Word: foxe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Match Game. The man who had blown up this merchandising phenomenon was Matthew Fox, 36, the bubble-shaped executive vice president of Universal-International Pictures. Matty Fox, whose pudgy fingers dabble in many side investments that have little to do with movies, got into balloon-blowing by way of the "everlasting match." The match, which could be struck 600 times, had been invented in 1931 by Dr. Ferdinand Ringer, a Viennese chemist. It was bought up for $400,000-and filed away-by the late match king, Ivar Kreuger. Subsequently, Dr. Ringer came to the U.S., and when a federal...
...Promoter Fox and associates underwrote Dr. Ringer and set him up in an elaborate, air-conditioned laboratory on Manhattan's East Side to perfect a marketable version of his match. While experimenting, Dr. Ringer dissolved some vinyl-resin plastic in acetone. In working with the solution, he noticed it forming thin-skinned, elastic bubbles. He called Matty. Cried Matty: "A gold mine, pure and simple...
Ballooning Profits. Fox & friends gambled $175,000 and borrowed more from banks to manufacture and market Bub-O-Loon. He took in two partners, who got together a company to work out the tricky process of putting the plastic into the tubes, and lined up nine plants in seven cities to turn out the tubes...
...Vinylite plastic (purchased in bulk from Bakelite Corp.) cost only 14? per 49? tube, a large part of the gross was profit. There was only one hole in the bubble. The formula for turning vinyl plastic into Bub-O-Loon was so simple that Fox did not think it could be patented. Already competitors were turning out more than 100,000 tubes a day. When the Bub-O-Loon finally bursts, Matty Fox hopes to be ready with his everlasting match...
...studios are concentrating on "cheap" million-dollar pictures. Costs are being cut, shooting schedules reduced. Metro's If Winter Comes (Deborah Kerr and Walter Pidgeon), which would normally have taken 70 days to shoot, has been finished after only 57. Fox canceled the expensive costume piece, The Black Rose, and plans to bear down on the Louis de Rochemont type of "realism," shot on location. Universal-International dropped Song of Norway, which would have been a big draw on the foreign markets. Expensive musicals generally are giving way to cheap, lucrative little comedies about domestic love...