The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  Maybe there was more than a little vanity in Fox’s acquisition of the Roxy. To his mind, the world’s largest movie theater should have been his all along. In fact, he had had the vision first. He had even wanted to build it on the same plot of land that the Roxy now occupied.

  The idea had come to him about four years earlier, when he was playing golf with his real estate agent, Alexander Kempner. Waiting for their caddies to go ahead to the area where they were likely to drive, Fox suddenly sat down on a bench and told Kempner his plan. He wanted to build a colossal recreation complex, with “the largest ballroom in the world, the largest indoor athletic place in the world, the largest theatre in the world, and also a great hotel with conveniences that would startle a stranger coming to New York.” He had already chosen the site: the entire city block bounded by Sixth and Seventh Avenues and by Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets, which was then owned by the Metropolitan Street Railway and used as a “car barn” storage facility. Fox had heard that the property could be had for $5 million, and he wanted Kempner to buy it the next day. Kempner urged caution, advising that they get expert appraisals. Fox acceded, and after the figures came in considerably lower than $5 million, he made a conservative, unsuccessful bid in December 1923.

  The next Fox heard, when the news was announced at a Rotary Club dinner at the Hotel McAlpin on June 2, 1925, Herbert Lubin had bought the lower portion of the same block, the part that stretched along Seventh Avenue from Fiftieth to Fifty-First Streets, for $1.9 million. Lubin planned to lease part of the property to a hotel development company. On the rest of the land, he would build a $6 million, 6,000-seat movie theater in collaboration with theater impresario and popular radio personality Samuel L. Rothafel. Also the manager of the Capitol Theatre, at Broadway and Fifty-First Street, then the world’s largest movie theater, with 5,300 seats, Rothafel had pioneered the deluxe presentation of movies, folding them into an elaborate program of stage entertainment that often included ballet and orchestra performances. Even when the movies he showed were terrible, Rothafel could come close to selling out the house.

  Learning about Lubin and Rothafel’s bold action, Fox resolved that “never again shall anyone talk me out of doing what I feel impelled to do.” For the time being, though, all he could do was watch and wait for an opportunity to get even.

  Fortunately for Fox, Lubin didn’t really know what he was doing. By October 1925, the Roxy’s projected costs had escalated to $8 million, and Lubin was having a difficult time finding bankers to provide financing so that construction could begin. His plan had a big hole in it. At a time when the major studios controlled theater circuits that they used like company stores to sell their products, the Roxy had no studio affiliation to ensure a steady supply of important movies. When Lubin did secure financing—in November 1925 two banking firms underwrote realty bonds and sponsored a public stock offering—he had to assume personal responsibility for cost overruns.

  And soon after construction began in March 1926, there were overruns, so much so that, according to Motion Picture News, “the opinion was practically unanimous that this theater was doomed to dire failure.” Fox sent Alfred Blumenthal, now working for Foxthal Realty, to make an offer. Other studios also dispatched representatives, but Lubin, desperate to hold on to the project, kept quoting prices that were too high. Blumenthal visited nearly every day. Finally, one night in early March 1927, about a week before opening day, Fox accompanied Blumenthal to the Roxy. As workers rushed around laying down the carpet and bolting seats to the floor, as the orchestra rehearsed and the ballet dancers practiced their routine, Fox walked about quietly. Then, according to early film executive and self-styled historian Benjamin B. Hampton, Fox and Blumenthal found Lubin, “a small man in shirt sleeves, perspiring and dust-stained, his normally husky voice hoarsened to a croak with nervous tension and lack of sleep.”

  Lubin had no more energy to hold out. Described by Photoplay as “a fragile little cuss, with nerves made of spun glass,” he was facing $2 million in cost overruns. If those bills weren’t paid, the bankers would foreclose and he would end up with nothing except the $2 million debt. Within minutes, Fox bought Lubin’s interest in the Roxy and agreed to assume all the theater’s current liabilities, so that Lubin would clear a profit of more than $3 million.

  And thus Fox got what he thought he should have had in the first place. Everyone seemed delighted. Fox praised Rothafel as “the greatest genius of motion picture presentation.” Rothafel told reporters he would welcome Fox’s “advice, counsel and guidance,” and concluded, “I am very happy indeed.” Lubin deemed the arrangement “an ideal one for all concerned.”

