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The Fox Film Corporation, 1915-1935: A History and Filmography Aubrey Solomon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.
Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935-1965 Peter Lev. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Known as the "lone eagle of the industry" (9), William Fox (1879-1952) entered film production in 1914, established the Fox Film Corporation in February 1915, and is considered to be one of the pioneers of the film industry. During the decade of the 1910s, he challenged the Motion Picture Patents Company, which, in January 1909, had announced that its partners "exclusively owned all rights to photograph, develop, print and exhibit motion pictures" (12). Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, Fox sued the General Film Company, which had been established by Motion Picture Patents Company, and the suit was later settled out of court. As a result, in 1913 the Motion Picture Patents Company's stranglehold on the film industry was broken.
During the 1920s, William Fox developed interests in sound pictures, color film, radio, and television. He held patents to the new sound-on-film process called Fox Movietone which became the "predominant method of re-producing sound" (7) and was used successfully in the company's newsreels, which were known as Movietone News. He also experimented with a color process called Fox Nature Color film and almost entered the medium of radio when he considered acquiring a network of thirty radio stations in the West and Midwest. Fox also recognized the potential of television. During the late 1920s he "became a leading proponent of a wide-film system, whose patents he co-owned, called Grandeur" (123). Fox thought this wide-film system would make it possible for motion pictures to compete with television.
Aubrey Solomon, coauthor of The Films of 20th Century-Fox: A Pictorial History (1979, revised 1985) and author of Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (1988), notes that William Fox "saw the expansion of Fox Films from a small exhibition set-up with six exchanges to a massive integrated corporate...