The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Zukor loved the movies as much as Fox, but in a very different way. For Fox, movies were an expansion of life, a heightening and highlighting of truth. For Zukor, movies filled a vast, vacant inner space. His official childhood history portrayed him as a victim of repeated traumatic loss: his father died when he was one, his mother when he was eight, and an uncle adopted his more scholarly older brother, but not him. At sixteen, he left his native land to come to the United States with about forty dollars provided by the Orphans’ Bureau. At least, that was the story Zukor told in his 1953 autobiography, The Public Is Never Wrong. It may have been emotionally, rather than factually, true. In 1923, when he made an impromptu visit to Risce, the Paris edition of the New York Herald reported that Zukor had left his hometown at age eighteen with his third-class passage to America paid for by his grocery store owner father.

  Whatever the determining factors, Zukor developed a self-protective, self-important manner that offended others. When he worked with Marcus Loew at the outset of their motion picture careers, Loew, whom everybody liked, didn’t like him. Reportedly, Loew wouldn’t even give Zukor a desk at the office, and when Zukor showed up, Loew would comment, “There comes the pest.”

  Short and slight, with a seamed, pitted face, Zukor struck fear into everyone he met. Everything about him spoke of a desire for correctness: his well-tailored suits, his diamond ring, the carefully fitted boots he wore on his small feet, his precise, poised manners. He was so controlled that even his smile wasn’t really a smile. Instead, it was, according to British politician and Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook, who met Zukor around this time, “just a distortion of the mouth which is meant to answer for a smile.” Only when Zukor talked about the movies did he come alive. Then, said Lord Beaverbrook, he “blazes up into a furnace of excited intensity . . . You see in eyes, in voice, in gesture, the zealot, the dreamer, the discoverer.” Film historian Neal Gabler has described Zukor as “a man who had been emptied out in childhood, who had lost or been deprived of love and security, and who then set about to fill himself back up again.” Marcus Loew said, “He became a success to prove he wasn’t a failure.”

  Zukor’s temperament gave him a distinct advantage over Fox. While Fox was always in danger of letting his emotions overwhelm him, of seeing what he wanted to see, Zukor was willing to take the world exactly as it was and to do whatever it demanded to win. To Fox, movies were a life to be lived. To Zukor, they were a land to be conquered. And Zukor meant to conquer. He often said so himself.

  Accordingly, on June 27, 1916, Zukor merged his Famous Players Film Company with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company to form a $12.5 million corporation that officially took shape on July 19, 1916, as Famous Players–Lasky (FPL). Financially, FPL was two-and-a-half times the size of Fox Film at its inception seventeen months earlier. FPL quickly acquired all the stock of two other production companies, Bosworth, Inc., and the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Company, and made deals to distribute movies by such leading independent producers as Thomas Ince and Mack Sennett. Zukor also moved into distribution. After failing to take over the Paramount Pictures Corporation, which was then a national distributorship handling all Famous Players’ and Lasky’s movies, Zukor started Artcraft Pictures in July 1916 as an allied distributorship. He thus crippled Paramount, whose owners sold out to FPL before the end of the year. Zukor then dissolved the Artcraft and Paramount companies, but kept the names and began to distribute FPL movies under both banners. Artcraft soon acquired the nickname “Art-Graft.”

  By the summer of 1917, FPL controlled many of the most popular stars (including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, and Dorothy Gish) and directors D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Having established a dominant position in production and distribution, FPL began to bear down on exhibitors by raising rental fees, insisting on block booking (a policy that required theater owners to take movies they didn’t want in order to get movies they did want),* and demanding advance deposits for movies.