  That was the public version of events. It was mostly true, but not entirely. First, Fox hadn’t actually bought the Roxy—not the land or the building or the business. He had bought a controlling share of the stock of the Roxy Circuit Inc., the holding company that, in turn, owned more than half the stock of the Roxy Theatre. More accurately, Fox had become the first among many owners of the Roxy, with all the power of a full owner, but also an implied responsibility to run the business for the benefit of the other owners as well as himself. Second, Fox hadn’t paid $15 million. The price of the deal was $4.5 million, a generous reflection of the value of the securities at stake. And Fox hadn’t actually paid any money yet. Because the pressing priority was to resolve Lubin’s $2 million debt, Fox would not begin paying Lubin for another two years, and then he would make installment payments stretching over three years and ending in March 1932. And third, although at the press conference Fox had portrayed his acquisition of the Roxy as an easy and munificent gesture, in fact, money was extremely tight. Fox Film had to join Fox Theatres as an equal partner in the purchase, and even that arrangement made Lubin sufficiently nervous that he required Fox personally to guarantee the last $1 million payment.

  For all the glory it conferred, the Roxy deal added to Fox’s sense of motion picture industry martyrdom. Why did he always have to shoulder every burden? Why couldn’t others try harder? Going forward, the Roxy would be a highly risky business venture. Although the theater did well in its opening week, there was no telling what would happen once the novelty wore off. The potential for loss was staggering. Experts estimated the Roxy’s weekly operating costs to be at least $80,000.

  Another aspect of the Roxy purchase that Fox obscured from public view was his true opinion of Samuel Rothafel, who had a long-term contract to manage the theater. While he admired his professional skill, on a personal level Fox regarded Rothafel with contempt. Always he would continue to think of Rothafel primarily in terms of his early occupation as a “trap drummer” in a midwestern movie theater orchestra: “Not only did he play the drums but he played all the jingling bells, blowed [sic] the whistles and all the other contraptions that falls [sic] to the duties of a drummer.”

  Indeed, Rothafel the man was more difficult to like than Roxy the folksy, friendly, “Hello, everybody!” public personality. Journalist Allene Talmey described him as a schmaltzy, self-pitying “sob sister,” boastful of his “passion for frankfurters and sauerkraut . . . and nicknames on five minutes’ acquaintanceship,” and ever ready with a “pail of tears.” He was, Talmey wrote, “a man without intimates.”

  To Fox’s eye, Rothafel was unprincipled and untrustworthy. He had known him since around 1912, when Rothafel arrived in New York to manage the failing Regent Theatre at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue. Rothafel turned the property around so dramatically that he was hired in 1914 to manage the newly built $1 million Mark Strand Theatre, at Forty-Seventh and Broadway. Shortly afterward, Fox learned, Rothafel took a copy of the Strand’s earnings report to competitors in the hope of persuading them to build a rival theater. This led to the creation of the deluxe Rivoli Theatre at Broadway and Forty-Ninth, with Rothafel as manager. Fox said, “The owners of the Rivoli Theater became all vexed and excited because Mr. Rothafel was showing the earnings of the Rivoli Theater to another group in the hopes that it would buil
d a competitive theater.” Thus arose the Capitol Theatre, with Rothafel as manager. Then, after launching his national radio show from the Capitol and adopting the trade name “Roxy,” Rothafel began showing the Capitol’s earnings reports around town. That was the way he’d met Lubin.

  As galling as Fox found such repeated acts of disloyalty to an employer, he was even more incensed by the sneaky, manipulative tactics Rothafel used to promote the Roxy Theatres Corporation stock. In his radio broadcasts, in letters, and during personal appearances, Rothafel constantly referred to the Roxy as his own, a project into which he was inviting all his good friends, the fans. “I want you all in on it. I want you to come in as my partners,” he advertised in the New York Times in November 1925. “I want us all to be one big Gang together, running our own big theatre.”

