William Fox was a film industry juggernaut. On the long list of this movie mogul’s lifetime achievements, the one year that the William Fox Studio was located at 1845 Allesandro Street doesn’t particularly stand out.
That’s all the more true because most of the prints and all of the negatives from this and later periods in Fox film history were damaged or destroyed in a 1937 storage facility fire.
Fox—born Wilhelm Fuchs in 1879 in Tulchva, Hungary—immigrated as a baby with his family to the Jewish quarter of New York City’s Lower East Side tenements. A shorthand version of his bio: dropped out of school at age 11, worked as a peddler and then in penny arcades, segued into the emerging business of film, both on the exhibition side (owning theaters) as well as production. This trajectory, followed for similar reasons by many of the early Hollywood founders, allowed Fox to gain control and improve the quality of films being made.
By 1915, Fox formed Fox Film Corporation. In 1916, while residing back east, Fox leased the Selig-Polyscope property on 1845 Allesandro from William Selig. This was in Los Angeles’s Edendale neighborhood, present day Silver Lake and an early LA film mecca with at least six small silent film studios nearby.
Selig-Polyscope was LA’s first permanent studio. Selig opened it in 1910, with architectural elements borrowed liberally from California 18th century Spanish missions (think: adobe, multiple large bells). The studio was less than an acre, but found room for a sunken pool for aquatic scenes, a glass-ceiling stage that allowed for filming indoors, another larger stage, offices, dressing rooms, a film laboratory, and areas for trades such as scenic-painting and carpentry.
(Selig, meanwhile, decamped from this location in favor of a 35-acre studio that doubled as a public zoo with 700 animals including elephants, lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, peacocks, yaks, and a boxing kangaroo.)
During the one year William Fox Studio was headquartered in Edendale, it made pictures with stars such as Tom Mix, Hollywood’s first Western star, and Theda Bara, a leading actress of the era famous for roles in Fox films such as Carmen (1915) and Cleopatra (1917). Fox quickly outgrew the small location though and moved to larger quarters on Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue in Hollywood.
Fox began buying land on Los Angeles’s westside in 1924 and continued, under slightly different corporate names and structures, through the decades. Key early acquisitions included a ranch owned by Tom Mix, and the patents for the synched sound system Movietone, which led to the construction of a huge studio equipped with sound stages.
In 1935, 20th Century-Fox formed through merger. The names on either side of the hyphen remain relevant. Today, Fox Studio Lot in Century City has 15 sound stages and outdoor sets of New York City and elsewhere. Century City was named because of the studio’s presence, and the Fox name remains titanic in the media and entertainment business.
Meanwhile, back at the old William Selig turned William Fox Studio spot, not all film history is forgotten. The once-studio location is now the site of a two-story condominium complex. The condos’ true address is on Glendale Boulevard, but in front of the driveway that leads to the condo’s garages, developers have added signs. They read, “Silent Era Dr.”