Film Booking Offices of America
Film Booking Offices of America, registered as FBO Pictures Corp., was an American film studio of the silent era, a midsize producer and distributor of mostly low-budget films. The business began in 1918 as Robertson-Cole, an Anglo-American import-export company. Robertson-Cole began distributing films in the United States that December and opened a Los Angeles production facility in 1920. Late that year, R-C entered into a working relationship with East Coast financier Joseph P. Kennedy. A business reorganization in 1922 led to its assumption of the FBO name, first for all its distribution operations and ultimately for its own productions as well. Through Kennedy, the studio contracted with Western leading man Fred Thomson, who grew by 1925 into one of Hollywood's most popular stars. Thomson was just one of several silent screen cowboys with whom FBO became identified.
The studio, whose core market was America's small towns, also put out many romantic melodramas, action pictures, and comedic shorts. Pauline Frederick and Sessue Hayakawa were the major stars of its R-C period. Subsequently, Evelyn Brent and Richard Talmadge were FBO's biggest non-Western stars. Tom Tyler played the lead in twenty-nine cowboy pictures for the studio. Alberta Vaughn headlined five FBO short series. The studio's most prolific directors included Ralph Ince, William Seiter, and Emory Johnson. From 1925 forward, adaptations of the works of Gene Stratton-Porter were consistently among its top box office attractions.
In 1926, Kennedy led an investment group that acquired the company, and he ran it hands-on—traveling frequently to California—with considerable success. Exhibitors cited The Keeper of the Bees, based on a Stratton-Porter novel, as the year's most popular film. In early 1928, Kennedy froze Fred Thomson out of the movie business as FBO signed the premier silent Western star, Tom Mix. That August, using RCA Photophone technology, FBO became the second Hollywood studio to release a feature-length "talkie". Two months later, Kennedy and RCA executive David Sarnoff arranged the merger between FBO and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater circuit that created RKO, one of the major studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. FBO's assets were folded into the new company, and it was dissolved in early 1929.
Business history
The R-C years
The company that would become FBO began as Robertson-Cole, an importer, exporter, and motion picture distributor with headquarters in London and New York, founded in 1918 by Englishman Harry F. Robertson and American Rufus S. Cole. The company handled American-made trucks, cars, automobile accessories, and Bell & Howell motion picture equipment; its initial film distribution focus was on the Northern European, South Asian, and Latin American markets. From its U.S. office, R-C Pictures, as it was often branded, started American motion picture distribution late in 1918, purchasing film rights from independent production companies and selling them on to Exhibitors Mutual Distributing, a corporate successor of the Mutual Film studio. In November, R-C contracted to serve as the sole provider to Exhibitors Mutual, and its first acquisitions were released the following month. For its top-of-the-line "product", it purchased the movies of star actor Sessue Hayakawa, whose films were produced by his own company, Haworth Pictures Corporation. Other companies also made films expressly for R-C distribution: B.B. Features, Jesse D. Hampton Productions, National Film Corporation, Winsome Stars. To accompany its features, Robertson-Cole also acquired a wide variety of serials and other shorts, from Supreme Comedies with Harry Depp and Teddy Sampson to a biweekly series, On the Borderland of Civilization, filmed by adventurer Martin Johnson. Late in 1919, independent motion picture producer Frank Hall acquired Exhibitors Mutual and integrated it into his new Hallmark Exchanges. In January 1920, Robertson-Cole purchased Hallmark, securing the capacity to directly distribute the films to which it owned rights, including the in-house productions then being planned.In March, the inaugural "convention of the branch managers and field supervisors of the Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation" was announced. The company currently boasted a slate of twenty-five movies in theaters around the country, with its top films co-branded "Superior Pictures". The first R-C feature productions began to appear, including The Third Woman that same month, directed by Charles Swickard and starring Carlyle Blackwell and Louise Lovely, and The Wonder Man, directed by John G. Adolfi and starring boxer Georges Carpentier, which had a premiere on May 29 and went into general release in July. With its move into production, Robertson-Cole needed its own filmmaking studio: in June, it acquired a lot around fifteen acres in size in Los Angeles's fortuitously named Colegrove district, then adjacent to but soon to be subsumed by Hollywood. For exterior shoots, the company purchased 460 acres in Santa Monica, to be known as the "R-C Ranch". In September, contracts were signed for the construction on the Colegrove property of an administration building with a massive neoclassical façade and eight stages, each occupying nearly a third of an acre. The first film to shoot at the facility, while it was still being built, was the independent production Kismet, directed by Louis J. Gasnier. With the West Coast operation up and running, Hayakawa's production company was absorbed into Robertson-Cole.
