies, but not competitively. Sweden, which remained neutral in the war, had only two directors turning out most of its internationally marketable work—Victor Sjöström (who would come to the United States as Victor Seastrom to work for Louis B. Mayer in the 1920s) and Mauritz Stiller (who would discover Greta Garbo and bring her to the United States in the 1920s). On the other side of the world, Japan had a substantial industry, but according to Collier’s magazine, which had an admittedly biased perspective, “the Japanese don’t know how to make moving pictures—at least alongside Americans. In an American picture there is always something doing; action, action; in a Japanese film nothing ever happens. Half the reel may be given up to a dozen people sitting around having tea.”

  The opportunity was obvious: a serious supply problem existed in surprisingly extensive foreign markets. At the start of the war in the summer of 1914, movies were highly popular throughout Mexico, South America, and Asia. China, then the most densely populated country in the world, had an especially enthusiastic audience that ranged from simple laborers, who reportedly shuffled their feet and shouted when watching Westerns, to upper-class women who attended matinees nearly every day. By the end of 1915, an estimated fifty million people worldwide went to the movies every day.

  The United States was well positioned to fill the void. Destined to remain neutral for nearly three years and never to see fighting on home ground, the nation had a film industry that was burgeoning with money and talent and that also enjoyed considerable support from the federal government. Since the days of Theodore Roosevelt, the United States had pursued a policy of “dollar diplomacy,” placing various agencies, at taxpayer expense, in service to the business community. The movie industry, so skillful at transmitting cultural values subliminally, was not overlooked. In 1912–1913 the U.S. Commerce Department began keeping records on film exports, and in 1916 the State Department instructed U.S. consuls to provide detailed information on the market for American films in their territory.

  If, in retrospect, American movies seemed bound to conquer the world, at the time, formidable obstacles loomed. Movies were used very differently in different countries, and U.S. sales agents would have to understand each set of cultural peculiarities in order to gain a foothold. Moreover, there was the problem of safely and reliably managing money. One of the reasons that British and German movie producers had prospered in South America was that they had maintained some seventy branches of their own banks to promote trade, provide capital, and perform credit services. U.S. banks, however, were prohibited from establishing branches in foreign countries.

  Other challenges included registering trademarks in every country and ensuring product delivery. In some areas, transportation companies refused to guarantee the safe receipt of films, requiring the extra expense of special messenger service. For many American movie producers, those nettlesome details amounted to too much trouble. They decided to stay home and concentrate on the customers they understood.

  Fox took the long view. In his zealous desire to get ahead, combined with his genuine enchantment by the movies, he convinced himself that the rest of the world was eagerly waiting for Fox Film’s products. The studio’s “great heart interest and human interest stories” could spread “the gospel of an international spirit” and might even prevent future wars. Movies were, Fox said, “the most subtle force of which I know, working to create a potent world-sympathy—to teach the one half how the other half lives.” He also knew that this business opportunity wouldn’t last. When the war ended, European film producers would want their old place back.

  Before Fox Film was even a year old, Fox expanded internationally. In late 1915 he opened sales offices in Montreal and Toronto, and in January 1916, a few weeks short of Fox Film’s first anniversary on February 1, he began his conquest of the rest of the world. In charge of the mission was forty-three-year-old “representative at large” Joseph R. Darling, whom Fox had met several years before when Darling served as the U.S. Justice Department’s lead investigator on the Motion Picture Patents antitrust case. If Darling’s résumé had an odd mix of occupations—he’d also developed the Jamaican orange industry for the United Fruit Company, negotiated options on South American oil fields for the Gulf Refining Company, and written the book Darling on Trusts (1915), which proposed establishing a “Federal Interstate Trade Commission” to regulate business conduct—he was probably as well qualified a candidate as anyone. No one had ever done such a job as Fox had hired him to do.*

  Over a twelve-month period, Darling traveled twenty-eight thousand miles. Every part of the world presented a different challenge. In South America, where he began and where some 1,200 to 1,500 movie theaters had previously been a stronghold for French, Italian, and German films, exhibitors told Darling to go home. American movies had a poor reputation, and cultural conventions were very different. In Rio de Janeiro, for instance, there wasn’t a single theater built specifically for the movies. All the venues were converted stores; many had an arcade down the center, with seating and screens on either side. That meant a separate projection room and a separate orchestra for each side, and usually the first half of the movie played on one side and the second half on the other side. Across Brazil, exhibitors had rarely booked movies for longer than two days, yet Fox Film insisted on a three-day minimum. Furthermore, rental fees couldn’t go too high because theater owners had to pay nine types of taxes. In Argentina, a significant portion of the country’s three hundred exhibitors ran movies in restaurants, where diners expected them as part of the menu and paid nothing extra for them.

