RKO Pictures
Encyclopedia
RKO Pictures is an American film production and distribution company. As RKO Radio Pictures Inc., it was one of the Big Five
Studio system
The studio system was a means of film production and distribution dominant in Hollywood from the early 1920s through the early 1960s. The term studio system refers to the practice of large motion picture studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under...

 studios of Hollywood's
Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...

 Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum
Keith-Albee-Orpheum
The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation was the owner of a chain of vaudeville and motion picture theatres. It was formed by the merger of the holdings of Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II and Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit, Inc..-History:...

 (KAO) theater chains and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America
Film Booking Offices of America
Film Booking Offices of America was an American film studio of the silent era, a producer and distributor of mostly low-budget films. The business began as Robertson-Cole , the American division of a British import–export company...

 (FBO) studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA chief David Sarnoff
David Sarnoff
David Sarnoff was an American businessman and pioneer of American commercial radio and television. He founded the National Broadcasting Company and throughout most of his career he led the Radio Corporation of America in various capacities from shortly after its founding in 1919 until his...

 engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film
Sound-on-film
Sound-on-film refers to a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying picture is physically recorded onto photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog sound track or digital sound track,...

 technology, RCA Photophone
RCA Photophone
RCA Photophone was the trade name given to one of four major competing technologies that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1920s for synchronizing electrically recorded audio to a motion picture image. RCA Photophone was a sound-on-film, "variable-area" film exposure system, in...

. By the mid-1940s, the studio was under the control of investor Floyd Odlum
Floyd Odlum
Floyd Bostwick Odlum was a wealthy lawyer and industrialist. He has been described as "possibly the only man in the United States who made a great fortune out of the Depression"...

.

RKO has long been celebrated for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute...

 and Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....

 in the mid- to late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress of film, stage, and television. In a career that spanned 62 years as a leading lady, she was best known for playing strong-willed, sophisticated women in both dramas and comedies...

 and, later, Robert Mitchum
Robert Mitchum
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time...

 had their first major successes at the studio. Cary Grant
Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach , better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English actor who later took U.S. citizenship...

 was a mainstay for years. The work of producer Val Lewton
Val Lewton
Val Lewton was an American film producer and screenwriter, best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s.-Early life:...

's low-budget horror unit and RKO's many ventures into the field now known as film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

 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
King Kong (1933 film)
King Kong is a Pre-Code 1933 fantasy monster adventure film co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and written by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman after a story by Cooper and Edgar Wallace. The film tells of a gigantic island-dwelling apeman creature called Kong who dies in...

 and Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...

.

Maverick industrialist Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...

 took over RKO in 1948. After years of decline under his control, the studio was acquired by the General Tire and Rubber Company in 1955. The original RKO Pictures ceased production in 1957 and was effectively dissolved two years later. In 1981, broadcaster RKO General
RKO General
RKO General was the main holding company through 1991 for the noncore businesses of the General Tire and Rubber Company and, after General Tire's reorganization in the 1980s, GenCorp. The business was based around the consolidation of its parent company's broadcasting interests, dating to 1943, and...

, the corporate heir, revived it as a production subsidiary, RKO Pictures Inc. In 1989, this business with its few remaining assets, the trademarks and remake
Remake
A remake is a piece of media based primarily on an earlier work of the same medium.-Film:The term "remake" is generally used in reference to a movie which uses an earlier movie as the main source material, rather than in reference to a second, later movie based on the same source...

 rights to many classic RKO films, was sold to new owners, who now operate the small independent company RKO Pictures LLC.

Origin of company

In October 1927, Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

 released The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer (1927 film)
The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system,...

, the first feature-length talking picture. Its success prompted Hollywood
Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...

 to convert from silent to sound film
Sound film
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades would pass before sound motion pictures were made commercially...

 production en masse. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) controlled an advanced optical sound-on-film
Sound-on-film
Sound-on-film refers to a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying picture is physically recorded onto photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog sound track or digital sound track,...

 system, Photophone
RCA Photophone
RCA Photophone was the trade name given to one of four major competing technologies that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1920s for synchronizing electrically recorded audio to a motion picture image. RCA Photophone was a sound-on-film, "variable-area" film exposure system, in...