Rufus Cole also entered into a working relationship with Hallmark investor Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future U.S. president John F. Kennedy and then a broker at the New York banking firm of Hayden, Stone. In December, after lengthy negotiations, Kennedy set up his own wholly owned company, Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation of New England, to handle the business's films in an area where he had a controlling interest in a regional theater chain. In February 1921, the movie heralded as Robertson-Cole's first "official" production came out: The Mistress of Shenstone, directed by Henry King and starring Pauline Frederick, a former headliner with Famous Players–Lasky and Goldwyn Pictures. At the same time, the business was $5 million in debt from the L.A. studio purchase and draining money—banks were reluctant to issue lines of credit to any but the biggest film companies, and R-C was forced to pay interest rates as high as 18 percent to so-called bonus sharks to access working capital. The company's primary investor, the Graham's of London firm, turned to Kennedy to find a buyer, giving him a seat on the R-C board, paying him a monthly adviser's fee, and promising a sizable commission. Though he failed to arrange the sale Graham's was looking for, Kennedy would become deeply involved with the studio in the coming years.
A new identity
In 1922, Robertson-Cole underwent a major reorganization as the company's founders departed. The flagship U.S. distribution business changed its name to Film Booking Offices of America, a banner under which R-C had released more than a dozen independent productions. The West Coast studio operation continued to make films under the Robertson-Cole name for some time, but FBO ultimately became the primary identity of the business for production as well as distribution. Between May 1922 and October 1923, one of the company's new American investors, Pat Powers, was effectively in command. Powers had previously led his own filmmaking company, part of the multiple mergers that created the large Universal studio in 1912. During his time in charge at FBO, his brand was added to many of its films: "P. A. Powers Presents". Among its outside suppliers of the period were Chester Bennett Productions, Hunt Stromberg Productions, and Tiffany Productions. While Kennedy left the board in July 1923, he leveraged his friendship with top screenwriter Frances Marion and her husband, accomplished athlete, ordained minister, and neophyte actor Fred Thomson, to help arrange a distribution deal between FBO and Thomson for half a dozen independent Westerns. An in-house series of boxing-themed shorts, Fighting Blood, starring FBO newcomer George O'Hara, grew so popular it was often billed above the accompanying feature. O'Hara would become an FBO mainstay, as would Alberta Vaughn, who specialized in shorts: most of her films were two-reelers, a measure of film length indicating a running time of fifteen to twenty-five minutes.File:TelephoneGirlCh10.jpg|thumb|225px|Love and Learn was the tenth installment of The Telephone Girl, Alberta Vaughn's first FBO series of shorts. Not a true serial film, each of its "chapters" was a stand-alone tale.
H.C.S. Thomson of Graham's, already chairman of the board, became the business's managing director with the departure of Powers. B. P. Fineman was hired as the studio's production chief in 1924; Evelyn Brent, his wife, moved over from Fox to become FBO's top dramatic star. Fred Thomson's fame was surging, and in April 1925, FBO vice-president Joseph I. Schnitzer signed him to a studio contract paying $6,000 a week—roughly $ in dollars. Behind only the enormously popular Tom Mix, Thomson was now the second-highest paid of all cowboy actors; his horse, Silver King, beloved by audiences, was covered by a $100,000 insurance policy. The deal also gave Thomson his own dedicated production unit at the studio. In December 1925, the Exhibitors Herald published its first annual list of the biggest box office films of the year based on a national survey of theater owners. FBO's top five attractions were led by A Girl of the Limberlost, an adaptation of a novel by bestselling author Gene Stratton-Porter, who had died the previous December; this was followed by Broken Laws, an issue-driven melodrama detailing the dire consequences of not spanking naughty children, and three Fred Thomson "oaters": The Bandit's Baby, The Wild Bull's Lair, and Thundering Hoofs.
As a distributor, Film Booking Offices focused on marketing its films to small-town exhibitors and independent theater chains. As a production company, it concentrated on low-budget movies, with an emphasis on Westerns, action films, romantic melodramas, and comedy shorts. From its first productions in early 1920 through late 1928, just before it was dissolved in a merger, the company, as either Robertson-Cole Pictures or FBO Pictures, produced more than 400 features. The studio's top-of-the-line movies—"specials", in industry parlance—aimed at major exhibition venues beyond the reach of most FBO films, were sometimes marketed as FBO "Gold Bond" pictures. Between 1924 and 1926, seven of Evelyn Brent's star vehicles as well as two other high-end films were produced under the label of Gothic Pictures or Gothic Productions. With neither the backing of large corporate interests nor the daily money generator of its own theater chain and far from its London owners, the company faced persistent cash-flow difficulties. The significant financial drain of its reliance on short-term, high-interest loans continued.