| H I S T O R Y
![]() Garret Nicholas Fox, III is the eldest child and only son of entrepreneur Garret Nicholas Fox, Jr. (Nick) and his South Carolinian wife, Margaret Saergant (Peggy). Garret was born into a life of privilege and influence due to his father's hard work building Vulpis Enterprises, the small mining company started by Garret's grandfather, Garret Nicholas Fox, Sr. (Vulpes is the Latin word for the genus that the fox is in). Garret, Sr. was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1900, but the family moved west, following work and finally settled in Louisiana. Garret Sr worked at the oil derrick all over Texas and Louisiana, like at Caddo Lake, then in Kilgore Texas. He worked for a company called Morgan Industries, one of the few oil companies that existed in the west that prospered during World War I. He was especially taken with Catherine, the boss's daughter. He worked his way up in the company and in 1927, he was named a vice-president and married his beloved Catherine. Two years later, the American economy collapsed, and many many companies went out of busniness. But being an oil company, Morgan managed to stay solvent, specially with Garret working hard to find his father-in-law new oil fields to expand into. The onset of World War II helped the company grow as it provided fuel for the US military. The company moved into mining after the war, obtaining rights to mine beryllium, tin and copper in New Mexico. Garret married Catherine Morgan in 1927; their first son, Garret Nicholas Fox, Jr.(Nick), wasn't born until 1931, followed by two daughters, Lenore (Lettie) in 1933 and Elizabeth (Betty) in 1935. Nick Fox was much like his father: hard working, hard drinking, and willing to travel the world, learning the mining business and how to deal with people on many different levels. He met Peggy Sergeant during a trip to New Orleans in the late 50s and the pair married in December of 1960 against his parents wishes. Catherine Fox did not think that Peggy, whose family had come from old South Carolina money, would take kindly to the workaholic tendencies of her son. During the first years of their marriage, Nick and Peggy lived a lifestyle very much like the one they had when they were single: parties and lots of them. Most of that ended when Peggy got pregnant and had Garret Nicholas the Third in August of 1961. She wasn't exactly happy about being a mother, but Nick was thrilled to be a parent. He was also happy to have a son carry on the family name, and he took to calling him 'Garret' or 'Gar' as his father had been. Nick was a very hands-on parent, curtailing social engagements to spend time with his son. Catherine Fox passed away in 1969 from a heart attack when she was 54; Garret, Sr. was heartbroken and chose to retire, leaving his son in charge of the company. At the time Nick Fox became President of Vulpis Enterprises, the company was worth about $15 million US. Nick decided to move the family back East and bought a expansive mansion in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts overlooking the ocean along the same stretch of beach that what would called the Kennedy Family compound was located. As soon as Garret was old enough, Nick began taking him with him on short trips to New York and in Boston and occasionally back to Santa Fe where his grandfather now resided in a ranch his son purchased for him. The relationship between Nick and his wife deteriorated slowly. Surprisingly, eight years after Garret was born, Jillian Cecila joined the Fox household. Nick was just as much a hands-on a parent with his daughter as he had been with his son, mimicking his own relationship with their grandfather. Garret, Sr. died when Gar was 10 and Jillian was 2, happy that he had lived to see the next generation of Foxs enter the world. One of the things that Garret shared with his grandfather was a love of movies. Old Westerns were the senior Fox's favorite and he passed that love of those stories to his grandson. Garret, Sr. was also a movie making buff, and showed Garret many of the family movies he made over the years. It was after Garret, Sr.'s death in 1972 that the relationship between Nick and Peggy truly dissolved. Nick took the first of many mistresses, Peggy took the first of her many lovers. She maintained the Hyannis Port mansion; Nick took up residence in Back Bay, Boston in a penthouse on Huntington Avenue. However, no matter how bad the relationship became between he and his wife, Nick never neglected his children. It was impossible not to have to hire nannies and private tutors, but Nick was there as much as he could be for Gar and Jillian, and when he was home for them very rarely did he allow business to interfere with their time. Garret, like with his grandfather, would watch old Westerns and kung fu movies with his father. By the time Garret was 12, his mother and father were married in name only. It was open knowledge with both children that their parents were not 'together' but it was pride that would not allow Peggy to file for divorce. For his part, Nick would have rather tried, but he was more afraid that his wife would be awarded custody of the two children she had never really wanted and they would bear the brunt of her displeasure in life. He consoled himself with being a father, with his mistresses and growing the business by purchasing first an oil refinery, then mining operations in Africa. By the time Garret was 15, Vulpis Enterprises was being publicly traded on the NYSE and the family fortune had expanded to several hundred million dollars. When Garret and Jillian were old enough, they became their father's almost constant travel companions. It was during one of their many trips that Gar picked up the video camera that Nick had brought with him and make his first 'film': a video of their trip to Paris that focused in on Jillian's fascination with her first trip to the City of Lights. Nick had the video edited and set to music...which Gar hated. He began finding books on film production and editing, and got his father to hire him a tutor to work with him. In six months, Garret created his own