, recently developed by General Electric
General Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

, RCA's parent company. However, its hopes of joining in the anticipated boom in sound movies faced a major hurdle: Warner Bros. and Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...

, Hollywood's other vanguard sound studio, were already financially and technologically aligned with ERPI, a subsidiary of AT&T's Western Electric
Western Electric
Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...

 division. The industry's two largest companies, Paramount
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...

 and Loew's
Loews Cineplex Entertainment
Loews Theatres, aka Loews Incorporated , founded in 1904 by Marcus Loew and Brantford Schwartz, was the oldest theater chain operating in North America until it merged with AMC Theatres on January 26, 2006. From 1924 until 1959, it was also the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. The...

/MGM, with two other major studios, Universal
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....

 and First National
First National
First National was an association of independent theater owners in the United States that expanded from exhibiting movies to distributing them, and eventually to producing them as a movie studio, called First National Pictures, Inc. It later merged with Warner Bros.-Early history:The First National...

, were poised to contract with ERPI for sound conversion as well.
Seeking a customer for Photophone, in late 1927 David Sarnoff
David Sarnoff
David Sarnoff was an American businessman and pioneer of American commercial radio and television. He founded the National Broadcasting Company and throughout most of his career he led the Radio Corporation of America in various capacities from shortly after its founding in 1919 until his...

, then general manager of RCA, approached Joseph Kennedy about using the system for Kennedy's modest-sized studio, Film Booking Offices of America
Film Booking Offices of America
Film Booking Offices of America was an American film studio of the silent era, a producer and distributor of mostly low-budget films. The business began as Robertson-Cole , the American division of a British import–export company...

 (FBO). Negotiations resulted in General Electric acquiring a substantial interest in FBO—Sarnoff had apparently already conceived of a plan for the company to attain a central position in the film industry, maximizing Photophone revenue. Next on the agenda was securing a string of exhibition venues like those the leading Hollywood production companies owned. Kennedy began investigating the possibility of such a purchase. Around that time, the large Keith-Albee-Orpheum
Keith-Albee-Orpheum
The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation was the owner of a chain of vaudeville and motion picture theatres. It was formed by the merger of the holdings of Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II and Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit, Inc..-History:...

 (KAO) circuit of theaters, built around the then-fading medium of live vaudeville
Vaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

, was attempting a transition to the movie business. In mid-1927, the filmmaking operations of Pathé (U.S.)
Pathé
Pathé or Pathé Frères is the name of various French businesses founded and originally run by the Pathé Brothers of France.-History:...

 and Cecil B. De Mille had united under KAO's control. Early in 1928, KAO general manager John J. Murdock, who had assumed the presidency of Pathé, turned to Kennedy as an adviser in consolidating the studio with De Mille's company, Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). This was the relationship Sarnoff and Kennedy sought.

After an aborted attempt by Kennedy to bring yet another studio that had turned to him for help, First National, into the Photophone fold, RCA was ready to step back in: the company acquired Kennedy's stock in both FBO and the KAO theater business. On October 23, 1928, RCA announced the creation of the Radio-Keith-Orpheum holding company, with Sarnoff as chairman of the board. Kennedy, who withdrew from his executive positions in the merged companies, kept Pathé separate from RKO and under his personal control. RCA owned the governing stock interest in RKO, 22 percent; in the early 1930s, RCA's share of stock in the company rose as high as 60 percent. The company's production and distribution arm, presided over by former FBO vice-president Joseph I. Schnitzer, was incorporated early in 1929 as Radio Pictures. Looking to get out of the film business the following year, Kennedy arranged in late 1930 for RKO to purchase Pathé from him. On January 29, 1931, Pathé, with its contract players, well-regarded newsreel operation, and Culver City
Culver City, California
Culver City is a city in western Los Angeles County, California. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 38,883, up from 38,816 at the 2000 census. It is mostly surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, but also shares a border with unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. Culver...

 studio and backlot, was merged into RKO as Kennedy sold off the last of his stock in the company he had been instrumental in creating.

