If the year 1937 is remembered for one particular fire it is the burning of the German airship Hindenburg, which occurred on May 6th in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The crash, which was spectacularly caught on film and radio, killed 35 people. However, there was another fire later the same year in the same state – a mere 120km away in fact – that, though resulting in only one fatality, was arguably a greater loss humanity; the infamous Fox Vault Fire.
Located on 365 Main Street, Little Ferry, the Fox Vault was the studio’s primary storage facility for more than 40,000 reels of positive prints and negatives relating to more than 1,100 short films and features produced by the studio during the teens and 1920s. The Fox Flim Corporation had been established by Hungarian-American Wilhelm Fuchs – Americanised to William Fox – in 1915. The company vault also housed films produced by several other studios, most notably Educational Pictures, for whom Buster Keaton had made a series of comedy shorts in the early 30s.
A passing truck driver named Robert Davison was the first to notice flames coming from the brick-built edifice at around 2am on 9th July 1937, a particularly hot summer’s day in Northern New Jersey. Davison quickly alerted the authorities as well as residents in the adjacent houses. However, by the time the first fire crews arrived minutes later, flames had begun exploding out of the windows of the building. The escaping heat and flames severely burning passing mother Anna Greeves and her two sons, one of whom, thirteen-year-old George Greeves died from his injuries ten days later. Despite the presence of 150 fire-fighters working fourteen fire hoses, the blaze raged uncontrollably and was not put out until 5am the following morning, the crews having concentrated their efforts on preserving surrounding properties. The sight of the flames illuminating the night sky attracted hundreds of onlookers and was partially caught on film by the chief of the town’s fire service. In the subsequent clean-up operation, a reported 57 truckloads of detritus, including thousands of charred reel canisters, were removed, some effort being made recycle the material’s silver content.
The Fox Vault Fire was the latest in a line of similar conflagrations of aging film stock at studio store houses and laboratories. One of the earliest had occurred at the negative and stock storage facilities of the Lubin Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia at on 13th June 1914. The fire destroyed every one of the firm’s pictures produced up to that point; the company had been founded a dozen years earlier; the material damage being estimated at half a million dollars. Later the same year, a massive fire at the laboratories of Thomas Edison’s film company situated in West Orange, New Jersey had destroyed countless of the studio’s early productions. The inventor purportedly joked at having ‘just got rid of a lot of rubbish’, but his friend Nicola Tesla called the fire ‘not only a personal and national loss, but a world loss.’
The principle cause of such fires was the nitrocellulose-based transparent film-stock on which most early motion pictures had been captured. This ‘nitrate film’ was highly flammable and extremely hard to extinguish. Film vaults were supposed to guard against such fires by keeping film stock in ‘fire-proof’ internally subdivided structures protected by thick walls, metal doors and concrete roofs. The Fox Vault, which had been built in 1934 and was owned by businessman D. J. DeTitta, contained all these features and had been officially certified as fire-proof despite having no sprinkler system and only minimal ventilation. Previous protected vault fires such as that which occurred at the film reproduction company Consolidated Film Industries in Los Angeles in 1929 were assumed to be the work of arsonists. In fact, earlier fire investigations had ignored the possibility that nitrate film could spontaneously combust; that is ignite through its own internal heat generation. This then poorly understood phenomenon was deemed to be the cause of the fire at Little Ferry.
The studio initially made light of the disaster, insisting that ‘only old films’ had been lost, and that copies of many of these existed elsewhere – the company had a similar repository on the West Coast near its Edendale film lot. This sanguine response could in part be regarded as the company putting on a brave face, but also reflected an industry-wide ignorance of the legacy value of silent film in keeping with the Edison-espoused view that most was ‘a lot of rubbish’. The truth was that in the course of one day Fox lost an estimated 75% of the films it had made prior to 1930. Although copies were subsequently found to exist of many of the lost originals, they were often inferior, incomplete, damaged or degraded copies. Many more were preserved nowhere else and thus had been definitively lost.
One of the greatest casualties of the Fox Vault Fire was Theda Bara. Hollywood’s prototypical vamp had made 40 films for the studio beginning in 1914, the majority of them directed by James Gordon Edwards. Only six of these are known to survive, most having been destroyed at Little Ferry. Although Bara’s screen legacy endures to some extent owing to her distinctive persona, the directorial achievements of Edwards have been largely obliterated. Also wiped out by the fire was the entire catalogue of Valeska Suratt, one of Bara’s chief rivals in femme fatale roles. Suratt had starred in eleven films for Fox between 1915 and 1917. All that remains of her film legacy today are production stills and studio portraits.
Another major casualty of the Fox Vault Fire was western star Tom Mix. The flamboyant cowboy-actor, who performed most of his own stunts, is credited with ‘transforming the western from its Victorian theatrical melodrama roots into contemporary action narrative.’ [1] Signing for Fox in 1919, Mix was given a $7,500 a week salary and his own 12-acre ‘frontier town’, christened Mixville, in which to set and shoot his movies. Alas, of the 85 mainly light-hearted westerns Mix shot at these facilities, only twelve now survive.