  “From now on, Roxy was going to own his own theater, so it was advertised,” Fox said. “The fact of the matter was, he wasn’t going to do anything of the kind. He was just going to manage a larger theater than he ever managed before and Lubin, the promoter, was going to profit by it.” According to Fox, neither Rothafel nor Lubin had a dime of their own money in the Roxy. And Fox was certain that no wealthy, knowledgeable investors ever touched the Roxy stock. “The funds of servant girls, barbers, bootblacks, truck drivers, bookkeepers, and many others of similar occupation, wholly inexperienced in Wall Street, believing in this demigod Roxy, actually bought $5 million worth of preferred stock. Roxy campaigned for the sale of this stock by the sending out of letters and by using the radio to broadcast that here was a chance for his admirers to build for him this temple of music and [to receive] great profits.”

  Much to Fox’s annoyance, once he had their money, Rothafel seemed to forget all about his investors, who, Fox estimated, numbered more than thirteen thousand. Fox said, “After the Fox enterprises had acquired the Roxy Theater, I naturally was in personal contact with him. I again and again reminded him of his extreme obligation to these poor people who had invested $5 million on his say-so; that in spite of the fact that the theater was a profitable venture, that greater profits could be earned by economies that he could put into effect; that the only way he could ever hope to have the people who followed him blindly and invested this money—the only way he could hope to have them get this money back was through profits.”

  According to Rothafel biographer Ross Melnick, Rothafel didn’t like Fox any more than Fox liked him. In his previous positions, Rothafel generally had been able to do as he wished as long as he delivered phenomenal results. It hadn’t been easy to earn that trust. “Pitting unusual ideas against the conventional views of people in power is no child’s play. You suffer opposition, antagonism, and sometimes even slander. You often begin to doubt yourself,” Rothafel lamented. Now, with Fox as the Roxy’s owner, he would have to endure Fox’s fierce and unforgiving financial supervision.

  Despite their mutual antipathy, Fox needed Rothafel to pull in the audiences—and Rothafel did make money. During the first six months, the Roxy averaged weekly receipts of more than $105,000, yielding profits of more than $25,000. According to Motion Picture News, the Roxy quickly became “without doubt the world’s most successful theatre enterprise.”

  Such was show business, where the facts didn’t matter as much as the story one told. For Fox, even his own past was becoming fuzzy. At the Roxy purchase announcement press conference, after his heart-rending tale about having to go to work at age ten, a reporter asked him to describe his first job. Fox was taken aback. It wasn’t so much that he had forgotten—as Theda Bara noted, he had a vaultlike memory from which very little ever escaped—as that he couldn’t be bothered to try to remember. He replied, “Well, what does one do at ten? I suppose I must have sold papers.” He wasn’t saying he had forgotten. He was saying, in effect, that the truth was somewhat beside the point.

  CHAPTER 31

  Sunrise (1927)

  This Song

  of the Man and his Wife

  is of no place

  and every place;

  you might hear it anywhere

  at any time.

  —OPENING INTERTITLE FROM SUNRISE

  Just as buying control of the Roxy Theatre signaled Fox’s imperial intentions as an exhibitor, so Sunrise (1927) represented the ultimate purpose of that ambition—to make movies that reached new heights of motion picture artistry. Widely considered one of the best movies ever made, a visually mesmerizing portrait of a troubled marriage restored to love, Sunrise would become Fox Film’s single greatest achievement. Sunrise would also be the studio’s greatest disappointment, entailing tragedy.

  Fox had tremendous hopes for Sunrise, the first project for German director F. W. Murnau at Fox Film. Although the one-year contract Murnau signed with the studio in January 1925 was supposed to begin in February 1926, his arrival in the United States was delayed until July 1926 by previous obligations at UFA studios in Berlin, where he was filming a version of Faust. During the eighteen-month waiting period, Fox built up a set of expectations that recalled his artistic infatuation with Herbert Brenon a decade before. Idealizing the director in absentia, Fox came to regard Murnau as “a man who can accomplish what we have dreamed of.”