Early years

Declaring that it would make only all-talking films, RKO began shooting at the small facility FBO shared with Pathé in New York City while the main FBO studio in Hollywood was technologically refitted. In charge of production was William LeBaron, who had held the same position at FBO. The new company's two initial releases were musicals: The melodramatic Syncopation
Syncopation (1929 film)
Syncopation is the second film produced by RKO Pictures but the first distribution. It is a musical, starring Barbara Bennett, Bobby Watson, and Ian Hunter, and is based on the novel Stepping High by Gene Markey.-Cast:*Barbara Bennett as Fleurette...

 premiered on March 29, 1929. The comedic Street Girl
Street Girl
Street Girl is a musical comedy/drama film directed by Wesley Ruggles and released by RKO Radio Pictures, it's the first official production of RKO but was released soon after Syncopation the second production of RKO.-Plot summary:...

 debuted July 30. This was billed as RKO's first "official" production—first to follow the formal incorporation of Radio Pictures, first to be made in Hollywood. A few nonsinging pictures followed, but the studio's first major hit was again a musical. RKO spent heavily on the lavish Rio Rita
Rio Rita (1929 film)
Rio Rita is a 1929 RKO Pictures musical comedy starring Bebe Daniels and John Boles along with the comedy team of Wheeler & Woolsey. The film is based on the 1927 stage musical produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, which originally united Wheeler and Woolsey as a team and made them famous...

, including a number of Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...

 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
San Fernando Valley
The San Fernando Valley is an urbanized valley located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of southern California, United States, defined by the dramatic mountains of the Transverse Ranges circling it...

 as a backlot
Backlot
A backlot is an area behind or adjoining a movie studio, containing permanent exterior buildings for outdoor scenes in filmmaking or television productions, or space for temporary set construction....

 for exteriors and large-scale standing sets.

RKO released a limited slate of twelve features in its first year; in 1930, that figure more than doubled to twenty-nine. Originally organized as the distinct business entities RKO Productions Inc. and RKO Distributing Corp., by July the studio was making a transition to the new, unified RKO Radio Pictures Inc. Encouraged by Rio Ritas success, RKO produced several costly musicals incorporating Technicolor sequences, among them Dixiana and Hit the Deck
Hit the Deck (1930 film)
Hit the Deck is a 1930 musical film directed by Luther Reed, starred Jack Oakie, and featured Technicolor sequences. It was based on the musical Hit the Deck. It was one of the most expensive productions of RKO Radio Pictures up to that time, and one of the most expensive productions of 1930. This...

, 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
Revue
A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance and sketches. The revue has its roots in 19th century American popular entertainment and melodrama but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from 1916 to 1932...

, Radio Revels. Promoted as the studio's most extravagant production to date, it was to be photographed entirely in Technicolor. The project was abandoned, however, as the public's taste for musicals temporarily subsided. From a total of more than sixty Hollywood musicals in 1929 and over eighty the following year, the number dropped to eleven in 1931. RKO was left in a bind: it still had a contract with Technicolor to produce two more features with its system. Complicating matters, audiences had come to associate color with the momentarily out-of-favor musical genre due to a glut of such productions from the major Hollywood studios. Fulfilling its obligations, RKO produced two all-Technicolor pictures, The Runaround and Fanny Foley Herself
Fanny Foley Herself
Fanny Foley Herself is an American comedy-drama film that was shot entirely in Technicolor. The film was the second feature to be filmed using a new Technicolor process which removed grain and resulted in a much improved color...

 (both 1931), containing no musical sequences. Neither was a success.