Shirley Mason was another Fox star who would be better remembered today were it not for the loss of many of her films. Mason was one of a trio of acting sisters whose birth name had been Fugarth – her siblings being Viola Dana and Edna Flugarth. Shirley had signed with Fox in November 1919 while still a teenager. Her first starring role for the company was Her Elephant Man (1920) alongside Alan Roscoe, one of Bara’s regular male co-stars. She also worked in two pictures directed by the young John Ford; Jackie (1921) and Little Miss Smiles (1922). All sixteen movies she made for the studio between 1919 and 1925 perished in the Fire, a loss that has mitigated the actress’s film legacy.
The Fox film legacies of several other now forgotten actors also went largely up in smoke in 1937. These included William Farnum, whose $10,000-a-week salary was one of the studio’s highest, and former athlete George Walsh, an action hero who was briefly considered a rival to Douglas Fairbanks. The handful of films made for the studio by Evelyn Nesbit, the former chorus girl whose scandalous relationships had resulted in America’s so-called ‘Trial of the Century’ a decade earlier, also burned at Little Ferry.
As indicated above, the Fox Vault Fire damaged the legacies not only of the studio’s early stars but also many of its directors. For example, only ten of John Ford’s 60 silent pictures, two thirds of which were produced at Fox, survive. Although his epic westerns The Iron Horse (1924) and Three Bad Men (1926) can still be viewed in their entirety, several earlier westerns and many other films he’d made belonging to other genres perished in the flames, presenting difficulties in making a full appraisal of his remarkable film career.
Although almost all of the films made for the studio by German director F. W. Murnau have thankfully been preserved, the original negative of his most acclaimed work, Sunrise (1928), was destroyed at Little Ferry. Also missing is Murnau’s follow-up picture Four Devils. The loss of this legendary film, made during the studio’s transition to sound, has been blamed on participating actress Mary Duncan, who it is claimed borrowed ‘the only surviving print’ from the studio to show to friends in the 1940s and then purposely had it destroyed. However, it seems likely that other copies of the silent and/or sound versions of Four Devils had been stored in the Fox Vault after its 1928/29 release, and had thus been incinerated, making the studio as much the culprit as its former star.
The Fox Fault Fire also destroyed many of the studio’s early sound pictures. At least 50 talkies and part-talkies made in 1928 and 1929 were lost. Among these were: The Fox Movietone Follies of 1929, an early musical containing multi-colour segments; the John Ford comedy Strong Boy, of which only a trailer is preserved; the raunchy Raoul Walsh directed musical Hot for Paris; and four early Charlie Chan pictures featuring Warner Oland in the title role. Also presumed to have been incinerated was the studio’s second all-talking feature The Ghost Talks, an ‘old dark house’ comedy-mystery which evidently featured Helen Twelvetrees (in her first Hollywood role) as a ‘lisping heroine’; a sadly lost example of how early talkies experimented with voice for comedic ends.
Other presumed casualties of the Fire were a pair of early movie serials. Bride 13, starring Marguerite Clayton, was the studio’s first foray into the multi-chapter genre. Released in 1920, it was in part a US Navy promotional film, and featured footage of the American battlefleet as well as scenes shot aboard some of the Navy’s smaller warships. Fox’s second and only other serial was the 20-part Fantômas, an American remake of an earlier and now renowned French serial by Louis Feuillade. No copies of either production are known to exist.
The 1937 Fox Vault Fire led to increased efforts to protect film stock, firstly by building better vaults and secondly by replacing nitrate film with more stable cellulose triacetate film or ‘safety film’, although this practice would not be adopted by the motion picture industry until 1948. Despite these increased efforts, vault fires continued to happen. Harold Lloyd’ strenuous efforts to preserve his own film legacy in a personal vault on his estate soon after the Fox conflagration were partially thwarted in 1943 when a fire destroyed nearly all of his early ‘Lonesome Luke’ shorts as well as the original version of the classic feature Safety Last. And in 1965, MGM, by then the industry leader in efforts to preserve motion pictures, suffered an equally infamous fire in its ‘Vault 7’ at Culver City. Among the films lost in this disaster were Victor Sjöström’s Divine Woman, starring Greta Garbo, and several Lon Chaney pictures including Hollywood’s first vampire picture, London After Midnight.
Disasters are often measured only in human lives lost. The 1937 Fox Vault Fire also resulted in one tragic death, but the cultural loss was arguably more significant. The film historian Anthony Slide, in his book about film preservation, Nitrate Won’t Wait, described this incident as ‘the most tragic of all American nitrate fires in terms of both loss of life and loss of American cultural heritage’. As another noted historian, William K. Everson, once observed: ‘Little programmers of the twenties may have relatively little to offer artistically, but they are a marvelous record of their times.’ [1]
As well as denying modern film historians and movie audiences insights into film-making techniques and early 20th century culture, it could be argued that film loss has also distorted early motion-picture history by pushing certain actors and directors whose output has not fully or even partially survived into the background, and perhaps, conversely, foregrounding the work of other players and filmmakers whose work has been, largely by matters of pure chance, better preserved.
[1] cited in Pierce, D. (2013) The Survival of American Feature Films 1912-1929, Council on Library and Information Services and Library of Congress
CINEMATOGRAPHOMANIA 