William Fox, the original movie mogul

Witness the mythic spectacle, digital wizardry and box office dominance of a movie like Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It makes it easy to forget that commercial American cinema was born in grubby penny arcades and nickelodeon halls, with silent images that juddered to life for a few moments.

Yet this novelty of the late 19th century was the very future of show business, as shepherded by a handful of entrepreneurs, most of them from the immigrant streets of New York — and none more driven or influential than William Fox.

Fox — born Fuchs, a son of Hungarian Jews who struggled for their place in the ghettos of lower Manhattan — went from peddling candies as a child of the 1890s to studio head by 1915.

His empire, with its vertical integration of Fox filmmaking, film distribution

and exhibition, was the root of a great brand, 20th Century Fox. By now that brand is buried in the parts of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media monolith just sold to Disney Corp. for $52 billion.

Vanda Krefft tells Fox’s tale in her new biography, The Man

Who Made the Movies (Harper, 755 pp., A wonderfully cinematic prologue — “Past the half-block-long ochreand-slate-colored Spanish Baroque facade, under the marquee that blazed nightly with the power of 4,500 bulbs” — reveals how Fox lost everything soon after he hit his pinnacle in 1929.

That’s when he purchased control of his competitor, MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, only to fall prey to the chaos of the Great Depression, bankruptcy, prison (he served nearly six months for bribing a bankruptcy judge and for perjury) and, later, obscurity. He died in 1952.

“A fighter and dreamer who relied on clear-eyed vision and an indomitable will, he did more than anyone else to make the movies what they are today,” Krefft declares.

Fox was loyal and endlessly industrious, visionary and flawed. He hated his feckless father for failing to find or hold a job, and he wound up supporting his entire family for the rest of his life. He had to endure the reflexive anti-Semitism of the era (Thomas Edison would bemoan the Jews’ “almost supernatural business instincts”), though his films were not untainted by boilerplate American racism.

Life, ever unfair, had its way with the fantastic Mr. Fox. Yet Krefft reminds us, in this big, brassy production of a book, of his grand legacy.