Even as the U.S. economy foundered, 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's Van Beuren
Van Beuren Studios
Van Beuren Studios was an American animation studio that produced theatrical cartoons from 1928 to 1936.Producer Amedee J. van Beuren first became involved in the animation industry in 1920, when he formed a partnership with Paul Terry and formed the "Aesop's Fables Studio" for the production of...

 studio, which specialized in cartoons and live shorts. RKO's production schedule soon surpassed forty features a year, released under the names "Radio Pictures" and, for a short time after the 1931 merger, "RKO Pathé". Cimarron
Cimarron (1931 film)
Cimarron is a 1931 Pre-Code film directed by Wesley Ruggles and based on the Edna Ferber novel Cimarron. It won three Academy Awards.-Background:...

 (1931), produced by LeBaron himself, would become the only RKO production to win the Academy Award for Best Picture
Academy Award for Best Picture
The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only...

; nonetheless, having cost a profligate $1.4 million to make, it was a money-loser on original domestic release. The most popular RKO star of this pre-Code era was Irene Dunne
Irene Dunne
Irene Dunne was an American film actress and singer of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. Dunne was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her performances in Cimarron , Theodora Goes Wild , The Awful Truth , Love Affair and I Remember Mama...

, who made her debut as the lead in the 1930 musical Leathernecking and was a headliner at the studio for the entire decade. Other major performers included Joel McCrea
Joel McCrea
Joel Albert McCrea was an American actor whose career spanned 50 years and appearances in over 90 films.-Early life:...

, Ricardo Cortez
Ricardo Cortez
Jacob Krantz , known by his stage name Ricardo Cortez, was an American film actor who began his career during the silent era.-Life and career:...

, Dolores del Río
Dolores del Río
Dolores del Río was a Mexican film actress. She was a star of Hollywood films during the silent era and in the Golden Age of Hollywood...

, and Mary Astor
Mary Astor
Mary Astor was an American actress. Most remembered for her role as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, Astor began her long motion picture career as a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s.She eventually made a successful transition to talkies, but almost...

. Richard Dix
Richard Dix
Richard Dix was an American motion picture actor who achieved popularity in both silent and sound film. His standard on-screen image was that of the rugged and stalwart hero.-Early life:...

, Oscar-nominated
Academy Award for Best Actor
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

 for his lead performance in Cimarron, would serve as RKO's standby B-movie
B-movie
A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....

 star until the early 1940s. The comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey
Wheeler & Woolsey
Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey were a famous American film comedy team of the 1930s....

, often wrangling over ingenue Dorothy Lee
Dorothy Lee
Dorothy Lee was an American actress and comedian during the 1930s, usually appearing alongside the popular Wheeler & Woolsey comedy team....

, was a bankable mainstay for years. Constance Bennett
Constance Bennett
-Early life:She was born in New York City, the daughter of actor Richard Bennett and actress Adrienne Morrison, whose father was the stage actor Lewis Morrison , a wealthy performer of English and Spanish ancestry...

, Ann Harding
Ann Harding
Ann Harding was an American theatre, motion picture, radio, and television actress.-Early years:Born Dorothy Walton Gatley at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, to George G. Gatley and Elizabeth "Bessie" Crabb. The daughter of a career army officer, she traveled often during her early life...

, and Helen Twelvetrees
Helen Twelvetrees
Helen Twelvetrees was an American stage and screen performer, considered a top female star in the early days of sound films.- Early life and career :...

 came over with Pathé. The Pathé acquisition, though a defensible investment in the long term for its physical facilities, was yet another major expense borne by the fledgling RKO, particularly as Pathé's stock price had been artificially inflated by some prepurchase finagling. After little more than a year of semiautonomous operation within RKO, Pathé was dissolved as a feature production unit.

