History:
William Fox, Founder of the Fox Empire
Fox was born Wilhelm Fried to Jewish parents in Tolcsva, Hungary, then part of Austria-Hungary. He came to America at the age of 9 months, where his name was anglicized to William Fox. In 1900 he started his own company which he sold in 1904 to purchase his first nickelodeon. In 1915, he started Fox Film Corporation.
William Fox opened his first theatre with 146 seats in a Brooklyn storefront in the early 1920s. He then parlayed his first success into a nationwide circuit of 305 theatres. Always more of an entrepreneur than a showman, Fox concentrated on acquiring and building theaters; pictures were secondary.
Fox shook the film industry with his takeover of the Loew's Corporation, swallowing up an additional 500 theatres and the Mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture Studios to boot. However, the Justice Department's anti-trust unit interceded to block the merger. During this period, Fox was badly injured in a car crash in the summer of 1929, and by the time he recovered the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 had taken most of his fortune, putting an end to the Loew's merger. Newspapers in December of 1929 carried the story of how the stock market crash left William Fox with $91,000,000 of debt.
Fox lost control of the Fox Film Corporation in 1930 during a hostile takeover. A combination of the stock market crash, Fox's car accident injury, and government antitrust action forced him into a protracted seven-year struggle to fight off bankruptcy. At his bankruptcy hearing in 1936, Fox attempted to bribe judge John Warren Davis and commit perjury. Fox was sentenced to six months in prison. After serving his time, he retired from the film business. Fox died in 1952 at the age of 73.
