by Vanda Krefft
As always, Fox had no patience with nail-biters. Again he led the way. In an astonishing ninety days, he built Movietone City, a brand-new $7 million sound-era studio* on forty acres (previously occupied by cactus and sagebrush and stables for Tom Mix’s horses) at the one-hundred-acre Fox Hills lot. On July 28, 1928, about 1,200 laborers began working nonstop, seven days a week in three consecutive eight-hour shifts. The result was the largest and best-equipped talking pictures studio in the world, the “eighth wonder of the world,” according to Fox Film literature, and for Fox himself, “a dream come true.” Powered by the largest privately owned electricity plant on the West Coast, Movietone City had twenty-seven reinforced concrete buildings that ranged from four enormous structures, each containing two soundproof stages, to a fully equipped hospital with a physician and surgeon on staff, to cottages for the stars. The property had its own police and fire departments, and gardens designed after those at Versailles. Surrounding the forty-acre oasis, as if to preserve its pristine vision of the future from influences of the past, was a fourteen-foot-high concrete wall.
The eight soundproof stages, housed two apiece in four buildings, represented an unprecedented engineering achievement. Because the main problem in recording sound is eliminating unwanted noise, and because the basis of sound is vibration, the new studios had to be completely stable. Consequently, they were designed as buildings within a building. The four outermost structures were huge concrete shells anchored on piers stretching two hundred feet long and reaching eighteen feet into the ground. Inside each shell, separated by a wide, dead airspace, was another entirely separate concrete building suspended by steel rods from the roof of the exterior building. Within each interior building, using the same system of suspension and dead airspace, were two soundproof stages. Believed to be the first manmade, absolutely silent spaces on earth, the stages allegedly wouldn’t feel an earthquake unless the fault line ran directly underneath them.
Fox meant Movietone City as more than a state-of-the-art place of business; he saw it also as a kind of community institution. For the October 28, 1928, opening day dedication ceremony, invitations went out to fifty thousand people, and even more showed up, bringing with them an estimated fifteen thousand cars that jammed neighborhood streets in every direction. (All was peaceful: the studio had imported a Stanford University traffic expert to manage the logistics.) In midafternoon, the celebration opened patriotically and inclusively. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner”; prominent Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic clergymen gave speeches; the Versailles-style gardens had been planted with a flower or shrub representing every state in the union. Delivering the keynote address, former assistant U.S. attorney general Oscar Lawler described Movietone City as an emblem of motion picture idealism.
To no one’s great surprise, William Fox did not appear. That is, he was there as much as he cared to be, in the vision and reality of the place, but not in person. He still shunned direct acclamation, still preferred to be the mysterious force behind the grand achievement.
Movietone City made the impression Fox wanted. Called the “country club” studio, it was considered the most beautiful one in Hollywood.
Curiously, Fox didn’t release his first talking feature film, Mother Knows Best, based on the Edna Ferber novella about a pushy stage mother who ruins her daughter’s chances for romance, until October 28, 1928—more than a year after Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer. With so much money and pride invested in Movietone, he wasn’t willing to risk embarrassment. Feature films, requiring the willing suspension of disbelief, were a much more demanding format than newsreel segments, where a viewer could forgive mechanical-sounding voices or technical glitches because of the value of the subject material. Before the latter half of 1928, Fox hadn’t been ready for talking features. Now, with Movietone City up and running—and with Theodore Case having perfected his AEO flashing light recording method and Fox-Case chief engineer Earl Sponable improving Movietone equipment’s portability and ease of operation—he was ready. After adding synchronized soundtracks to many silent movies, Fox set about claiming the remaining sound-era milestones.