Success under Selznick

Exceptions like Cimarron and Rio Rita aside, RKO's product was largely regarded as mediocre, so in October 1931 Sarnoff hired twenty-nine-year-old David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.-Early years:...

 to replace LeBaron as production chief. In addition to implementing rigorous cost-control measures, Selznick championed the unit production system, which gave the producers
Film producer
A film producer oversees and delivers a film project to all relevant parties while preserving the integrity, voice and vision of the film. They will also often take on some financial risk by using their own money, especially during the pre-production period, before a film is fully financed.The...

 of individual movies much greater independence than they had under the prevailing central producer system. "Under the factory system of production you rob the director of his individualism", said Selznick, "and this being a creative industry that is harmful to the quality of the product made." Instituting unit production, he predicted, would also result in cost savings of 30–40 percent. To make films under the new system, Selznick recruited prize behind-the-camera personnel, such as director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...

 George Cukor
George Cukor
George Dewey Cukor was an American film director. He mainly concentrated on comedies and literary adaptations. His career flourished at RKO and later MGM, where he directed What Price Hollywood? , A Bill of Divorcement , Dinner at Eight , Little Women , David Copperfield , Romeo and Juliet and...

 and producer/director Merian C. Cooper
Merian C. Cooper
Merian Caldwell Cooper was an American aviator, United States Air Force and Polish Air Force officer, adventurer, screenwriter, and film director and producer. His most famous film was the 1933 movie King Kong.-Early life:...

, and gave producer Pandro S. Berman
Pandro S. Berman
Pandro Samuel Berman , was an American film producer.-Biography:His father, Henry Berman, was general manager of Universal Pictures during Hollywood's formative years. The younger Berman, Pandro Samuel, was an assistant director during the 1920s under Mal St. Clair and Ralph Ince...

, aged twenty-six, increasingly important projects. Selznick discovered and signed a young actress who would quickly become one of the studio's biggest stars, Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress of film, stage, and television. In a career that spanned 62 years as a leading lady, she was best known for playing strong-willed, sophisticated women in both dramas and comedies...

. John Barrymore
John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...

 was also enlisted for a few memorable performances. From September 1932 on, print advertising for the company's features displayed the revised name "RKO Radio Pictures"; the Pathé name was used only for newsreels and documentaries. That year, the New York City–based corporate headquarters moved into the new RKO Building, an Art Deco
Art Deco
Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 skyscraper that was one of the first Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering between 48th and 51st streets in New York City, United States. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning the area between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. It was declared a National...

 structures to open.

Selznick spent a mere fifteen months as RKO production chief, resigning over a dispute with new corporate president Merlin Aylesworth concerning creative control. One of his last acts at RKO was to approve a screen test
Screen test
A screen test is a method of determining the suitability of an actor or actress for performing on film and/or in a particular role. The performer is generally given a scene, or selected lines and actions, and instructed to perform in front of a camera to see if they are suitable...

 for a thirty-three-year-old, balding Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 song-and-dance man named Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute...

. In a memo, Selznick wrote, "I feel, in spite of his enormous ears and bad chin line, that his charm is ... tremendous". Selznick's tenure was widely considered masterful: In 1931, before he arrived, the studio had produced forty-two features for $16 million in total budgets. In 1932, under Selznick, forty-one features were made for $10.2 million, with clear improvement in quality and popularity. He backed several major successes, including A Bill of Divorcement
A Bill of Divorcement
A Bill of Divorcement is a 1932 American drama film, directed by George Cukor and starring John Barrymore and Katharine Hepburn in her movie debut. It is based on the British play of the same name, written by Clemence Dane as a reaction to a law passed in Britain in the early 1920s that allowed...

 (1932), with Cukor directing Hepburn's debut, and the monumental King Kong
King Kong (1933 film)
King Kong is a Pre-Code 1933 fantasy monster adventure film co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and written by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman after a story by Cooper and Edgar Wallace. The film tells of a gigantic island-dwelling apeman creature called Kong who dies in...

 (1933)—largely Merian Cooper's brainchild, brought to life by the astonishing special effects work of Willis O'Brien
Willis O'Brien
Willis Harold O'Brien was an Irish American pioneering motion picture special effects artist who perfected and specialized in stop-motion animation. He was affectionately known to his family and close friends as "Obie"....

