The Man Who Made the Movies

by Vanda Krefft

  All movies, however, face competition and less-than-ideal conditions. Sunrise wasn’t so much a vast failure as a vast disappointment for Fox. In that respect, the movie’s greatest handicap may have been the weight of expectations it had to bear as a result of its $1.2 million expense. To get his money back, Fox demanded that the movie perform like broad, crowd-pleasing entertainment. Sunrise couldn’t do that. Murnau had never understood that it should do that. Instead, he had concentrated on doing what Fox had asked him to do, creating “the very best and finest—the idealistic and the beautiful.” Perhaps if Murnau had better understood, if someone had explained to him, the unvarying commercial basis of American studio filmmaking, he might have found a way to make the same movie more cost effectively—without, for instance, the tree that twice needed artificial leaves glued on.

  After Sunrise, Murnau fell off his pedestal. To Fox, he now became like every other director, someone who needed the studio’s close supervision.

  Murnau probably anticipated this fate after the studio’s chilly treatment of him in the spring of 1927. Although he had been released from his UFA contract and had no other work to detain him in Germany, he didn’t attend the New York premiere of Sunrise on September 23, 1927, and instead returned to the United States on October 7. He managed to rally himself for the November 29 premiere of the silent version* in Los Angeles, but there he was among friends, admirers, and fellow artists and ran no risk of encountering an unhappy William Fox.

  Evidently disheartened, Murnau delayed starting work on his next film, 4 Devils, a drama about four young circus trapeze artists, two men and two women, whose friendship and professional harmony are threatened when one of the men succumbs sexually to a wealthy vamp. Probably in early October 1927, when Murnau spent a few days in New York following his arrival from Germany, he and Fox had discussed the project, and Fox had laid out a whole new set of rules for their relationship. There would be no more hands-off policy and no more financial carte blanche. Also, from now on, Eva Fox would now be involved. The boss’s wife looking over his shoulder, despite all he had worked so hard to give to the art of film: no wonder Murnau temporized.

  On December 22, 1927, guilt overcame him. Ruefully he wrote to Fox, “my not having communicated with you until now, weighs heavily on my mind. So with this letter I shall try to make good for that and begin the New Year and my new picture with a clear conscience.” He would start work on 4 Devils on Tuesday, January 3, 1928, and was “greatly delighted with my story and with the forthcoming production.” He’d keep costs “reasonable,” Murnau promised, “since exorbitant settings like in Sunrise are not required, and since I have also tried my utmost, in order not to be subjected to California weather-whims, to have all my settings on the Hollywood stages, with only a very, very few exterior shots.” Now that he knew the rules, he would follow them. And yes, humbly, he would submit to higher authority. This must have been a difficult sentence to write: “I shall mail you a copy of my script and I certainly would like to hear from you and Mrs. Fox, as to your opinions about the story, and suggestions.”

  Five days later, Fox wrote back. His opening salutation sent a message by itself. Although Murnau had addressed his letter to “My dear Mr. Fox,” although only nine months earlier Fox had spoken of him as “Dr. Murnau,” the great director had now become “My dear Fred.” Courteous, respectful, encouraging even, Fox nonetheless instructed Murnau how to go about his work. The script for 4 Devils ought to contain not only “screen drama,” but also “pathos, thrills, well-timed and well calculated comedy situations intermingled with the other emotions which I am certain every large picture requires.” Once he and “Mrs. Fox” received the script, they would read it and send back comments promptly.

  The production didn’t go well. Although it was by no means cheaply made—more than 1,300 extras were hired for the circus audience, and some scenes were shot with six cameras—the studio imposed economies. Murnau had wanted both his lead actors from Sunrise. He got only Janet Gaynor. George O’Brien, he was told, was too big a star for 4 Devils. Instead, unknown Charles Morton played the seduced aerialist. And none of Murnau’s advisers, presumably not even the astute Mrs. Fox, seemed truly to understand the story. Murnau had to shoot four different endings. He wanted a tragedy, the story of a man who begins an affair impulsively and casually, and thus incites a chain of events leading not only to his own death but also to that of the kindhearted young woman who loves him. That version tested well. The studio substituted a happy, romantic ending before the premiere in New York on October 3, 1928. In May 1929, with no input from Murnau, another director reshot about a quarter of the movie to incorporate sound.

