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. 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. Kennedy in late 1927 about using the system for his Film Booking Offices of America (FBO).
Seeking a customer for Photophone, then general manager of RCA David Sarnoff approached financier Joseph P. ĭavid Sarnoff (1929), by Samuel Johnson Woolf, National Portrait Gallery 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. 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. Its path to joining the anticipated boom in sound movies had a major hurdle: Warner Bros. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) controlled an advanced optical sound-on-film system, Photophone, recently developed by General Electric, RCA's parent company. Its success prompted Hollywood to convert from silent to sound film production en masse. released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talking picture. The original studio's film library is now largely controlled by Warner Bros. 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, who established the small independent company RKO Pictures LLC. In 1978, broadcaster RKO General, the corporate heir, launched a production subsidiary, RKO Pictures Inc., which revived the theatrical brand with its first releases three years later.
The original RKO Pictures ceased production in 1957 and was effectively dissolved two years later. After years of disarray and decline under his control, the studio was acquired by the General Tire and Rubber Company in 1955. Maverick industrialist Howard Hughes took over RKO in 1948. Though it often couldn't compete financially for top star and director contracts, RKO's below-the-line personnel were among the finest, including composer Max Steiner, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, and designer Van Nest Polglase. 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. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and Citizen Kane. 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. Cary Grant was a mainstay for years, with credits including touchstones of the screwball comedy genre with which RKO was identified. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their first major successes at the studio. RKO has long been renowned for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid- to late 1930s. By the mid-1940s, RKO was controlled by investor Floyd Odlum.
Two years later, another Kennedy concern, the Pathé studio, was folded into the operation. 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 (an abbreviation of Radio-Keith-Orpheum).
Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company, one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age.
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