edit of their trip to Paris, put together a soundtrack of music that Jillian liked at the time and gave it to his little sister as a present. The senior Fox was much more impressed and pleased with his son's effort and encouraged Garret to continue making the family travelogues. By the time Gar was ready to enter high school, he was shooting and editing his own travelogues of the Fox's family adventures on actual film and creating an extensive portfolio. Nick was living in Boston full time at this point, only coming to the family home in Hyannis Port on the weekends. Garret begged to move in with his father. He wanted to go to the prestigious Boston Latin School, which had a small visual arts program, but where he could gain access to places like the Boston Museums of Fine Arts as well as internships at WGBH, one of the premiere Public Television stations in the country. He could have easily gone to the LaGuardia School in New York, but did not want to go that far from home. It was at Boston Latin that Gar met three other boys who were in his homeroom: Kevin Allen, Peter Yates and Bryan Silver. The other three boys had been arguing the merits on whether Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan was the better action hero, and Garret joined in. Having found kindred spirits, the boys often spent more of homeroom time and lunch time talking about what movies they liked, had seen and introducing each other to different genres. They started making small student movies. They wrote, acted in and edited their videos, and then films, in Garret's Chestnut Hill home. They entered a few student competitions and created a buzz around Boston Latin, since film was not a part of the BL curriculum. The quartet applied to New York University's undergraduate film program in their senior year and all four were accepted, which was extremely rare. Garret was excited to be accepted into NYU with his friends, but he was nervous about being away from his father and sister for the first time. He was right to be nervous. The quartet's first semester was downright hellacious. All of them were doing work far beyond their classmates and their freshman level professors, but instead of being encouraged they were constantly derided for being 'pretentious' and aiming far too high. By the time they ended their first year, they went back to what they'd done in high school for fun, to stay sane. They made movies. No matter how bad it got, the actual process of filming, editing, scoring and post-producing a project always settled him. It was something he expressed to his father every time they spoke, and finally Nick Fox made his son a deal. Normally, Garret worked for him during his breaks at the main Vulpis offices and on the company's Louisiana oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. However, for his sophomore year, Nick would allow Garret all his break time to finance, film produce and release a feature length film, with no help from him. Garret would have to find the script, arrange for the filming, get the actors, set the filming schedule...and get financing...all on his own. If he could do that by the end of his sophomore year...Nick would allow Garret could quit NYU and come work for him full-time so that he could go and pursue a career in film as a director. If his friends wanted to quit, Nick would offer them positions as well. Garret talked to his three friends, and explained the deal. He stressed that none of them were obligated to follow him, he would do the whole thing and deal with the consequences himself. They would hear nothing of that. They started together, and the other three declared they would see it through together. They decided to draw up a contract and to form an actual production company. Against Garret's wishes, their collaboration was called 'Vixen Films'. Garret's main focus was as screen-writer, director, editor, and musical director. Kevin served as 'executive producer', Peter helped with screen-writing and was in charge of logistics/procurement and Bryan served as head of the crew and chief cinematographer. Over the course of the next year, Vixen Films began to start building, recruiting and scouting all manner of actors, writers and crew from their varied classes, and created an outer core around their original quartet. The best addition was Darren Ramirez, who ended up being the team's associate director. As such, he was Garret's right hand and the two shared a connection that almost equaled the one he had with his old friends. Gar wasn't usually very comfortable with speaking publicly. He was much more comfortable behind the camera but Darren's natural charisma forced him to be able to speak with potential investors with much more confidence, something even Nick Fox hadn't been able to impart to his son. During the intermission between fall and spring semesters of that sophomore year, Vixen Films had raised enough capital to begin production on a project called My Best Friend's Birthday. They were able to convince some of the seniors and a few grad students in the acting program to star in it in exchange for them using it to turn in for credit and even to help towards their Screen Actor Guild certification. No-one realized the synergy of the team they'd created in the midst of filming. They met the goal put forward with three weeks to spare, and premiered it during NYU's annual student film festival. They also were able to get a limited run in several Greenwich Village art house theaters, under their own steam with money they had raised. Nick Fox was the first person they showed the finished product to and was convinced and impressed with both the reviews and the finished product. Unfortunately there was a fire in the editing studio, and their sole master along with several other student films were almost completely destroyed and unsalvageable. True to his word though, Nick Fox allowed his son to leave NYU to make movies on his own. Garret had done everything he'd asked and the fire that destroyed their first movie wasn't his fault. All of his friends opted to leave with him, and they spent the next five and a half years going to