RKO Pictures
RKO Pictures, commonly known as simply RKO, is an American film, television and stage production company owned by Concord. In its original incarnation, as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., it was one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America in October 1928. RCA executive David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone, and in early 1929 production began under the RKO name. Two years later, another Kennedy concern, the Pathé studio, was folded into the operation. By the mid-1940s, RKO was controlled by investor Floyd Odlum.
RKO has long been renowned for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid- to late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their first major successes at the studio. Cary Grant was a mainstay for years, with credits including touchstones of the screwball comedy genre with which RKO was identified. The work of producer Val Lewton's low-budget horror unit and RKO's many ventures into the field now known as film noir have been acclaimed, largely after the fact, by film critics and historians. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and producer/director/star Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. RKO was also responsible for notable coproductions such as It's a Wonderful Life and Notorious, and it distributed many celebrated films by animation pioneer Walt Disney and leading independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. Though it often could not compete financially for top star and director contracts, RKO's below-the-line personnel were among the finest, including composer Max Steiner, cinematographers Nicholas Musuraca and Gregg Toland, and designer Van Nest Polglase.
Maverick industrialist Howard Hughes took over RKO in 1948. After years of disarray and decline under his control, the studio was acquired by the General Tire and Rubber Company in 1955. It soon broke new business ground as the first major studio to sell the bulk of its film library's TV rights. The original RKO Pictures ceased production in 1957 and was effectively dissolved two years later. In 1978, broadcaster RKO General, the corporate heir, launched a production subsidiary, RKO Pictures Inc., which revived the film production brand with its first theatrical releases three years later. In 1989, this business, with its remaining assets, including the studio trademarks and the remake rights to many classic RKO films, was sold to new owners. It was re-established as the production company RKO Pictures LLC., which operated independently for 35 years until it was acquired by Concord Originals in 2025.
Origin
In October 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talking picture. Its success prompted Hollywood to convert from silent to sound film production en masse. The Radio Corporation of America controlled an advanced optical sound-on-film system, Photophone, recently developed by General Electric, RCA's parent company. Its path to joining the anticipated boom in sound movies had a major hurdle: Warner Bros. and Fox, Hollywood's other vanguard sound studio, were already financially and technologically aligned with ERPI, a subsidiary of AT&T's Western Electric division. The industry's two largest companies, Paramount and Loew's/MGM, along with First National Pictures—third of the silent era "Big Three" major studios, but by then in marked decline—and Universal Pictures, were poised to contract with ERPI and its Vitaphone and Movietone systems for sound conversion as well.Seeking a customer for Photophone, then general manager of RCA David Sarnoff approached financier Joseph P. Kennedy in late 1927 about using the system for his Film Booking Offices of America. A Kennedy-led investment group had acquired the modest-sized, low-budget-focused studio the previous year, and he had turned it into a steady profit maker. Negotiations resulted in RCA acquiring a substantial interest in FBO; Sarnoff had apparently already conceived of a plan for the studio to attain a central position in the film industry, maximizing Photophone revenue. Next was securing a string of exhibition venues like those the leading Hollywood production companies owned. Kennedy began investigating the possibility of such a purchase.
At that same time, the allied Keith-Albee and Orpheum theater circuits, built around the then fading medium of live vaudeville, were pursuing a transition into the movie business. In 1926 the exhibitors had acquired a 50 percent stake in the holding company of Producers Distributing Corporation, a smaller studio than FBO but more prestigious. Famed director Cecil B. DeMille—PDC studio chief and owner of its Culver City production facility—had been draining the company's resources for his well-appointed productions, and it had been finding little success in getting its films into first-run theaters, which were largely tied up by the majors. In early 1927, despite months of DeMille's strenuous objections, an agreement was reached to merge PDC into Pathé, a lower-level studio known for its newsreel and churn out of cheap shorts. Investment banker Elisha Walker, whose Blair & Co. firm owned the controlling interest in Pathé, brought on Keith-Albee general manager John J. Murdock as studio president. In January 1928, a less tense merger, engineered by Murdock, was finalized, establishing the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain. With Pathé's finances in a ditch, Murdock, at Walker's prodding, turned to Kennedy for help in reorganizing the studio and consolidating it with PDC. The two men found that they had mutual interests, in particular, removing Edward Albee, the "Czar of Vaudeville" and Murdock's nominal boss, from the picture. Sarnoff's vision of a new big-league studio was coming into focus—and both Kennedy and Walker had similar notions.
Image:RadioKeithOrpheum.jpg|thumb|right|175px|Radio-Keith-Orpheum logo, 1929
Assisted by Murdock and with Blair & Co.'s backing, Kennedy quickly maneuvered to interlock KAO and FBO, selling the exhibitor a substantial stake in his studio while buying up copious amounts of KAO stock. Within months, he had installed himself as chairman of the theater chain's new board of directors. When Albee, still KAO president, visited his office, Kennedy reportedly asked, "Didn't you know, Ed? You're washed up. You're through." DeMille departed with a large payout in April and later in the year signed a three-picture deal with MGM. Sarnoff and Kennedy began talks about setting up a holding company funded by RCA cash and KAO securities, but plans stalled as Sarnoff grew frustrated with Kennedy's reluctance to pay for the Photophone work proceeding, if slowly, at FBO and Pathé. An attempt by Kennedy to reorganize yet another studio that had turned to him for help, now ERPI-aligned First National, further strained his relationship with Sarnoff and raised the threat that Photophone would be locked out of the industry entirely. Though Kennedy's deal with First National collapsed within weeks, the RCA executive saw that it was time to make his move.