  Many reviewers tried to be kind, but 4 Devils was no Sunrise, so most of the praise went to Janet Gaynor for a sensitive, sympathetic performance. Life magazine critic Robert E. Sherwood didn’t bother with niceties. Labeling 4 Devils “almost shockingly trite,” he commented about the plot, “Such goings on have not been witnessed since the hottest days of Theda Bara and Louise Glaum.” Of Murnau, he lamented, “I hate to see so substantial an idol as this crumbling before my eyes.”

  Murnau came back for another try with City Girl (1929), which he had wanted to title Our Daily Bread, “to tell a tale about WHEAT—about the ‘sacredness of bread’—about the estrangement of the modern metropolitans from and their ignorance about Nature’s sources of sustenance.” The studio changed the story to a romance between a young farmer (Charles Farrell) and a city waitress (Mary Duncan, who had played the glamorous, wealthy vamp, in 4 Devils), and generally interfered so much that Murnau quit before the movie was finished. Nobody tried hard to stop him. On February 4, 1929, Fox Film let the director out of his contract, even though he had made only two of the four required movies. Then the studio chopped City Girl down to a running time of only sixty-eight minutes and had nearly half the film reshot by another director to include spoken dialogue.

  Surviving documents don’t indicate who exactly at Fox Film took such a heavy hand with 4 Devils and City Girl. Likely Fox was more involved with the former than the latter. By the time of City Girl, he seems to have been willing to do for Murnau no more than honor the four-year contract he had impulsively given him on July 8, 1926. Probably it was Sheehan, trying to guess what Fox wanted, who demanded most of the changes for both movies and got them because Murnau no longer had direct access to Fox. Indifferent now to the once-revered German genius, Fox abandoned Murnau to Sheehan. In Fox’s view, there were other talented directors.

  Despondent over his experiences in Hollywood, Murnau formed a production company with documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, producer and director of the successful Nanook of the North (1922). In May 1929 Murnau sailed to the South Pacific to make Tabu, a drama of young lovers whose innocent happiness is destroyed both by an Old Warrior, who wants the girl to become a sacred maiden dedicated to the gods, and by the Westernized, money-centered society of the island to which they escape.

  Perhaps Murnau was translating his interpretation of his experiences at Fox Film, meditating on his failure to adapt himself and the love of his life, motion pictures, to a commercial culture. At the end of the movie, the Old Warrior steals the girl back, and the boy drowns trying to swim after their ship. Murnau, too, had lost his chance at happiness because he had not protected the movies properly when their future was entrusted to him. He, too, had failed to provide financially. Now the treasure had been reclaimed. In Tabu, the boy has nothing to live for once he realizes he belongs to the girl’s past. In real life, after three Fox Film failures—that was how the industry judged those movies at the time—Murnau had become a person of little importance to the Hollywood power structure.

  Murnau returned to California in late 1930, settling into a low-key, secluded existence at an old-fashioned hotel near the ocean in Santa Monica. Asked by a reporter to describe his experiences at Fox Film, he laughed and said only, “No.” By late February 1931, he had arranged for Paramount to distribute Tab
u.

  On March 10, 1931, a week and a day before the movie’s scheduled premiere in New York, Murnau was seriously injured in a car accident north of Santa Barbara. His car, driven by his valet, had been traveling on the Pacific Coast Highway when it swerved to avoid a truck, pitched over an embankment, and crashed upside down some thirty feet below, on top of Murnau. His skull was fractured, his ribs broken, and his lungs punctured. He died in a local hospital the following morning. He was forty-two.

