A new Twentieth Century Fox 75th anniversary logo debuts at the beginning of “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief,” opening Friday. I don’t want to pour cold water on our sister company’s birthday celebration, but film historians agree the studio was actually founded in 1915 by William Fox, which would actually make this Fox’s 95th anniversary. The Fox Film Corporation merged in 1935 with Darryl F. Zanuck’s two-year-old 20th Century Productions and the new company was using 1915 as its birthday as late at 1945. This poster from that year’s “Where Do We Go From Here” is clearly marked in the lower left-hand corner as a “20th Century-Fox 30th Anniversary Production” (the company started spelling out Twentieth and dropped the hypen in the ’80s). By 1985, the studio was using the 1935 merger date to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Twentieth has always had a complicated relationship with the original Fantastic Mr. Fox, who lost control of the studio in 1930 because of a failed hostile takeover of Loews Inc. (parent company of MGM) and the stock market crash. William Fox spent years in court, and finally ended up in jail for bribing a judge, dying a forgotten man.
Fox the company seemed to be coming to terms with its heritage in recent years, naming a screening room on the lot after William Fox and even celebrating his contributions as an unusually enlightened studio executive in an elaborate DVD box set called “Murnau, Borgaze and Fox.” (The photo shows Fox welcoming the great F.W. Murnau, who not only made movies for the company but greatly influenced its resident directors, including Borzage, John Ford, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks). But now Twentieth is back to pretending that Zanuck founded the company. Fox is hardly alone in its confusion about dates. The Warner Brothers, who broke into the business by running a theater in Pennsylvania in 1905, celebrated their 25th anniversary in 1930 and even released a short with a testimonial dinner (it’s in “The Jazz Singer” DVD set). But after the studio passed out of the family’s hands in 1967, the subsequent corporate owners have insisted on counting from 1923, when Warner Bros. was incorporated, even though the brothers had been making and distributing movies for years by that point. Paramount, on the other hand, dates its existence from the 1912 founding of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, the most prominent of several companies that eventually merged into what became Paramount Pictures. Using this math will allow Paramount to become the first studio to celebrate its 100th anniversary, though Warner Bros. and possibly Universal (if you count its predecessor, Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company, founded in 1909, which Universal doesn’t) are arguably older.