Upton Sinclair wrote a book about Fox's struggles, "Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox," based on five weeks of interviews with the former movie mogul. In the book, which was published in 1933, Fox charged that AT&T and the investment bank Halsey, Stuart & Co. entered into a conspiracy to take over his film empire and force him out so they could loot his assets. He claimed that the two culprits were in cahoots with duplicitous Fox Film executives, lawyers, financiers and government officials. The irony in Fox's case is that he had used exactly those devices in his machinations against Louis B. Mayer and other studio executives.
After going bankrupt in the early 1930s, in 1941 he was convicted of trying to bribe a bankruptcy judge and served a short term in prison.
Forced to sell the studio to bankers for $18 million in 1929 after losing his fortune in the stock market crash. He faced a federal antitrust investigation.
In 1927, Joseph P. Kennedy arranged a series of lectures in the Harvard Graduate School of Business by representatives of all the big film companies. Marcus Loew and Fox, two immigrants who had never finished grammar school, were included.
In 1929, Loew's Inc. President Nicholas Schenck agreed to sell a controlling interest in the firm to Fox Film Corp. for $10 million that would have given Fox control of Loew's theater chain and its MGM studio subsidiary. Fox was interested in boxing in Adolph Zukor, owner of Paramount Pictures, who also was anxious to acquire Loew's. Fox claimed that the late Marcus Loew (who died unexpectedly in 1927) and Zukor, who had been partners in vaudeville, had a gentleman's agreement in which their theater chains would only show each other's films and keep out other studios' pictures. Acquiring Loew's would allow Fox to release his pictures in the Loew's theater chain and force out Paramount product, thus giving him a competitive edge over Zukor and Paramount. Fox made an agreement with Schenck by which the Loew's boss would assemble enough shares of stock, in secret, to give Fox control. The $10-million price included a $2.5-million premium for Schenck. Fox planned to merge MGM with his own studio, a merger that would require the approval of the Justice Department's Anti-Trust Divison, which Fox expected would approve the deal despite the huge concentration of production and power it would put in the hands of
Opened a projection room at New York's 700 Broadway during May 1906.