  Zukor’s actions threatened Fox both by their merciless vigor and by the chain reaction they triggered. Many exhibitors, the gatekeepers to the audience, feared that no sooner had they gotten rid of one oppressive monopoly, the Motion Picture Patents Company, than another one, in the form of FPL, was rising to take its place. To counter that possibility, in 1917 twenty-six leading exhibitors, who controlled about one hundred large theaters in thirty-five U.S. cities, formed the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit to buy or make their own movies through independent production companies. By granting subfranchises to suburban theater owners, First National gained control of more than six hundred theaters. That reach gave the organization tremendous financial resources, especially because it didn’t have to maintain an actual studio. It also allowed First National to guarantee actors and directors extensive, first-class distribution of their work. First National landed Charlie Chaplin in a $1.2 million deal, and in 1918 it struck directly at Zukor by luring Mary Pickford away from FPL with an offer of $250,000 apiece for three movies, along with 50 percent of the profits and complete creative control. Because henceforth many of the best U.S. movie theaters would fill their schedules with their own movies, First National’s plan stood to slash Fox Film’s film rental revenues.

  The outlook got worse. Reacting to the creation of First National, Zukor coolly announced that, “in self-defense,” he, too, would link production and exhibition. Nationwide, Zukor began to buy large first-run theaters, removing still more from the competitive marketplace. Among his acquisitions were three New York City movie palaces, the Strand, the Rialto, and the Rivoli; he also gained control of Los Angeles’s largest movie theater, Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater. In the late spring of 1919, Zukor bought the New York–area chain of theaters owned by Fox’s former Knickerbocker partner, Benjamin Moss, reportedly paying $750,000 in cash. Wid’s Daily warned readers that “ ‘the Wise Man of the East,’ Mr. Zukor,” might be planning to use theater owners’ money against them: “Have you ever stopped to consider the fact that this organization may be intentionally boosting the price of films sky-high with the realization that they will be able to get away with it for a certain length of time while the exhibitor loses what little he’s got, and that then it will be comparatively easy to go into Mr. Exhibitor and buy his theatre?”

  By mid-1919, FPL was by far the largest American movie studio, with $22 million in net assets and projected annual net earnings of $5 million. Even so, the money wasn’t coming in fast enough to fund Zukor’s expansion plans. Conveniently, there was Wall Street, panting to invest in the motion picture industry. In the fall of 1919, FPL authorized an issue of $20 million in new stock, half of it immediately, with underwriting by Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (Fox might have had that deal for himself, given his close association with Kuhn, Loeb leaders Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg during the 1917–1918 charity fund-raising campaigns, and given what Variety described as Fox Film’s “particularly healthy financial position.” Fox, however, didn’t want to pay the price.) To get the money, Zukor had to agree to accept a finance committee dominated by bankers.

  Others followed in Zukor’s footsteps. In the fall of 1919, backed by the J. P. Morgan firm, Marcus Loew took his company public, converting Marcus Loew Enterprises into Loew’s, Inc. and issuing 700,000 shares of a newly authorized four million shares of stock. Several members of the Morgan group joined the Loew’s board of directors, as did William C. Durant, founder and president of General Motors. Sam Goldwyn, who had formed Goldwyn Pictures after leaving FPL, began negotiations with the Du Ponts, who, following the end of the war, desperately needed to find a new outlet for their chemical business to replace the gunpowder market. Because the same chemicals used for explosives were also used to make motion picture film, the DuPont company was gearing up to challenge Eastman Kodak for the raw film stock market.

  “Can Wall Street systematize the industry and put it on what is termed ‘a business basis’ without killing the patient?” a 1919 Variety ed
itorial fretted. “Are the men who have built up the industry through their imagination, persistence, and knowledge of the public and its amusement needs, going to remain in charge of the destinies of the industry, or are they going to be relegated to the positions of department heads, with adding machines as their immediate superiors . . . ?”

  Zukor, Loew, and Goldwyn believed they could manage the moneymen. Fox wanted neither the bother nor the risk. As Variety commented, “William Fox . . . has always stood alone, and those in his confidence declare he will always do so.”