In September, while Kennedy was traveling in Europe, Sarnoff began negotiations with Walker, whose firm was now heavily invested in KAO, to merge the exhibition circuit with Film Booking Offices under RCA control. Soon after Kennedy's return at the end of the month, he closed the deal, arranging to sell off his FBO and KAO shares, options, and convertibles at enormous profit. On October 23, 1928, RCA announced the creation of the Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp. holding company, with Sarnoff as board chairman. The new administration made clear that Kennedy's services were no longer needed and he stepped down from his board and executive positions in the merged businesses, leaving him with co-ownership and management of Pathé and the PDC assets that it had absorbed. RCA owned the governing stock interest in RKO, 22 percent. On January 25, 1929, the new company's production arm, presided over by former FBO vice-president Joseph I. Schnitzer, was unveiled as RKO Productions Inc. A week later, it filed for the trademark "Radio Pictures".
History
Early years
While the main FBO studio in Hollywood was refitted for sound, production of shorts began in New York at the RKO Gramercy studio Sarnoff had just opened. RCA's radio network, NBC, began broadcasting a weekly variety show, The RKO Hour, that became a prime promotional vehicle for the studio's films. The first two features released by the new company were musicals: The melodramatic Syncopation, which actually completed shooting before FBO was reincorporated as RKO, premiered on March 29, 1929. The comedic Street Girl debuted July 30. This was billed as RKO's first "official" production and its first to be shot in Hollywood. As with many early RKO films, the producer was studio chief William LeBaron, who had held the same position at FBO. A few nonsinging pictures followed, but RKO's first major hit was again a musical. The studio spent heavily on the lavish Rio Rita, including a number of Technicolor sequences. Opening in September to rave reviews, it was named one of the ten best pictures of the year by Film Daily. Cinema historian Richard Barrios credits it with initiating the "first age of the filmed Broadway musical". By the end of the year, RKO was making use of an additional production facility—five hundred acres had been acquired near Encino in the San Fernando Valley as a movie ranch for exteriors and large-scale standing sets.With RKO Productions' films handled by sibling subsidiary RKO Distributing Corp., the studio released a limited slate of twelve features in its first year; in 1930, the figure more than doubled to twenty-nine. That July, RKO Productions Inc. was renamed RKO Radio Pictures Inc. RKO Pictures Ltd. was set up to handle British distribution. Encouraged by Rio Ritas success, RKO produced several costly musicals incorporating Technicolor sequences, among them Dixiana and Hit the Deck, both scripted and directed, like Rio Rita, by Luther Reed. Following the example of the other major studios, RKO had planned to create its own musical revue, Radio Revels. Promoted as the studio's most extravagant production to date, it was to be photographed entirely in Technicolor. The project was abandoned, as the public's taste for musicals temporarily subsided. From more than sixty Hollywood musicals in 1929 and over eighty the following year, the number dropped to eleven in 1931.
Rio Rita star Bebe Daniels, who had joined the new studio as its top female name after the final months of her contract at Paramount were bought out, fell victim to the shifting market. Her big musical follow-up, Dixiana, had been a big money loser, and in January 1931 her contract was sold to Warner Bros. RKO, meanwhile, was in a contractual bind that it could not get out of: it was committed to producing two more features with Technicolor's system, even as audiences had come to associate color with the momentarily out-of-favor musical genre. Fulfilling its obligations, RKO produced two all-Technicolor pictures, The Runaround and Fanny Foley Herself, containing no musical sequences. Neither was a success.
Despite these issues—and the foundering US economy—RKO had gone on a spending spree, buying up theater after theater to add to its exhibition chain. In October 1930, the company purchased a 50 percent stake in the New York Van Beuren studio, which specialized in cartoons and live shorts. Looking to get out of the film business, Kennedy arranged for RKO to purchase Pathé, in a deal that protected his associates' bond investments while it crushed many small stockholders who had bought in at artificially high prices. The deal was secured on January 29, 1931, and the studio, with its contract players, well-regarded newsreel operation, and DeMille's old Culver City studio and backlot, became the semiautonomous RKO Pathé Pictures Inc. The acquisition, though a defensible investment in the long term for Pathé's physical facilities, was yet another major expense borne by the fledgling RKO, particularly as the reliably avaricious Kennedy had masked Pathé's considerable financial woes, just as he had with FBO and KAO.
There was an undeniable plus side to the merger: when Pathé's Constance Bennett, Ann Harding, and Helen Twelvetrees joined the Radio family in early 1931, they were bigger box office draws than anyone on the RKO roster. The studio's production schedule surpassed forty features a year, released under the names "Radio Pictures" and, until late 1932, "RKO Pathé". Cimarron became the only RKO production to win the Academy Award for Best Picture; it cost a profligate $1.4 million, however, and lost nearly half that on its first release. Cimmaron's female principal, Irene Dunne, was the studio's one major homegrown star of this early pre-Code era; having made her screen debut as the lead in the 1930 musical Leathernecking, she would headline at the studio for the entire decade, under contracts that gave her an unusual amount of power. Other significant actors of the period included Joel McCrea, Ricardo Cortez, Dolores del Río, and Mary Astor. Richard Dix, Oscar-nominated for his performance in Cimarron, would serve as RKO's standby B-movie leading man until the early 1940s, while Tom Keene was top-billed in twelve low-budget Westerns between 1931 and 1933. The comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, often wrangling over ingenue Dorothy Lee, was a bankable constant for almost a decade.