  Yet South America had very few film production companies itself, and as yet, no one else was seriously competing for the business. Stay, Fox told Darling, and show them the movies. That turned the tide. Darling opened an office first in Rio de Janeiro, and then in São Paulo and Buenos Aires. By early 1919, with Theda Bara’s movies especially popular, Fox Film would be doing business in every South American country except Colombia.

  At Darling’s next stops, in the South Pacific region, many markets were minuscule and relatively primitive. That fact mattered less than Fox’s determination to plant the Fox Film flag everywhere possible. Darling set up offices
in Sydney, Melbourne, and Wellington to serve not only Australia and New Zealand, but also several of the Fiji Islands, Samoa, Tahiti, and various Asian countries. Truly, no settlement was too small for special attention. The remote post station of Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory, had only one hundred fifty residents, but Fox Film rented camels to trek film cans three hundred miles across the desert from the end-of-the-line railway station in Oodnadatta, in the southern part of the continent.

  In Europe, joined by Winnie Sheehan, who arrived in early spring 1916, Darling confronted the reality of war. They started in Britain, which was relatively insulated by its island status and where British workers, already accustomed to American movies, had new money in their hands as a result of government spending on war industries. After establishing Fox Film’s British headquarters in London, in a five-story building that the studio bought at 76 Old Compton Street, Sheehan and Darling acquired properties for branch offices in seven other cities: Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Glasgow, and Dublin. Because all the buildings needed extensive renovation and because almost all Britain’s able-bodied young men had been conscripted for military service, Fox Film had to make do with a construction crew consisting of six to eight old men. They were, Sheehan said, “a typical collection of the lame, the halt, and the blind.” Nonetheless, within two months, all the offices were open, doing vigorous business among Britain’s five thousand exhibitors.

  Conditions on the continent were far more forbidding. In September 1914, Moving Picture World had catalogued the gloom: “In Germany and Austria, in Russia and the Balkans, cinematography is a thing of the past; a forgotten thing, dead as a stone; in France no one has a thought for films; in Belgium, the cinemas have been blotted out—a huge red cross covers each one of them; in that fair land they are being utilized as hospitals, they are being filled day by day with wounded and maimed warriors.” Fox Film adapted as necessary. In Paris, Barcelona, and Rome, because of the proximity to battle and the tangle of government red tape, the company allied itself with existing distribution agencies. From there, Fox movies went out to Egypt, the Balkans, and North Africa. In Spain and Portugal, where few movie theaters existed, Fox Film helped build more. By the summer of 1916, the studio had extended its reach into Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

  As of September 1916, Fox Film was the only American film studio doing business abroad under its own corporate title. All the other U.S. producers, willing to give up a share of the profits in exchange for reduced risk, distributed their movies through alliances with foreign companies. William Fox, however, saw the foreign market as crucial to his company’s identity. As he told the press, “You must remember that Fox Film Corporation is distinctly more than a national institution. Its scope is international in the widest degree.”

  And then there was the strange case of Russia. In the June 2, 1917, issue of Moving Picture World, Fox Film ran an ad titled “Fox Covers the World,” which showed a map with sixty-six markers representing the studio’s distribution outlets throughout North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and Africa. Symbols denoted an agency alliance in Moscow and a planned Fox Film office in Petrograd.

  It seems mystifying that Fox would have thought it a good idea to invest in Russia. For years the country had been bedeviled by a corrupt, isolated, and intransigent aristocracy, a restive labor force, and an increasingly ambivalent military. Already, violent revolution was under way. In February 1917, factory workers rioted in Petrograd; soldiers fired on them, then joined them. The following month, Czar Nicholas abdicated, and the entire Russian Ministry, along with the president of the Imperial Council, was arrested on charges of corruption and incompetence. Before year’s end, Russia would explode in bloodshed and install a series of ruthless and anti-American Bolshevik leaders.

  In context, however, Fox’s optimistic outlook wasn’t so unusual. He was probably just reading the newspapers. In one of the most astonishing cases of American foreign relations myopia, many U.S. politicians, business leaders, and intellectuals initially applauded the Russian Revolution as a giant step forward for democracy and capitalism. Disregarding vast differences in culture, history, and social structure, they applied the template of the American Revolution and interpreted events as evidence that the last major European nation was about to dismantle its oppressive ruling monarchy and deliver power to the masses. In the eyes of most American opinion leaders, a fresh breeze of political and economic freedom had blown into Russia.

  Many U.S. captains of industry embraced the delusion from necessity. Feeling the pinch at home from antitrust legislation, the labor movement, and a relatively saturated market, they looked at Russia and saw what they wanted to see: 170 million people (compared to 102 million in the United States) and vast, untapped natural resources. If Russia had not yet entered the modern age, so much the better. American entrepreneurs would sell it to them.