  Nonetheless, Fox recognized that the influx of Wall Street money had drastically reconfigured the motion picture industry landscape. With two major companies, FPL and First National, each controlling its own extensive network of first-run theaters, and with a third threatening to do so as Marcus Loew began discussions to ally his theater chain with the Metro production company, the market was no longer openly competitive. Fox Film either would have to break into those circuits by offering very, very unusual movies—and no one could produce those all the time—or it would have to drop back and do business primarily with the remaining, mostly lesser, theaters. Popular appeal, Fox understood, would no longer primarily determine a movie’s success.

  That troubled him in principle as well as practicality. While he still owned most of his theaters from his early days in the industry, he didn’t want either to expand his circuit or to monopolize it with his own product. He regularly booked other studios’ movies at his theaters and concentrated on selling Fox movies to other exhibitors. He was even willing to use his own theaters to help a fledgling rival. In 1917 he gave a significant boost to the newly formed Goldwyn Pictures by contracting to book all its output into every Fox theater in the New York metropolitan area. Fox valued his theaters not only as a revenue source but also as a way to stay in touch with his customers’ needs. He often boasted that William Fox the producer made movies that William Fox the exhibitor wanted to show.

  Now, reluctantly, Fox began to acquire theaters again, starting in St. Louis, where the well-entrenched First National circuit threatened to shut him out. In July 1918, he took a multiyear lease on the 2,000-seat Victoria Theatre there, renaming it the William Fox Liberty Theatre. In the summer of 1919, he sent a broadcast letter to exhibitors nationwide offering to buy their theaters. He then spent $1 million in cash to acquire four Denver theaters (the Rivoli, Isis, Strand, and Plaza) and also signed a five-year lease on Detroit’s Washington Theatre. That fall, two Fox representatives went out on the road to begin negotiations to acquire about twenty theaters west of Chicago, all with seating capacity of 1,800 to 2,500. In December 1919, he announced plans to build the largest theater in Brooklyn, a $1 million, 3,500-seat venue on Flatbush Avenue at the corner of Duryea Place.

  Fox had little enthusiasm for these projects. All he really wanted to do was to make movies. In order to make movies, however, he had to become a major exhibitor.

  Seeking new inspiration, on March 6, 1919, Fox sailed to Europe for two months with Winnie Sheehan and Abraham Carlos. It wasn’t an original idea. Many other studio executives were also making pilgrimages to the birthplace of motion picture art.

  Upon landing in England, where the trade publication Bioscope hailed him as a “living embodiment of all that stands for what is best in the world of pictures,” Fox made grand pronouncements. Perhaps movies might work alongside President Wilson’s League of Nations to promote international harmony. At least, they should never be considered merely a business. In a London Daily Mirror article that appeared under his byline, Fox wrote, “What a tragedy it would be if the great writers, artists and sculptors of the world lived their lives as a commercial proposition! . . . Only those who actually love art should have anything to do with the making of motion pictures.”

  During two weeks in France, he visited Paris, toured battlefields at Rheims and Verdun, and announced that Fox Film writers were working on scripts to be set against these backdrops so that friends and relatives of war veterans could see the places where their loved ones had fought. Art, he said, “overleaps boundaries of race and language.” Art, family unity, international harmony—Fox was reminding himself of the ideals he’d had when starting out as a producer five years before. Toward any practical purpose, however, his words were meaningless. He was far too worried about money to act on them.

  He and Sheehan did at least establish ten new sales offices in Europe. Otherwise, Fox arrived back in New York on May 5, 1919, empty-handed. He had found no new stars, directors, or ideas.

  He took out his frustrations on the beleaguered Sol Wurtzel. In June 1919, reviewing the studio’s activities during his absence, Fox wrote to Wurtzel that he was “mortified to find the great quantity of money that [Jack] Leo is wiring you each week” and even more mortified, when he sat down to analyze expenses, to learn that the West Coast studio owed various merchants $70,000. Wurtzel was letting directors shoot too much footage, overpaying for supporting players, overpaying for furniture and props, and renting cars when the studio owned many cars. Moreover, Fox hated a lot of the movies that Wurtzel had sent him. Footlight Maids (1919), a Sunshine comedy about the theater world, was “impractical, impossible and unreleasable, and I have ordered it thrown into the waste heap.” Tom Mix’s High Speed was mostly a mess. Gladys Brockwell’s Sadie was “impossible . . . fit for the junk pile.” Wurtzel had ruined Gypsy Love by miscasting it. The Rebellious Bride, Miss Adventure, and Cowardice Court, none of which had cost more than $36,500, were all “stupid, insipid pictures.” Fox railed, “Is it not evident to you that there is something radically wrong?”