  CHAPTER 32

  The Triumph of Movietone

  In the spring of 1928, the rest of the motion picture industry made up its mind about sound technology. All the major studios chose to adopt Fox’s Movietone sound-on-film system instead of Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone sound-on-disk or RCA Photophone’s sound-on-film.* The signal event occurred on May 14, 1928, when Paramount, MGM, and United Artists executed fifteen-year contracts with Western Electric; by late July 1928, Universal and First National had also signed up. Over the next three months, they were joined by Hal Roach Studios, Christie Film Company, and Columbia Pictures. According to Fox, “[N]one of them made their pictures on disk, but all of them adopted the Fox system of sound and image on the celluloid.” Warner Bros. continued making movies with Vitaphone, but would switch in 1930 to sound-on-film because of the expense of breakage and shipping the sixteen-inch records. As for RCA’s Photophone sound-on-film system, during the late 1920s its only studio customers were RKO and Pathé, both of which RCA owned. (In 1933, Disney would sign up for Photophone, and over the next few years, so would Republic Pictures, Warner Bros., and, for some of its films, Columbia Pictures.)

  As the major producers went, so did the major film exhibitors. Largely, one group was the other. Thousands of theaters nationwide, representing at least one-third of the total seating capacity, were owned by or affiliated with the studios, which naturally wanted to make sure they could play their movies there. In the spring to midsummer of 1928, while it was theoretically possible for theater owners to install and use RCA Photophone equipment to play Movietone films, in practice that would have tempted trouble. Western Electric’s contracts prohibited studios from renting movies made on its equipment to any theater with a rival manufacturer’s installation.* For that reason, the remaining independent theater chains also had a strong incentive to sign up with Western Electric. (Warner Bros. wasn’t shut out because Western Electric had designed the projector equipment so that Vitaphone could be played on a Movietone machine with an inexpensive extra part.) Not until December 1928 did Western Electric formally drop its ban on interchangeability with RCA Photophone. By then, the direction-setting commitments had been made.

  With Movietone as the forefront technology, sound swept through the American motion picture industry at whirlwind speed. By February 1930, Hollywood studios were producing only 5 percent silent pictures. Major exhibitors rushed to keep up, embracing Movietone. At the end of 1927, there had been 157 theaters in the United States equipped for sound, 102 of them for disk only and 55 for both disk and film. One year later, Western Electric had completed 1,046 theater installations, with 1,032 for disk and film. By July 1930, nearly all the nation’s 2,000 first-run theaters had been wired for sound. Small theaters in small towns took longer to abandon silent pictures, but as of 1935 both production and exhibition in the United States had converted 100 percent to sound.

  In ascribing credit for the motion picture sound revolution, film history invariably tips its hat to the Warner brothers because of their early development of Vitaphone and their October 6, 1927, release of The Jazz Singer. The foremost scholar on Hollywood’s transition to sound, Douglas Gomery, has written, “Warner Brothers had proven sound’s saleability. Fox just developed that section of the market, newsreels, ignored by Warner Brothers.” Thus, concludes Gomery, “Warner Brothers was the innovator of sound . . . Fox Film Corporation followed Warner Brothers’ lead with much less difficulty.”

  In fact, Fox played a key role in the sound revolution and did far more than tag along after the Warners. He had known since the early 1920s that motion picture sound was inevitable and imminent, and he developed Movietone in almost the same time frame that Warner Bros. worked on sound-on-disk. The Warners formed Vitaphone in April 1926; Fox started Fox-Case in July 1926. Although it took Fox more than a year after The Jazz Singer to release his first talking feature film, initially he didn’t have the assistance of AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories.