In December 1928, Fox released the first outdoor talking feature film, In Old Arizona. Shot partially in the Mojave Desert, the story of Mexican bandit the Cisco Kid, the movie opens with the ringing of bells and the audible flutter of birds’ wings and goes on to showcase the frequent pounding of horses’ hooves, the whistle of a passing train, a rooster crowing, and bacon crackling in a skillet. Much of the conversation is pointless, seemingly included just to show that now people could talk in the movies. Often the characters shout at each other, as if the actors either didn’t trust the microphones or didn’t completely realize they were in a movie rather than onstage. Nevertheless, In Old Arizona won effusive praise—the Los Angeles Express called it “nothing short of triumphant. It advances the art of the talkies distinctly ahead of any rival attempt”—and by early 1930, it would take in $1.03 million against production costs of $305,000.
At Fox Movietone News, one notable achievement after another raced onto the calendar. In October 1928, the frequency of the service was increased from weekly to twice weekly; on December 1, 1928, to three times weekly; and on February 2, 1929, to four times weekly. With fifty news crews dispersed worldwide by the end of 1928 (the end of only its first year of regular service), Movietone News had already preserved a sparkling array of celebrity subjects and historic events. King Alfonso XIII of Spain genially invited Americans to visit his country; Britain’s ailing king, George V, dedicated a bridge, only the second time his voice had been recorded;* Herbert Hoover delivered his acceptance speech after the 1928 presidential election; and George Bernard Shaw did an impression of Mussolini. Fox’s old friend from the 1919 Academy of Music visit, the Prince of Wales, appeared three times. When the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a fifteen-nation agreement outlawing war, was signed in Paris on August 27, 1928, Movietone News microphones caught the sounds of rustling and cheering in the Salle de l’Horloge as German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann inscribed the first signature. When Italy’s Mount Etna erupted in early November 1928, hurling molten lava at two Sicilian towns, Movietone News recorded the noise of houses collapsing.
On March 24, 1929, head of production Sheehan made an announcement that literally stopped traffic: henceforth the studio would make no more silent movies. Fox was the first studio to break completely with the silent era, and the news was so startling that when it flashed on the New York Times’s electric ribbon in Times Square, crowds stood still to stare, blocking vehicles in the road.
Fox won no friends among his peers with his new all-sound policy, which put intense pressure on the others to keep pace. Although the introduction of sound had significantly increased earnings for all the major studios in 1928, many of the industry’s leaders were not persuaded either that the timing was right or that it ever would be. They had good reason to resist. As of March 1929, only about two thousand of the nation’s fifteen thousand movie theaters were wired for sound, and projectionists, even the best of them, were still learning how to operate the new equipment. In the spring of 1929, during three of the four movies that Harrison’s Reports publisher Pete Harrison saw at Fox’s Academy of Music in New York, the sound system failed, causing interruptions of five to twenty minutes, “to the great merriment of the spectators, who yelled and jeered, urging the pictures to talk.”
Shortly after Fox’s all-sound announcement, only small, scrappy Columbia Pictures also pledged to eliminate silent pictures. Paramount, M-G-M, Universal, and even Warner Bros. refused to commit themselves exclusively to sound. Universal founder Carl Laemmle commented, “Personally, I like the silent pictures. I work hard during the day and when I go to see a motion picture I want rest and relaxation, and the silent pictures give it to me . . . There’s another angle to the matter also. I have trouble with my hearing, and I have to strain to hear the talkies.” Within a year, all the major studio heads had followed Fox and given up
on silent film.
In perspective, The Jazz Singer may have acquired its landmark status largely because of Fox’s contributions. It was Fox who pushed to replace sound-on-disk with sound-on-film (so quickly that history tends to blur the distinctions between the two technologies), and it was Fox who spent the money to prove, via Movietone News, that this time sound would work. No studio except the Warners wanted Vitaphone. All the other majors wanted Fox’s Movietone.
Aside from the satisfaction of having played a key role in successfully introducing sound to the motion picture industry, Fox got very little back for his effort and expense, which he estimated first at $2 million and then, as his resentment grew, at $6 million. He was supposed to get exclusive sound newsreel rights, as well as an exclusive, five-year license to make educational, industrial, religious, and scientific sound movies, while the other Movietone-licensed studios would receive only theatrical motion picture rights. AT&T had verbally promised him this during a series of conferences.