film festivals, talking to other filmmakers and od'ing on all manners of films. It was during this time that Garret was introduced to the genres of 70s blaxplotiation films like Shaft and Foxy Brown and the old cult classic 'grindhouse' movies like The Raven andNight of the Living Dead. They also decided that they needed to have a real education in film-making and producing, and they focused their 'internships' on the French, Indian (Bollywood) and Hong Kong film industries. They wanted to learn outside of the United States, in places renown for the respect that they gave native filmmakers. They started working on a a script they named several things, but eventually settled on the name 'Reservoir Dogs'. It was the story about a well planned robbery that went horribly wrong. It was extremely and graphically violent, but the story was a real one to them and featured elements of the films and stories that they all admired and wanted to emulate in their work. This script ended up becoming the modus operandi for most Vixen films: stories that focused on the underbelly of society, starring unknowns and 'has-been' actors and actresses, filled with callbacks and visual references to old movies, as well as ones of their own making, like always having a scene being shot in or from a car trunk, someone missing an important event because they were in the restroom, and the following shot (a shot of the camera following one character from one room into another, often done in a single take) Vixen Films with this group produced three movies: Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction. All of these films were highly acclaimed in critical circles for Garret's seemingly chaotic-yet-concise, streamlined direction of the edgy, real-life dialog, the production quality, and the very real and dynamic stories. But Pulp Fiction is what put the company on the map. The screenplay was penned on a three week trip to Amsterdam in 1991 and filmed in Los Angeles in 1993. Pulp Fiction was premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1994 and won the coveted Palme d'Or as Best Film in the festival. At the 1995 Academy Awards, it was nominated for the best picture, best director and best original screenplay. Garret came away with the award for best original screenplay, and he won the same award at Britain's BAFTA Awards. One of the only changes in Vixen Films during this time was the addition of Kurt Becker, a friend of a friend who was looking for a job as a Director of Photography. Garret took a look at his work, hired him and many people believe that Becker was one of the last pieces of the puzzle to finish the unique look of this movie. The buzz surrounding Garret was intense from this point on. Luckily, there was such a good camaraderie between the members of the group that they were able to go off and work on their own projects, taking their time to craft and work on several scripts for themselves during this time. Other directors took screenplays that Garret had written and discarded were produced and released with very limited success, even as Garret was able to take others work and turn it into masterpieces of the independent market. He was considered a prodigy of directing, especially since he hadn't come to the field from the more 'traditional' circles. Garret was also still putting in time at Vulpis Enterprises under his father's tutelage. He might never take over the family business, but he'd have a long time to make that decision. His time working at Vulpis translated to his negotiates with it came to distribution, where he became known for his hard nosed positions, and managing to actually get the deals he wanted. It was during the filming of the next script written exclusively for Vixen , Jackie Brown (an ode to 70s blaxploitation films based on a novel by Elmore Leonard) that Garret's personal life took a major down swing. He got word that his father and sister were in a terrible car accident on Route 3 on the Cape in early June of 1996. Garret left filming in Darren's capable hands and hauled back to the East Coast. His sister Jillian was badly injured, but the doctors were certain she had a good chance of recovery. Not so for Nick Fox. Less than twelve hours after arriving...Garret was at his father's bedside when he succumbed to his injuries. At 37, Garret Nicholas Fox, III was now the de-facto head of a multi-national, multi-billion dollar empire he didn't want to run. Nothing would be known for certain until the contents of Nick's will was read. With a sister still in critical condition and an almost inconsolable mother, Garret had to keep himself together. He started by calling his friends. Production on Jackie Brown would continue, with Darren getting a co-directing credit. Garret had to meet with the company's legal counsel. He arranged to bury his father quietly in Santa Fe, New Mexico next to his grandparents as he had always wished. Over the next six months, Garret was thrust into a role he honestly didn't want and thought he would not have to face until he was much older. Under the terms of Nick's will, Garret, Jillian and Peggy equally split the extensive personal fortune Nick had amassed over the years. As Jillian was still in the hospital, Garret was named the temporary conservator of his sister's inheritance until such time as she was able to deal with her own matters personally. Garret and Jillian were left all of Nick's stock in the company. That decision kept the Foxs in charge of the board by maintaining their majority share, but cut Peggy from the management picture all together. This displeased Peggy a great deal; she felt she should have been left in charge of the business though she had shown very little interest in it over the years. The situation came to a head when Peggy attempted a hostile takeover of the board, by manipulating Jillian's vote against her older brother. It didn't work; Jillian sided with Garret to maintain control of the Vulpis board and the entire matter solidified the rift between mother and son. Jillian was named President of Vulpis Enterprises. Garret was granted a seat on the Board of Directors; Vixen