  He seems to have given some thought to replacing Wurtzel with Sheehan. That is, Sheehan, with his air of “wide-eyed innocence” and his “cherubic smile,” was noticed spending a lot of time at the Los Angeles studio in the fall of 1919. Nothing came of that. Although he might have had greater managerial ability, Sheehan still lacked the essential trait of trustworthiness. Wurtzel, by contrast, grew ever more anxious to please, and took on more blame and more work without complaint. By December 1919, with Fox’s portrait staring over his shoulder, he had four phones on his desk.

  So, the studio plodded on. Between late 1918 and 1920, Fox made no ambitious movies on the scale of A Daughter of the Gods, Cleopatra, A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, or The Honor System. That was one of the reasons so much talent was leaving: the ship seemed to be sinking. Yet, with limited access now to many of the nation’s first-run movie theaters, the studio couldn’t afford to operate on its former scale. Instead, Fox Film adopted the slogan “Not for One, but for All.” That was a euphemistic way of saying that while FPL and First National might concentrate on big features that could sell two-dollar tickets in the large urban theaters they controlled, Fox would primarily serve second- and third-run theaters that charged dimes and quarters for admission.

  The studio did have a few notable releases. Checkers (1919), a romance set in the world of thoroughbred horse racing, was a big commercial success, pulling in rental fees of at least $500,000. However, the movie had no claims to artistic achievement. Its main attraction was a scene of burning railway cars tumbling over an open drawbridge into New Jersey’s Raritan River. Raoul Walsh’s Evangeline (1919), on the other hand, won widespread critical praise as “a camera revelation and a Fox triumph,” with “some of the most beautiful scenes” ever filmed. Yet, with no big stars (Walsh’s wife, Miriam Cooper, played the title role), no big sets, and no big, thrilling action scenes, Evangeline was essentially a small art film and did only middling business.

  William Farnum did what he could to earn his $10,000 a week, but with Fox unwilling to spend as much as $100,000 on any of his movies, his main value to the studio was as a prestige symbol. He dutifully went back to the sort of generic, two-fisted, action-adventure roles in which he’d started at Fox Film. He made a string of movies based on best sellers by his friend, pulp Western novelist Zane Grey—Riders of the Purple Sage (1918), The Rainbow Trail (1918
), The Lone Star Ranger (1919), and The Last of the Duanes (1919)—but Zane Grey was no Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, and everyone knew it. When director Frank Lloyd wanted to go back to the Grand Canyon to reshoot scenes of Riders of the Purple Sage that had accidentally gotten fogged during lab processing, Fox refused because the trip would have added $6,000 to the existing $85,000 cost, which was already more than he deemed the movie likely to earn.

  The rest of Fox Film’s postwar releases relied on the same old melodramatic formula, which now seemed irksome to those who wanted the movies to move ahead. Reacting to a list of Fox titles that included Gambling in Souls, Pitfalls of a Big City, The Love That Dares, Broken Commandments, The Divorce Trap, The Splendid Sin, The Call of the Soul, and The Forbidden Room, Variety complained, “[T]here is behind all Fox productions a certain general scheme that is more important than any other consideration. This scheme is to put out melodramas that are heavy with sex appeal and blow air into the deadweight by swift action and unusual photography.” Well, yes, but Fox could make these movies cheaply and rent them profitably to neighborhood exhibitors who served a relatively undiscerning audience. After all, in 1919, an estimated 75 percent of the movie audience was under the age of twenty-four.