The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  No more hokum: not entirely—at least, not yet. Fox had gotten very good at formula-driven, melodramatic movies, and they still made money. Such habits were hard to break.

  Here, once again, was the usual contingent of racy but often irrelevant titles. The Hunted Woman (1925), for instance, was a Western shoot-’em-up about crooks trying to steal a gold claim, while She Wolves (1925) focused on a young wife who is disappointed to learn that her husband isn’t a debonair man-about-town. Here also was Fox’s fallback stock-in-trade, sex, offered as “folly, reckless living, passion unshackled” in The Dancers (1925); as moralizing melodrama in Scandal Proof (1925), about a working girl wrongly accused of murdering a wealthy cad at a wild party; and as a lighthearted “lingerie” romp in Summer Bachelors (1926).

  Furthermore, Fox was not about to toss the highly profitable Tom Mix out the door. Many theater owners called Mix the “rent man” because he ensured that they met their overhead costs every month. On average, each Mix movie was booked by more than seven thousand theaters, not counting repeat engagements. A Fresno, California, exhibitor commented, “Personally I wouldn’t give a dime to see them all, but I don’t buy pictures for my own entertainment. Tom Mix’s name packs the house no matter what the title of the picture is.” A De Queen, Arkansas, exhibitor agreed, “Why play so-called high class stuff when the people want the same old hokum? The fans come, the others don’t.”

  In January 1925, the same month that he issued his “no more hokum” proclamation, Fox personally negotiated a new three-and-a-half-year, $2 million contract with Mix. The new terms made Mix the highest-salaried actor in Hollywood, although other stars may actually have earned more through profit percentage agreements. Like John Ford, Mix was careful to broadcast his appreciation. In an April 1925 Photoplay article that appeared under his byline, Mix called Fox “one of the finest men I have ever known” and claimed he had recently written a letter to Fox that read, “ ‘Some folks may say that if you hadn’t done all this for me, somebody else would have. But the fact remains that you did it, and I feel mighty grateful.’ ”

  After the robustly successful stock offerings for both Fox Film and Fox Theatres, Fox began to think of himself as having the Midas touch. In 1926 he became a residential real estate developer. Partnering with a friend from the garment trade, Joseph Frankel, who had just sold his Frankel Brothers Clothing Company to R.H. Macy & Co., Fox formed the construction company Fox-Frankel to build two large middle-class housing communities on Long Island. First to open, on May 9, 1926 (Mother’s Day), was the Spanish-style $15 million Biltmore Shores development on 557 acres in Massapequa, New York, with frontage on the Great South Bay. Although the project wasn’t entirely finished—a large lagoon was still being built to accommodate yachts, motorboats, and water sports; an eighteen-hole golf course and two-hundred-room hotel had yet to be started—Fox and Frankel chartered a special train to bring prospective buyers for free from Manhattan. Ads for the first section of 1,300 lots promised “your own ideal home” where “You are as free and untrammeled as the fresh, invigorating salt-sea air that you breathe at Biltmore Shores.” Sales proceeded so quickly that on May 30, 1926, a second section of 560 lots was put up for sale. Also under construction by Fox-Frankel, but not to open until 1928, was the slightly down-market Merrick Gables, a single-family housing development on 428 acres in Merrick, New York.

  For Fox, the movies and the houses were all part of the same mission: to improve life for the average person and to establish himself as a guiding hand in American life.

  CHAPTER 28

  Talking Pictures

  The thing that attracted me to talking pictures was not the entertainment of the talking picture . . . [T]hese were the thoughts that entered my mind. How could I leave something behind if I were to die tomorrow? I knew the leaving of mere money meant nothing.