Films was made an extension of Vulpis to justify this, and it gave Garret access to using corporation funds to bankroll his future projects. The siblings decided that it would be best if there was a neutral Chief Operating Officer, especially with Garret's focus on making movies and not really on the business. Jackie Brown was not completed until the end of 1996 and released in 1997. The film did well with critics and relatively well in general release, and it made a killing with the art house crowd that had been faithful viewers of Vixen Films. But with all the personal turmoil going on it was a film Garret felt detached from and it showed during press junkets. After Jackie Brown was released, Garret met with the other members of Vixen Films, offering to sell them his share of the company with Darren replacing him as director. They told Garret that wasn't an acceptable option. Vixen decided to move into producing scripts and projects from outside sources, but that when Garret was ready to come back to the fold, he would be welcome to 'come home'. For the next four years, Garret threw himself fully into running Vulpis Enterprises with his sister Jillian while his friends continued to run the production company. However he managed not to stay away from the business for long; he lent his name to promoting independent films in the US, especially from Asia, and worked on several screenplays. In 2001, he flew his friends out on a vacation to Amsterdam where they'd written Pulp Fiction and showed them the next scripts he wanted the company to film, a World War II film about a band of renegade Jewish-American soldiers killing Nazis in occupied France and an homage to the Japanese film Lady Snowblood that melded the themes of Chinese wuxia and spaghetti Westerns that he was calling The Bride. They looked over both, and decided The Bride was closer to being finished and decided to concentrate on that script first. The Bride eventually became Kill Bill, a movie that went back to the frenetic, non-linear style of storytelling that had defined Pulp Fiction. The shoot was intensive and renown for the delay in mid-filming when its female lead announced that she was pregnant and Garret refused to recast her. It wasn't really that much of a surprise; Garret often wrote many of his characters with a specific actor or actress in mind and was dogged in getting them. However, he was also considered an actor's best friend because one you were cast in a Vixen Film, you were almost guaranteed work from them on out. The film when finally finished was so long and so expansive that it had to be split into two parts. Kill Bill, Parts 1 & 2 was the grand return of Garret Fox to the film world. He was President of the jury at Cannes in 2004, the 10-year anniversary of his improbable win with Pulp Fiction. Kill Bill, Part 2 wasn't in contention for an award, though it did premiere at the renowned film festival. Garret took this new critical collateral into several new projects. He was finally able to use his clout to move into new fields and genres. He started lending his name to films who wanted distribution in the US, but weren't able to procure a deal one their own. He directed the season six finale of CSI in 2005, and teamed up with his good friend Darren to combine two films into Grindhouse, a double feature of Garret's 'Death Proof' and Darren's 'Planet Terror'. It was a critical success, lauded for the fake old school 60s and 70s style movie trailers that aired between the two films, but did horribly in general release. When premiered in the UK, the films were separated and Garret had his first 'flop'. Death Proof was throughly drubbed and is generally considered Garret's worst work. 2008 seemed to represent the slow waning of Garret's work. However that was only because he was spending his time cleaning up the World War II screenplay he had pushed aside in order to film Kill Bill. He called it Inglourious Basterds after a 1970s Spanish film of a similar name and plot and went back to co-producing with Harvey Weinstein, the same producer who bankrolled Pulp Fiction. Filming started in late 2008 in Paris and Berlin and he edited the initial cut of the movie in late March and the early part of April 2009. In six weeks, h e had a complete cut ready to be entered in the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, the 15th anniversary of Pulp Fiction's win. The film's reception was mixed, and the only award the movie received was a Best Actor for one of the male leads. However, after a concentrated re-edit in June and July, the movie opened to rave reviews and the biggest box office take of Garret's career. At Cannes, Garret happened to meet Duncan Jones, the son of glam-rock legend David Bowie. Jones was known mostly as a commercial director and producer, but he had written a screenplay for a movie he desperately wanted Garret to direct. He had been approached numerous times over the years to direct others' work, but never felt he was 'ready' enough to make the attempt. However, with the success of Inglourious Basterds and how much the story hit him, he agreed to direct, at a highly reduced pay scale because of the limited budget--as long as he was able to control casting choices. In August of 2009, he announced that he would be directing Duncan Jones' Moon. Since June of 2009, Garret has been dating Roma musician Lubya Gori, aka Garbo Khiell. Garret and Garbo have created a huge buzz in the gossip world since Khiell is fully 20 years Fox's junior as well as being, until the point they started dating, openly homosexual. Garret is extremely attached to Khiell as she is to him. He recently spent six weeks in her home country of Romania, meeting her family. Garbo accompanied Garret to his family's ranch in Santa Fe, NM for his annual ritual of mourning his father in June; he returned the favor by being with Khiell for her family's pomana for the anniversary of her older brother's murder. Garret plays the relationship off very coolly publicly, though many of his close friends and family are very aware how seriously he takes it.
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