The Fox Film Corporation (also known as Fox Studios) was an American independent company that produced motion pictures and was formed in 1915 by the theater "chain" pioneer William Fox. It was the corporate successor to his earlier Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attraction Company (founded 1913).
The company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, but in 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood, California, to oversee the studio's new West Coast production facilities, where the climate was more hospitable for filmmaking. On July 23, 1926, Fox Studios bought the patents of the Movietone sound system for recording sound onto film.
After the Wall Street crash of 1929, William Fox lost control of the company in 1930, during a hostile takeover. Under new president Sidney R. Kent, the new owners merged the company with Twentieth Century Pictures to form Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation (later 20th Century Studios) in 1935.
History
Background
thumb|Founder [[William Fox (producer)|William Fox]]
William Fox entered the film industry in 1904 when he purchased a one-third share of a Brooklyn nickelodeon for $1,667. He reinvested his profits from that initial location, expanding to fifteen similar venues in the city, and purchasing prints from the major studios of the time: Biograph, Essanay, Kalem, Lubin, Pathé, Selig, and Vitagraph. After experiencing further success presenting live vaudeville routines along with motion pictures, he expanded into larger venues beginning with his purchase of the disused Gaiety theater, and continuing with acquisitions throughout New York City and New Jersey, including the Academy of Music.
Fox invested further in the film industry by founding the Greater New York Film Rental Company as a film distributor. The major film studios responded by forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 and the General Film Company in 1910, in an effort to create a monopoly on the creation and distribution of motion pictures. Fox refused to sell out to the monopoly, and sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, eventually receiving a $370,000 settlement, and ending restrictions on the length of films and the prices that could be paid for screenplays.
In 1914, reflecting the broader scope of his business, he renamed it the Box Office Attraction Company. He entered into a contract with the Balboa Amusement Producing Company film studio, purchasing all of their films for showing in his New York area theaters and renting the prints to other exhibitors nationwide. He also continued to distribute material from other sources, such as Winsor McCay's early animated film Gertie the Dinosaur. Later that year, Fox concluded that it was unwise to be so dependent on other companies, so he purchased the Éclair studio facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey, along with property in Staten Island, and arranged for actors and crew. The company became a film studio, using the name Box Office Attraction Company; its first release was Life's Shop Window.
Fox Film Corporation
thumb|This large stage at the Fox Studio on North Western Avenue was used as the men's dressing room when more than 2,000 people were needed for the Jerusalem street scenes in [[Theda Bara's Salomé (1918)]]
thumb|Silent film The Heart Snatcher (1920) directed by [[Roy Del Ruth for Fox Film Corporation.]]
Always more of an entrepreneur than a showman, Fox concentrated on acquiring and building theaters; pictures were secondary. The company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee where it and many other early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood to oversee the studio's West Coast production facilities where a more hospitable and cost-effective climate existed for filmmaking. Between 1915 and 1919, Fox Films earned millions of dollars through films featuring Theda Bara, known as "The Vamp" due to her unique ability to display exoticism. Fox also produced 85 films featuring lead Western actor Tom Mix, who joined Fox in 1917.
With the introduction of sound technology, Fox moved to acquire the rights to a sound-on-film process. In the years 1925–26, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, the U.S. rights to the Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors, and the work of Theodore Case. This resulted in the Movietone sound system later known as "Fox Movietone" developed at the Movietone Studio. Later that year, the company began offering films with a music-and-effects track, and the following year Fox began the weekly Fox Movietone News feature, that ran until 1963. The growing company needed space, and in 1926 Fox acquired<span style="white-space:nowrap"> 300 acres (1.2 km<sup>2</sup>)</span> in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City", the best-equipped studio of its time.
Because William Fox opted to remain in New York, much of the Hollywood filmmaking at the Fox Film Corporation was instead managed by Fox's movie makers. Janet Gaynor would also become one of the company's most prominent stars by the late 1920s. and later ended up in jail on bribery and perjury charges. Fox Film, with more than 500 theatres, was placed in receivership. A bank-mandated reorganization propped the company up for a time, but it soon became apparent that despite its size, Fox could not stand on its own. William Fox resented the way he was forced out of his company and portrayed it as an active conspiracy against him in the 1933 book Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.
Merger
Under new president Sidney Kent, the new owners began negotiating with the upstart, but powerful independent Twentieth Century Pictures in the early spring of 1935. Twentieth Century had begun in the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in 1932 under founders Joseph Schenck and Darryl F. Zanuck.
The two companies merged that spring of 1935 and became Twentieth Century-Fox. The company was purchased by News Corporation in 1985, becoming "20th Century Fox" without the hyphen, and in 2019 was acquired by The Walt Disney Company as part of Disney's purchase of 20th Century Fox's owner and was renamed 20th Century Studios in 2020. For many years, 20th Century-Fox claimed to have been founded in 1915; for instance, it marked 1945 as its 30th anniversary. However, in recent years it has claimed the 1935 merger as its founding, marking its 75th rather than 95th anniversary in 2010.
Products
Feature films
A 1937 fire in a Fox film storage facility destroyed over 40,000 reels of negatives and prints, including the best-quality copies of every Fox feature produced prior to 1932;