  —WILLIAM FOX

  As much as Fox loved silent movies, he knew they couldn’t last. He had realized this during the early 1920s, when radio invaded American homes offering convenient, inexpensive, and varied entertainment at the flip of a dial. While his larger competitors, such as Famous Players–Lasky, M-G-M, and First National, were insulated by their lavish productions and splendid theaters, Fox, with his budget-minded movies and smaller, older theaters, had felt the impact. At first, ticket sales lagged only on rainy nights, when business had previously been the best. Soon, the effect spread to clear nights. “The eyes had seen so much and the ears had heard so little that when the radio came in, it was a new thrill . . .” Fox said. It was so much easier for the average person to stay home after a tiring day at work, settle into a comfortable chair, and enjoy a music program or a lecture. As it built an audience, radio increasingly spotlighted what the movies were missing. No matter that the “silent drama” had become an art form in itself, no matter that many theaters managed to rustle up some kind of musical accompaniment, whether a full orchestra or a lonely piano player—the fact remained that in real life people talked, and in the movies, so far, they didn’t. If the movies didn’t adapt, Fox feared, “we were going to find our theaters empty.”

  At first, wide swaths of the industry disagreed. Talking pictures had a long history of failure. Thomas Edison thought of the idea as early as 1887, and between 1907 and 1911, the first flurry of talking picture machines swept into the marketplace. With catchy names such as Chronophone, Cameraphone, Cinephone, Fotophone, Vivaphone, and Synchroscope, they had razzle-dazzle features such as colored lights, illuminated bull’s-eyes, and revolving dials. Most made extravagant claims of realism. All disappeared within a year or two. The problem wasn’t a lack of public interest. As Moving Picture World reported in 1909, audience enthusiasm was “unquestionably very strong,” and “the time is ripe for the popularization of vocalized moving pictures . . .” The trouble was that the systems didn’t work very well. Synchronization often failed; the sound was thin and metallic; and the theater equipment was expensive to install and difficult to operate.

  Hope revived briefly in February 1913, when Edison introduced his talking pictures machine, the Kinetophone. Although Edison cautioned that the invention was far from perfect—an assessment borne out by films of tired subjects such as “a couple of dogs barking” and the Edison Minstrels telling stale jokes and singing in flat voices that finished a few beats before their mouths stopped moving—many believed that the Wizard of Menlo Park would soon surmount these problems. Indeed, he kept trying. Then came the disastrous December 9, 1914, fire at the Edison plant in West Orange, New Jersey, that destroyed nearly three-quarters of the manufacturing and experimentation facilities. Work on the Kinetophone literally went up in smoke, and sixty-seven-year-old Edison was content to let it remain there.

  So, that was that. After all the false promises and dashed hopes, the American motion picture industry gave up on sound and concentrated on making the best of what it had. Aesthetically, silent film developed by expressing itself mainly through action, heightened expressions and gestures, and visual imagery—a rich, multitextured form of pantomime that could, when necessary, fall back on words through the use of intertitle cards. Until radio’s arrival, Fox had been quite happy with that conceptualization; the movies he most admired were those that used the fewest words.

  Undeterred by the major studios’ lack of interest, electrical equipment manufacturers continued to work on motion picture sound technology, although not with the intention of instigating a revolution. As one engineer later explained, “giving the actors voices seemed hardly necessary . . . However, a very large business in synchronized sound seemed assured (even without any use of the system for dialogue) in furnishing sound effects, background music, and providing voice for lectures, speeches and travelogue commentary.” By the mid-1920s, AT&T, General Electric, and Westinghouse all had talking pictures research programs.

  Two rival technology pathways emerged: one to record sound on a disk and play it on a phonograph linked to a projector—this was the method used by
all the unsuccessful systems a decade before—and the other to translate sound waves into light waves and embed the signals on a narrow strip next to the images on the film. Sound-on-disk seemed much more practicable because it relied on an existing invention, the phonograph. By contrast, sound-on-film, which was theoretically superior because of the possibility of perfect synchronization, was fraught with complex technical challenges.

