Devin fox biography of william

Witness the mythic spectacle, digital wizardry and box-office dominance of a movie like Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

It makes it easy to forget that commercial American cinema was born in grubby penny arcades and nickelodeon halls, with silent images that juddered to life for a few moments.

Yet this novelty of the late 19th century was the very future of show business, as shepherded by a handful of entrepreneurs, most from the immigrant streets of New York — and none more driven or influential than William Fox.

Fox — born Fuchs, a son of Hungarian Jews who struggled for their place in the ghettos of lower Manhattan — went from peddling candies as a child of the 1890s to studio head by 1915.

His empire, with its vertical integration of Fox filmmaking, film distribution and exhibition, was the root of a great brand, 20th Century Fox.

By now that brand is buried in the parts of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media m