William Fox

William Fox was carried to America as an infant from Tolcsva, Hungary, and grew up working the sweatshops of New York's garment trade, where a childhood accident left one arm permanently weakened. He clawed his way out through a cloth-examining business, then sank his savings into a Brooklyn penny arcade in 1904 and never looked back, expanding into nickelodeons and then a full theater circuit.

Like Laemmle, Fox refused to bow to the Edison trust, but he fought it with lawyers rather than defiance. His antitrust suit became a central weapon in the legal campaign that dismantled the Motion Picture Patents Company, freeing the independents to grow into the studios. Fox promptly built one of his own, the Fox Film Corporation, and integrated it in the classic pattern, producing pictures, distributing them, and showing them in a swelling empire of theaters.

His studio launched Theda Bara, the original screen "vamp," and later the director John Ford and the luminous romances of Frank Borzage. But Fox's most durable contribution was technological. He backed Movietone, a sound-on-film system that recorded audio directly onto the print, and his Fox Movietone newsreels brought the voices of the world into theaters, helping settle the format on which all talking pictures would be built.

At the peak of his ambition in 1929, Fox moved to swallow the Loew's/MGM empire and stand astride the entire industry. Then everything collapsed at once. A serious automobile accident laid him up for months, the stock market crash gutted his overleveraged finances, and antitrust regulators and rival bankers closed in. By 1930 he was forced out of the company that bore his name, wiped out in bankruptcy. In a final humiliation he was convicted of bribing a judge and served time in prison. His old company was folded into Twentieth Century-Fox in 1935 while Fox himself lived out obscure, embittered years until his death in 1952.