  In 1924, a breakthrough occurred. AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories, which had discovered that the vacuum tubes used to transfer and amplify sound in telephones could be adapted to record and reproduce motion picture sound, developed a new sound-on-disk system that seemed to solve many of the earlier problems. At first, the new system drew a dreary response. When William H. Hilles, a sales promotion manager for AT&T’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric, tried to recruit a major studio to help refine the technology, all refused. For most, the cost was too high, the past too heavily freighted with failure, and business just fine as it was. They hadn’t felt radio’s threat to their income the way Fox had. As Adolph Zukor later commented, “We didn’t take it as seriously as we should have. Somebody comes in here to you in your house and he’s got a beautiful rug—but you don’t need it. All your rooms are carpeted. They offered talking pictures—which I didn’t need, at that time.”

  Fox refused for a different reason. Sound-on-disk, he knew, would never hold up in the marketplace. Not only would two mechanical devices, a turntable for sound and a projector for images, have to work together perfectly—an unlikely event in the rough-and-tumble world of movie exhibition—but also, once the sound had been recorded, the picture couldn’t change. As Fox well knew, editing occurred frequently for any number of reasons, even after a movie was finished. Producers, for instance, might cut down a first-run version to a shorter length for neighborhood theaters, and exhibitors routinely snipped out damaged frames or scenes deemed objectionable to their audience. As soon as the film images changed, the sound would no longer match. Furthermore, disks might easily break, become lost in transit, or get mismatched with film reels by careless or harried projectionists. To Fox, the only viable talking pictures technology was sound-on-film.

  Unwilling to abandon sound-on-disk, Western Electric contracted with two outside promoters to try again with the major studios. The first one, Charles S. Post, got nowhere and was replaced in May 1925 by promoter Walter J. Rich, who learned through a stockbroker friend of the Warner brothers that they were interested. No one had gone looking for them—Warner Bros. was a second-rate studio. However, Sam Warner had heard about the new movie sound system from the Western Electric executive who was supervising installation of equipment at a radio station the Warners were building in Los Angeles.

  The Warners were interested in talking pictures not, as the story is often told, because they were broke and desperate. To the contrary: the Warners’ business was on the upswing. Profits for the fiscal year ending in March 1925 had totaled $1.1 million, compared to less than $250,000 for 1924. In March 1925 the Warners had restructured their company from a family business into a public corporation, and the next month, they bought the assets of the Vitagraph Company of America, including studio facilities in Brooklyn and Los Angeles and a distribution network of thirty-four sales offices in the United States and Canada. Aiming for a place at the top, proud of what they considered a “perfect-running organization,” the Warners believed they could sell sound to small theater owners as a means of competing against large exhibitors.

  In June 1925 the Warners and Rich agreed to work together on introducing Western Electric’s sound-on-disk system to the motion picture industry. With the Warners pouring money into refining the technology, on April 20, 1926, Western Electric gave them an exclusive license to produce sound movies in the United States and to sublicense other studios. In effect, Warner Bros. would serve as Western Electric’s marketing agency to introduce sound to the motion picture industry, and the two companies would split the sublicense profits equally. Western Electric proposed the name Vitaphone, reflecting both the Warners’ recent acquisition of the Vitagraph studio and the involvement of Western Electric’s parent, AT&T.*

  No one else paid much attention. After all, 1926 was on its way to becoming the U.S. motion picture industry’s most successful year to date, with an average of seven million paid admissions per day and total box-office revenues of $750 million, up from about $700 million in 1925. There seemed no need to abandon silent pictures.

  It was not in Fox’s nature to stand by and tolerate bad leadership. And that was very much what this looked like. The further the Warners got with Vitaphone sound-on-disk, the more likely they were ultimately to delay the widespread adoption of sound. Here would be another false promise that absorbed the money and efforts that might have gone toward a successful system. Once again, as he had ever since he pushed aside his father to become head of his family, Fox decided that if no one else would do the job properly, he would.