  International Harvester relied on Russia as its second-largest market; Singer Sewing Machine built a huge factory in Podolsk (near Moscow) that by 1914 employed more than thirty-four thousand people and manufactured 80 percent of all sewing machines sold in Russia. Other American companies that had set up shop in Russia included New York Life Insurance, Equitable Life Assurance, General Electric, Westinghouse Electric, Western Electric, and Parke, Davis.

  One hundred seventy million people! Fox couldn’t resist. In mid-1916 he sent Sheehan to Russia for several months. It didn’t matter that he himself would not have been able to enter the country because no foreign Jews were allowed into Russia, or that the czarist regime mercilessly persecuted its Jewish population. There was money to be made—at least, there seemed to be. Russia, three times the size of the United States and covering one-seventh of the globe, already had an extensive exhibition infrastructure and a history of enthusiasm for foreign movies. The first movie theaters had opened shortly after the turn of the century in Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, and Kiev, and by 1915, almost every town or village had at least one, with big-city movie theaters rivaling legitimate theaters in size and magnificence. Although at the time of Fox Film’s arrival, Russia had at least ten movie studios, audiences usually preferred imports, especially Westerns and comedies. According to one industry observer, Russian movies tended to be like Russian novels: they were “too long, lacked action and went into the psychology of things to an extent which could not be portrayed on the screen.”

  Russian officials welcomed Sheehan warmly and took him to watch army maneuvers. By the fall of 1916, Fox Film had established an agency partnership in Moscow to cover the whole country. If commerce required a mask of political indifference, a willingness to deal with whatever regime was in power, that was what it was—a mask. Fox personally sympathized with the revolutionaries and, within the United States, used Fox Film to promote their cause. In addition to Theda Bara’s The Rose of Blood (1917), which depicted bomb-throwing Russian revolutionaries as freedom fighters, Fox made The Firebrand (1918), with Theda look-alike Virginia Pearson as a Russian princess who falls in love with a heroic young American supporter of the revolution. Ads described The Firebrand as a “Great democracy drama!”

  Behind the scenes, Fox provided financial help to one of the revolution’s foremost leaders. Leon Trotsky arrived in New York in mid-January 1917, exiled from Spain and unwanted by the rest of Europe. “I first saw him on the Lower East Side with a copy of the Forward under his arm,” Fox told his niece Angela Fox Dunn. He felt sorry for Trotsky. The great intellectual looked so shabby. “I wouldn’t give you $11 for him, including the shoes!”

  Although Trotsky would insist that in New York he earned his living only as a journalist, British spies (who were keeping a close eye on him because they believed that he was receiving German money) discovered that he’d been hired to work as an electrician at Fox Film. According to Sheehan, Trotsky also appeared as an extra in Fox movies and had a Fox Film employee identification card.* The story is plausible. Trotsky needed the money—
socialist editorial writing paid poorly—and he loved the movies. Reportedly, to escape their dreary apartment in the Bronx, he often took his wife and two young sons to a Russian-Jewish lunchroom on Westchester Avenue, under the elevated railroad, and then on to see a film.

  According to family lore, Fox gave Trotsky money to help him return to Russia on the SS Kristianiafjord on March 27, 1917, twelve days after the czar’s abdication. Perhaps Fox was influenced by Jacob Schiff, who was said by his grandson to have given Trotsky $20 million for the trip. Such support wouldn’t have been controversial. In general, American leaders still clung to a vision of Russia’s peaceful, enthusiastic transition to capitalist democracy. Immediately after the czar’s abdication, the New York Times reported that a “swift and orderly transition” of power had taken place and indicated that the revolution was complete. Wall Street financiers and industrialists, surveyed by the New York Herald, displayed a “most cheerful frame of mind” and widely expected tremendous opportunities in Russia for American business.

  So, through the bloody, tumultuous events of late 1917 and 1918—through even the execution of the Romanoff royal family on July 16–17, 1918—Fox Film stayed on. In December 1918, Sheehan described Russia as “a tremendous field” for American movies. As late as July 1919, Fox Film had two branch offices in Russia.

  Fox never said what happened to his Russian outposts. Probably they suffered a similar fate to that of the Scandinavian Film Agency’s well-equipped distribution offices in Petrograd, Moscow, and Odessa, which were sealed up and shut down by Bolshevik agents. Or they may have survived under special protection. Fox told his niece Angela Fox Dunn that at a café in Paris, he received a folded note from Lenin’s representatives asking him to meet and that he subsequently made educational films for Russia to raise the literacy rate.