  Furthermore, while The Jazz Singer certainly demonstrated the tremendous public appeal of sound movies, it did nothing to allay the fears of other studio heads. Before undertaking the trouble and expense of converting to sound, they needed to be convinced that this time the technology would actually work. The Jazz Singer failed to do that. Amid the movie’s clamorous reception, no other producers rushed to sign up for Vitaphone. All recognized, as Fox had known, that sound-on-disk was unsuitable for widespread diffusion. “Vitaphone was extremely cumbersome and unreliable throughout shooting, editing, and sound mixing,” explains sound historian and sound editor and mixer Larry Blake, whose credits include Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven, Syriana, and Behind the Candelabra. “Flexibility during production and creativity during post-production were severely limited.” Regarding exhibition, Rene Brunet, owner of New Orleans’s Prytania Theatre, who as a boy started working in theaters around 1930, comments, “I’ll never commit suicide—if I would have, it would have been when I was trying to keep Vitaphone records in sync.” When streetcars rumbled by on Prytania Street, Brunet remembers, the Vitaphone needle often skipped.

  Fox showed the industry a viable, profitable way to meet public demand for sound. Beginning in early 1927, he poured money into developing Movietone News as a first-class news organization. In addition to the Mussolini* and Vatican choir segments that accompanied the Sunrise premiere in September 1927, Movietone News covered a wide array of events during 1927. Among them were Charles Lindbergh’s whirring, bouncing takeoff on May 20 from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, on his historic transatlantic solo flight; an outdoor march of West Point cadets, complete with trumpet signals and a drillmaster’s orders; a speech by Irish nationalist Éamon de Valera denouncing British rule; the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace; and, ominously, German Army soldiers goose-stepping to the music of the von Hindenburg march in Berlin. In late 1927, Fox began adding Movietone News field crews worldwide at the rate of one or two per month, and on December 3, 1927, Movietone News began regular weekly service as the world’s first talking newsreel. Fox believed so much in the future that he acted as if it were already present.

  Given the enormous expense facing the industry in the conversion to sound, Fox knew that the broader business community had to be won over as well. In February and March 1928, Fox Film held three Movietone demonstrations at the Western Avenue studios in Los Angeles, primarily for the commercial and investment bankers who would be called upon to help finance the new sound equipment and facilities. Several dozen business leaders attended each presentation, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. After the first one, Los Angeles lawyer Alfred Wright, who organized the events, wrote to Winfield Sheehan, “You cannot go too far in assuring Mr. Fox of the keen interest not only in Movietone itself but in his work in its development.” Cabling his congratulations to Fox, Los Angeles real estate developer Edwin Janss commented, “I was most agreeably surprised and amazed . . . The Movietone in my opinion is perfect.” No other movie studio undertook any such outreach effort, and Fox Film received nothing in return.

  Fox may not have been essential to the sound revolution. Absent him, the major producers would most likely have adopted RCA’s Photophone sound-on-film system. Yet Fox did develop Movietone, and Movietone was the way the most major studios got started making talking pictures.

  Another claim that has obscured Fox’s contribution to the sound revolution is that the major studios ended up using a Western Electric system that replaced a key piece of the Fox-Case technology—in technica
l terms, Western Electric substituted a light valve for the AEO flashing light method of translating sound to electrical impulses. However, that substitution evidently didn’t occur until 1929 or 1930,* well after the major studios had committed to Movietone, and it was not considered to make a substantial difference. Through 1929, without noting any distinction, Western Electric advertised its sound-on-film system under the brand name Movietone, indicating that the technology was the same as that used by the Fox Movietone newsreels, which employed the Fox-Case AEO flashing light method. Western Electric would later quietly bury the Movietone name when the company’s relationship with Fox deteriorated.

  Even after the motion picture industry made its commitment to adopt sound in the spring and summer of 1928, Fox kept pushing. Other studio heads wanted to proceed slowly, to continue releasing silent movies and gradually phase in sound. The main reason for their caution, Fox believed, was that the industry was carrying at least $100 million worth of silent movies on the books as a current asset. (The customary practice was to amortize a movie’s negative and positive costs within a year from the release date, and Hollywood studios had collectively been spending about $100 million a year on production.) If sound took over all at once, that $100 million of inventory would be worthless—this at a time when producers would be pouring out a fortune for new facilities, new equipment, and new creative and technical personnel. Foreign income was another important consideration. International markets accounted for more than 30 percent of U.S. studios’ gross revenues, and other countries were expected to shun English-speaking movies.