However, shortly after the other major studios signed up with ERPI for Movietone sound, Fox learned that they, too, had been granted newsreel rights. M-G-M moved quickly to exercise that part of the license, announcing on June 23, 1928, that it would soon begin the M-G-M Movietone News, to be produced in conjunction with the Hearst organization.
“I complained about it. I told them [AT&T] that they were violating our complete understanding,” Fox said. It wasn’t fair. With the exception of Warner Bros., none of the other studios had contributed anything to talking pictures research, and now “they were to benefit by the experience and the money that the Fox companies had expended.” Phone company executives explained to Fox that they couldn’t show preference to any one licensee, that all the contracts had to be the same. Fox didn’t believe it. The real reason, he suspected, was the RCA Photophone had offered newsreel rights as part of its deal, and Western Electric wasn’t willing to lose enormous future profits on that point.
Competition between the two companies had been extremely close. Many experts considered Photophone sound-on-film superior in quality to Movietone sound-on-film. Photophone used a “variable area” method that translated sounds into different lengths of lines, creating a horizontal, jagged-tooth pattern on the sound portion of the filmstrip. Movietone used a “variable density” method that represented different sounds as different shades of gray on horizontal lines of the same length. “Variable area” was subject to less interference than “variable density,” where any imperfections on the film emulsion would distort the shadings and cause an annoying ground noise.* Photophone theater installations were also priced considerably lower, costing $6,500 to $15,000 compared to $13,000 to $23,000 for Movietone. According to Film Daily, after the Big Five studios’ one-year moratorium expired in February 1928, RCA Photophone appeared to be in the lead.
Countless millions of dollars were at stake. ERPI’s newsreel promise to Fox had to be sacrificed.
Otterson assured Fox that the phone company still intended to fulfill its other promise and would give Fox Film an exclusive five-year contract to make industrial, educational, and religious sound films. When Fox was ready, they would provide the appropriate papers. Fox recalled, “Although we asked for those papers every time we saw representatives of the Telephone Company, we never got those papers.”
Quietly, calmly, Fox exacted revenge. Although in May 1928 he began negotiating Movietone equipment contracts with ERPI on terms identical to those received by the other major studios, and although he would abide by those terms, he never signed the contracts. That left him free to quit Western Electric at any time.
To reinforce the strength of the threat, he made an important decision about the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film patents that he had optioned in October 1926 after they failed to generate any profits for their owners in Europe. Around July 1927, on the advice of ERPI’s lawyers, Fox had exercised part of his option and bought the North American rights for about $60,000. Although Tri-Ergon’s application was still under review by the U.S. Patent Office, if approved, the patents would be worth a fortune because they purported to govern essential parts of both the Movietone and Photophone systems. Fox would be entitled to collect royalties from both companies and could even go into business as a competitor to them.
In the aftermath of their dispute over the Movietone newsreel rights, Fox took care to appear as if he were continuing to respect the phone company’s wishes. In mid-1928, it was time for him to make a decision about Tri-Ergon’s worldwide rights. Fox wanted to buy them. Otterson, wary of Fox’s penchant for control, no longer wanted him involved with patents. According to Fox, Otterson told him, “If you want our company’s help from time to time, you will not exercise these rights. You can do things better with the backing of the Telephone Company, and if you want the Telephone Company as your friend, we insist that you don’t exercise this option.” Fox let his option on the worldwide rights expire. On August 14, 1928, he cabled Otterson, then in Europe, to confirm that action and assure him: “My interest in this matter is to insure and protect your company in Europe as we have done in this country and I am still willing to act on your advice.”
Three weeks later, on September 4, 1928, Fox got even. Formalizing the transfer of the Tri-Ergon North American patent rights from the Swiss Tri-Ergon company, Fox named himself personally as the new owner. Otterson hadn’t expected that. He had assumed that Fox would assign the Tri-Ergon rights to the Fox-Case Corporation, which would have been contractually obligated to share them with Western Electric/ERPI. Fox now had a potential weapon against the phone company. Fox promised Otterson that he had no ill intent and would make the North American Tri-Ergon rights available for their mutual benefit. Unspoken but implicit was the condition that he would do so only if the phone company flew straight with him from now on.