  Yet more than a sense of paternalistic obligation drew Fox to talking pictures. This was also a rare opportunity. Whoever introduced sound-on-film would be in a position both to reap tremendous profits through licensing royalties and to achieve historic status in the film industry. “The thing that attracted me to talking pictures was not the entertainment of the talking picture,” Fox said. “How could I leave something behind if I were to die tomorrow? I knew the leaving of mere money meant nothing. I wondered what kind of contribution I could make on this earth that would live after I was gone, and to me there came this thought—that the talking motion picture presented a new field of endeavor.”

  The most logical candidate to head a talking pictures effort for Fox was Dr. Lee de Forest, a brilliant and prolific inventor who in 1908 had patented a revolutionary device called the Audion. One of the major challenges of the early modern electronic age had been to find a way to amplify faint electrical impulses and reduce distortion. De Forest’s Audion, a three-element tube, accomplished those goals and thus enabled long-distance telephony, public address systems, and radio. (The Audion would also become an essential component of television and of equipment for controlling the speed and security of express trains, for stopping elevators, and, in medical practice, for inducing an artificial fever in patients.) Directly to Fox’s purpose, de Forest had developed a sound-on-film system based on the Audion, and in 1922 he started the Phonofilm Corporation to market the technology.

  De Forest had long been interested in an alliance with Fox. Traveling back to the United States from Europe in late 1922 on the same ship as Fox, de Forest had tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting. Four years later, he was almost desperate. Phonofilm had never gotten off the ground, mainly because it lacked a major business partner with the resources to generate enthusiasm amid the highly skeptical motion picture industry.

  Yet Fox bypassed de Forest in favor of his former colleague in Phonofilm, Theodore W. Case. Probably de Forest’s personality warned Fox off. De Forest’s career had been plagued by financial hardship and exploitation—or, as he saw it, by “repeated thievery . . . by conscienceless corporations.” In 1913, needing money to continue his work, he had sold the Audion’s telephone rights for $50,000 to AT&T and the following year, sold the radio rights for $90,000 to RCA. After refining de Forest’s work, both companies quickly made millions. By the 1920s, de Forest had become quirky, cranky, and somewhat unhinged. In 1926, he was working on an “Anti-Add” device, a wireless remote control that would allow radio listeners to “instantly assassinate the advertising announcer” and enjoy silence until the program resumed.

  One headstrong autocrat at Fox Film—Fox himself—was enough.

  Instead, Fox preferred thirty-seven-year-old Case, a mild-mannered Yale graduate who had left Phonofilm in late 1925 because de Forest repeatedly claimed all the credit for himself. Case had patented two important sound-on-film devices, the AEO recording light and its reproducing counterpart, the Thalofide cell, both of which greatly improved Phono
film’s voice quality.* (Before Case came along, de Forest later admitted, he’d been unable to tell whether his recordings of his own voice were being played backward or forward.) In early 1926, while Fox was in California for several months, brother-in-law and Fox Film vice president Jack Leo commissioned Case to make test films at the studio’s Tenth Avenue headquarters. On Fox’s first day back in April 1926, Leo pulled him into the projection room and ran footage of a canary singing in a birdcage. “It sang beautifully from the lowest to the highest note,” Fox said. “It sang for several minutes, and then following that came a Chinaman who had a ukulele and he sang an English song. He sang terribly and played none too well, but to me it was a marvel.” This, Fox knew, would work.

  Although many of his senior executives thought the project too risky, and although the great Thomas Edison declared in May 1926 that audiences didn’t want talking pictures to replace the “restful quiet” of movie theaters, Fox rushed ahead. On July 23, 1926, he and Case formed the Fox-Case Corporation, with Case turning over all his sound patents and receiving in exchange a substantial block of the new company’s stock and a three-year contract to head the research lab.* Fox commissioned two completely soundproof stages in New York and, to keep him busy during the four-month construction period, gave Case $1 million to spend however he saw fit, no questions asked, on outdoor sound filming. So far, talking pictures research had concentrated on studio work; Fox believed it was crucial for sound cameras also to operate well outdoors.