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New Jersey and the AFI Top 100: #82

The American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films of all-time is widely regarded as the definitive ranking of the best movies that the film industry brought to the silver screen. We’ll take a periodic look at this list and try to establish a New Jersey connection to as many of the AFI Top 100 as possible. Up today is number 82 on the list, Sunrise.

The 1926 movie Sunrise is one of the few films from the silent era to be recognized among the greatest of all time. The story of a married farmer who is urged to kill his wife by his summer visitor girlfriend, it won four Oscars during the inaugural year of the Academy Awards.

Sunrise was produced by William Fox and the Fox Film Corporation. Although it was well-established in Hollywood by then, the studio was founded by Fox in Fort Lee in 1914. Fox received funding for the venture from the venerable Prudential Insurance Company, then and still headquartered in Newark. So, to borrow from their famous slogan, Prudential owned a piece of the Fox … Yes, I heard you groan …

Fox was born in Austria-Hungary in 1879 and emigrated to the U.S. and the Lower East Side of Manhattan as a child. He started out working in the fur industry in his teens. But after a few years he got into the fledgling film industry by purchasing a struggling nickelodeon in Brooklyn in 1905.

Fox managed to turn around the business and built it into a chain of nickelodeons, which were the first indoor facilities in which motion pictures were shown. They were much smaller than today’s movie theaters and admission was — you guessed it — five cents.

Fox parlayed that success in the movie exhibition business into establishing his own movie-making enterprise. According to the Fort Lee Film Commission web site:

“The first Fox studio was rented from C.A. “Doc” Willat in Fort Lee. It had two large shooting stage areas resembling gigantic twin glass barns. This remained Fox’s principal studio for the next several years until production was shifted to New York City and Los Angeles in 1919. Many other studios in New Jersey were used, among them facilities in Hoboken, Jersey City, Grantwood, and Cliffside, as well as Fort Lee. Branch studios were also built in Jamaica and Los Angeles. Among its directors, Fox hired a young man working for D.W. Griffith, Raoul Walsh, destined to become one of the most famous Hollywood directors.”

Fox’s ticket to success as a movie producer was a young actress named Theda Bara. Bara’s dark, sultry looks made her an overnight star when she starred in the studio’s first hit, A Fool There Was.

“This one movie made the company a major force in the movie world,” according to the film commission. “Theda Bara was a huge star and a completely new phenomenon, a mass-produced celebrity instantly familiar to millions of people through the images seen on the screen.”

Bara made 40 movies for Fox in Fort Lee before the studio pulled up stakes and moved to sunny Southern California in 1919.

Fox was at the top of his game in the 1920s, culminating with Sunrise in 1926. Things started going downhill shortly thereafter. A combination of the stock market crash in 1929, lawsuits and ultimately bankruptcy led to the studio being merged with Twentieth Century Pictures to form what is today the media conglomerate 20th Century-Fox. To make matters worse Fox served some jail time for trying to bribe a judge during the bankruptcy proceedings. He died in 1952, persona non grata in the film industry he helped to build.

Even though Fox’s stay in New Jersey was relatively brief, the New Jersey Hall of Fame recognized his contributions to the Garden State with his induction last year.