Walkabout: Brooklyn's Fox Theater, Part 2

The Brooklyn Fox Theater was one of Downtown Brooklyn’s big four movie theaters, the others being the Loew’s Metropolitan on Fulton Street, the RKO Albee Theater on Fleet Street, and the Brooklyn Paramount on Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues.

The Fox, looming large on the corner of Flatbush, Nevins and Livingston, was the largest and most magnificent of them all, boasting 4,305 seats in an enormous theater space which could also be used for stage productions as well as showing motion pictures.

All of this was the brainchild of William Fox, a man who came to the United States as a penniless immigrant, illiterate and unschooled, but quite astute in matters of show business.

In the space of twenty years, his Fox Theater Corporation would begin by owning nickelodeons and rise to the point of owning over 800 movie theaters across the country.

In 1928, William Fox opened the Brooklyn Fox Theater to a sell-out crowd, offering them an opening night extravaganza of live orchestral music, song, dance, Fox Movietone short films, and the main feature film.

The sumptuous movie palace designed by prominent theater architect C. Howard Crane filled movie goers with awe and wonder, and William Fox basked in the glow of his success. Little did he, or his patrons know that the Great Depression was right around the corner.

William Fox is credited as one of the great early film moguls, who began making silent films starring such legendary stars as Theda Bara. When movies started to talk, he invested in the invention of an imbedded sound-and-film process he called Fox Movie-tone, which would be a mainstay of his company until 1963.

His Hollywood studios produced popular and award-winning movies, but for Mr. Fox, the theaters his movies played in were his passion. Movie theaters were built to impress, to give their patrons an escape from the everyday world, and show them a fantastical paradise.

Movie theaters offered those suffering through the Great Depression a respite from life’s difficulties.

For the cheap price of admission, one could spend a couple of hours in the splendor of an exotic Indian Baroque palace, and watch the Hollywood fantasies that took the viewer to exotic places and adventures, and peek in on the lives and loves of the kinds of people they would never meet.

On November 4, 1930, the crowds were so great in front of the Fox Theater, that the police were called to keep people from crushing in the first floor shop windows. But behind the scenes, things were not going well.

In July of 1929, several months before the Wall Street crash that heralded the Depression, William Fox was in a horrific automobile accident that almost killed him, and put him in the hospital for 3 months.

The Friday before the crash, he had realized $20 million from sales of assets. The following Tuesday, that sale was worth only $6 million, and continued to drop.

His stock went from $119.00 to $1.00 a share. In 1932, one of his creditors filed suit, claiming default by Fox on a $13 million bond issue.

He demanded the appointment of an equity receiver for Fox Metropolitan Playhouses, Inc., which owned all of the New York Fox theaters. In February of 1933, the Brooklyn Fox closed, its employees given two weeks’ notice, and the public told that the closure was in order to expand the stage.

A few weeks later, the theater reopened, but it was soon to be under new management.

Theaters may have been his love, but William Fox was still a movie mogul, and one of the industry’s top producers and studios. Back in 1927, Fox had bought the Loew family holdings of rival studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, upon the death of studio head, Marcus Loew, intending to merge Fox Pictures with MGM.

This infuriated MGM studio heads Louis Meyer and Irving Thalberg, as they were not shareholders, and Fox would have become their boss. Meyer used his legal connections to have Fox accused of anti-trust violations, income tax evasion and even trying to loot his company.

The triple whammy of Fox’s automobile accident, his losses because of the stock market crash, and the resulting bankruptcy, killed the deal, and the merger did not take place.

The legal wrangling cost him control of Fox Pictures. He had already lost control of the theaters. However, in a move of incredible stupidity, Fox tried to bribe the judge in his bankruptcy hearing, and committed perjury.

He was indicted, pled guilty, and served six months of a one year jail sentence. When he got out, in 1936, William Fox was done, no longer in the film business. The studio had been transferred to a new president, Stanley Kent.

In 1935 Kent merged Fox Pictures with a new company called Twentieth Century Pictures. 20th Century Fox, under Darryl Zanuck would become a legendary film studio in the Golden Age of motion pictures. William Fox died in 1952. Not one single Hollywood producer came to his funeral.

Back in New York, in 1933, the Loew-Warner Corporation attempted to buy the Fox Metropolitan Theater Corporation. They were outbid by another theater chain, Fabian Enterprises, and the Brooklyn Fox Theater, along with the other NYC theaters, now belonged to Fabian.

They didn’t change anything, and movie goers continued to patronize the theater. The Depression ended the big stage extravaganzas, but the movie-going public stayed loyal to the theater for at least another twenty years.

In 1934, William Fox’s old office suite became headquarters for radio station WBNY, which gave them access to activities on the Fox stage. They broadcast radio amateur-hour contests for talented kids, until running afoul of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which resulted in fines and a one-day closure.

In March of 1945, the theater stopped having amateur night as a drive against bobby-sox juvenile delinquency in movie theaters.

The invention of television took the motion picture world by storm, creating competition that exists to this day, but the Fox Theater took it in stride by broadcasting the first closed-circuit telecasts shown in theaters, a prize fight from Chicago, brought to NY by coaxial cable, through an arrangement with RCA and NBC.

They would broadcast other sporting events, including the 1949 World Series and college football games.

Other important broadcasts included presidential addresses by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, the December 11, 1952 broadcast of Bizet’s Carmen, starring Brooklyn natives Richard Tucker and Robert Merrill.

A riot almost occurred during the Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson fight, in 1962, when the screen went dark right before the knockout, and over 4,000 fans had to be promised refunds for the $7.50 tickets, for a fight that lasted only two minutes and six seconds.

In 1955, the Fox became host to a series of live rock-n-roll stage shows, a tradition that continued until 1966. DJ Alan Freed hosted the first of the concerts in the 1950’s, and he was followed by radio disc jockey, Murray Kaufman.

Murray the K, featured popular acts of the 1960’s. He was famous for integrating his shows, well before that was a matter of course, bringing black, white and Latino artists under the same roof.

He usually produced four shows a year, each featuring a multitude of acts. One marquee from the early 60’s featured Little Stevie Wonder, the Drifters, the Shirelles, Ben E. King, Gene Pitney, and the Miracles.

As popular as the Murray the K shows were, they were not enough to keep an enormous theater like the Fox afloat. By 1966, the knockout punch of flight to the suburbs, urban blight, and television had brought the movie theater down.

Attendance in the 4,300 seat theater was down to 100 people. On February 6, 1966, the Fox ceased to be a movie theater, and its staff of 70 people was given notice.

For the next two years the huge theater hung in limbo, unsuccessfully opening as an opera company for a few months, and there were a few more rock concerts. A Humphrey for President rally took place here, and then the doors closed forever.

The marquee read Temporarily closed, for rent. In 1971, the magnificent Wurlitzer organ was removed, (it ended up in a private home in Washington State) and the building was torn down.

Officially, none of its architectural features were salvaged, not the lights, the decorative railings, fixtures, movie seats, or anything else. Period photographs show the bulldozers just ripping through the building.

Today, the site is home to a Con Edison office building, a bland building that would be at home in any suburban office complex.

William Fox’s monument to the glory of the movies, the extravaganza of a full blown stage experience, and his own massive ego, is remembered only by Brooklynites of a certain age, and seen only in a few black and white photographs that can’t fully show the magnificence that was the Brooklyn Fox Theater.

Source material: Historic-Structures.com, Cinema Treasures, Wikipedia, NY Times, nycago.org.