No one was going to push William Fox around.
CHAPTER 33
The One Great Independent
The world is ready to receive masterpieces of the cinema.
—WILLIAM FOX, 1928
As Fox pushed Movietone technology forward to lead the sound revolution, he seemed invincible. Beginning in 1927, Fox Film entered a golden age commercially and artistically, establishing itself decisively at the top. Among the studio’s releases during the late 1920s would be some of the early film industry’s most significant accomplishments, movies that made a difference then and that still matter today.
Creatively, Fox remained the studio’s supreme guiding force. Winfield Sheehan, installed as West Coast head of production in the fall of 1926, had little independent authority. As Fox later explained, “He was a subordinate. He acted under my orders. He was required to and did consult me in most things that he did, and had to receive my approval before he could proceed.” Fox’s absolute control arose from the simple fact that he had never sold any of his 51 percent ownership of Fox Film’s voting stock and so no one could overrule him. In that respect he was unique: in order to fund expansion, all the other major studio heads had taken bankers onto their boards of directors. Proud not only of what he had achieved but also of the way he had achieved it, Fox adopted a new slogan for Fox Film: “The one great independent.”
In his philosophy of filmmaking as well, Fox rejected the industry’s conventional wisdom, which more than ever emphasized the importance of stars. Instead, Fox continued to believe in directors as the primary architects of success. By 1927, Fox Film’s staff of thirty-five directors included some of Hollywood’s most admired names: F. W. Murnau, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Frank Borzage, and Allan Dwan. In addition to Murnau, two of them especially anchored Fox Film as a first-rate studio: John Ford and Frank Borzage. Catching Fox’s vision, willing to work within the well-defined boundaries of his preferences, they advanced the art of motion pictures as they advanced their own careers.
With six years and twenty-one movies made at Fox Film as of early 1927, Ford was the most dependable interpreter of the studio’s outlook. He gave Fo
x back the thoughtful side of himself, the part that looked back and regretted the losses. No theme better captured this longing for a treasured past than that of mother love. Now that Fox Film had the means, now that his talent had matured, Ford raised to the status of art what previously had been the simple sentimentality of movies such as Over the Hill (1920).
Ford’s Four Sons (1928, silent) was based on the Saturday Evening Post short story “Grandmother Bernle Learns Her Letters,” about an elderly Bavarian woman who loses three sons in the Great War and then comes to New York City to live with her surviving son, his wife, and their young boy. It was Ford’s particular genius to make simultaneously a standard-issue Fox Film and an evocative personal statement. “Grandmother” became “Mother” Bernle, consistent with Fox’s opinion that no stronger love existed than that of a mother for her child, and Margaret Mann as Mother Bernle looked very much like Over the Hill actress Mary Carr, who in turn had looked very much like the beloved Anna Fox. Father Bernle is neither seen nor mentioned. Ford evidently knew quite well that, in Fox movies, fathers were irrelevant except as villains or as heroic sons with their own families. The movie concludes with Mother Bernle finding happiness for the rest of her days when her loving son in New York welcomes her into his home.
Originally, Four Sons didn’t have that straightforward happy ending. After viewing the director’s cut, Sheehan decided that the son’s wife came across as having “an icy cold bearing” and the son as insufficiently overjoyed by his mother’s impending arrival. The audience, Sheehan instructed Ford, “wants to see how faith and hope can conquer over adverse circumstances.” Ford complied. By the time the movie was released, the son and his wife had become warmly devoted to each other, and in the last scene, Mother Bernle wakes up in a fireside chair in their apartment, her grandson in her lap. Mother Bernle says, “For all Thy blessings, dear God, I thank Thee—” and the movie ends with mother and son embracing.