  They were an unlikely match. At six foot four, with reddish-blond hair, a broad-shouldered “lumberjack” frame, elegantly chiseled features, and, according to actress-screenwriter Salka Viertel, the “pose of a grand seigneur,” Murnau towered over the portly, unfussy, five-foot-seven Fox in size and bearing. During the world war, Murnau had served in the Prussian Guards and the German Air Force, part of the enemy military power that Fox had demonized in movies such as The Prussian Cur (1918) and Why America Will Win (1918). Murnau was also quietly but unmistakably homosexual, while Fox, who had grown up amid the social chaos of the slums, held firmly to traditional standards of personal conduct. To Fox, marriage and children marked a man’s character as stable and upstanding.

  Nonetheless, for Fox, one fact overcame all others: Murnau was an artist. He had made great movies in Germany and his attitude toward filmmaking mirrored Fox’s highest hopes. Art was international, Murnau believed, and in an article published under his byline in Film Daily in June 1925, he wrote that, at Fox Film, he intended to make movies that would be “practical, as well as inspirational.” Art was also collaborative. “A director should not work on his script alone,” Murnau opined in the same article. “There are many fine points a man will miss, in a private perusal of a script that he can get verbally from outside minds.” And art was personal, emotional. His assistant and technical director Hermann Bing explained that Murnau “aims to turn a man’s mind, his heart, his soul, inside out and then put him on the screen for other men to see.” Lest that sound expensive, Bing emphasized, “Murnau will do nothing spectacular. There will be no elaborate sets, no big scenes, no splurge, no blustering effects.”

  While Murnau said, or had said for him, all the right things, he also said a few wrong things. Acknowledging in his Film Daily article that “essential differences” divided American and European audiences, he admitted that he didn’t entirely understand “the American viewpoint.” He also blithely estimated that a good movie might take a year to make, with the possibility of retakes months later. His haziness about American film production priorities, his lack of awareness of economics, led to a series of skirmishes in late 1925 and early 1926 with Winnie Sheehan, then the acting head of West Coast production, over story selection. Sunrise was not the movie Murnau most wanted to make.

  Instead, Murnau had his heart set on adapting the 1920 Danish novel Frozen Justice, about a beautiful half-caste Eskimo wife who runs off to the big city with a ruthless white trader, leaving behind her betrayed Eskimo chief husband, who becomes obsessed with revenge. In November 1925, Murnau wrote to Sheehan from Berlin, “When I read this book the first time, it impressed me immediately as the ideal motion picture story for me, and plenty of ideas came to my mind . . . today I feel fully grown together with the story. I lo
ve it and it would be hard for me to part with it.” Fox Film already owned the story rights, and Murnaus was sure he could make Frozen Justice as an “absolutely novel motion picture production which is sure to be an international success.” In fact, he told Sheehan, he wanted to make Frozen Justice more than he’d ever wanted to make any other movie.

  Something about Murnau’s high-hatted attitude—his apparent assumption that whatever he wanted he would get—offended Sheehan. Sheehan didn’t tell Murnau directly, but instead communicated through Julius Aussenberg, Fox Film’s Berlin-based representative for Central Europe, that Frozen Justice would not be a good idea for Murnau because it would require a year’s trip to Alaska. Murnau agreed that “of course” he would have to film the movie in Alaska, but he thought six months there would be sufficient. Murnau seemed to think that answer settled the matter. “Please do not hesitate any longer and confirm to Mr. Aussenberg by cable that you sanction my selection of this story.”

  Absolutely not. Sheehan seemed to delight in refusing Frozen Justice to Murnau just because he could. He wasn’t really concerned that the story would be too expensive to film. While running up “a large cable bill” trying to steer Murnau toward another story, Sheehan assigned Frozen Justice to John Ford instead. In a December 1925 letter to Ford, Sheehan gloated, “Mr. F. W. Murnau of Berlin . . . is suffering mental anguish and untold tortures” at being denied the project. Neither did Sheehan think that Murnau didn’t understand the material. In fact, Murnau’s ideas for Frozen Justice were good enough to steal. Sheehan sent Ford a copy of Murnau’s letter about the project and wrote that he wanted to talk to Ford about Murnau’s proposed approach, which he believed presented a “fine opportunity ahead.” As events had it, Ford would not make Frozen Justice; Allan Dwan would in 1929, but Sheehan had made his point. Not everyone was going to treat Mr. F. W. Murnau like a god.