. Still, the shaky finances and excesses that marked the company's pre-Selznick days had not left RKO in shape to withstand the Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

; the company sank into receivership
Receivership
In law, receivership is the situation in which an institution or enterprise is being held by a receiver, a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights." The receivership remedy is an equitable remedy that emerged in...

 in early 1933, from which it did not emerge until 1940.

Cooper at the helm

Cooper took over as production head after Selznick's departure and oversaw two hits starring Hepburn: Morning Glory (1933), for which she won her first Oscar
Academy Award for Best Actress
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...

, and Little Women
Little Women (1933 film)
Little Women is a 1933 American drama film directed by George Cukor. The screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman is based on the classic novel of the same name by Louisa May Alcott...

 (1933), director Cukor's second collaboration with the actress. Among the studio's in-house productions, the latter was the biggest box-office success of the decade. Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers
Ginger Rogers was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century....

 had already made several minor films for RKO when Cooper signed her to a seven-year contract and cast her in the big-budget musical Flying Down to Rio
Flying Down to Rio
Flying Down to Rio is a 1933 RKO musical film noted for being the first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Astaire and Rogers were not the stars of the film, however, Dolores del Río and Gene Raymond were top-billed. Among the featured players Franklin Pangborn and Eric Blore are...

 (1933). Rogers was paired with Astaire, making his movie debut. Billed fourth and fifth respectively, the picture turned them into stars. Hermes Pan
Hermes Pan (choreographer)
Hermes Pan was an American dancer and choreographer, principally celebrated as Fred Astaire's choreographic collaborator on the famous 1930s movie musicals starring Astaire and Ginger Rogers.-Early life:...

, assistant to the film's dance director, would become one of Hollywood's leading choreographers through his subsequent work with Astaire.

Along with Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

, RKO became one of the primary homes of the screwball comedy
Screwball Comedy
Screwball Comedy is an album by the Japanese band Soul Flower Union. The album found the band going into a simpler, harder-rocking direction, after several heavily world-music influenced albums.-Track listing:...

. As film historian James Harvey describes, compared to their richer competition, the two studios were "more receptive to experiment, more tolerant of chaos on the set. It was at these two lesser 'majors'...that nearly all the preeminent screwball directors did their important films—[Howard] Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...

 and [Gregory] La Cava
Gregory La Cava
Gregory La Cava was an American film director best known for his films of the 1930s, including My Man Godfrey and Stage Door....

 and [Leo] McCarey
Leo McCarey
Thomas Leo McCarey was an American film director, screenwriter and producer. During his lifetime he was involved in nearly 200 movies, especially comedies...

 and [George] Stevens
George Stevens
George Stevens was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer.Among his most notable films were Diary of Anne Frank , nominated for Best Director, Giant , winner of Oscar for Best Director, Shane , Oscar nominated, and A Place in the Sun , winner of Oscar for Best...

." The relatively unheralded William A. Seiter
William A. Seiter
William A. Seiter was an American film director. He was born in New York City. After attending Hudson River Military Academy, Seiter broke into films in 1915 as a bit player at Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, doubling a cowboy...

 directed the studio's first significant contribution to the genre, The Richest Girl in the World (1934). The drama Of Human Bondage (1934), directed by John Cromwell
John Cromwell (director)
Elwood Dager Cromwell , known as John Cromwell, was an American film actor, director and producer.-Biography:...

, was Bette Davis
Bette Davis
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress of film, television and theater. Noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters, she was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional...

's first great success. Stevens's Alice Adams
Alice Adams (film)
Alice Adams, also known as Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams, is a 1935 romantic film made by RKO. It was directed by George Stevens and produced by Pandro S. Berman from a screenplay by Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner adapted by Jane Murfin from the novel, Alice Adams, by Booth Tarkington...

 and director John Ford
John Ford
John Ford was an American film director. He was famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath...

's The Informer were each nominated for the 1935 Best Picture Oscar—the Best Director statuette won by Ford was the only one ever given for an RKO production. The Informers star, Victor McLaglen
Victor McLaglen
Victor Andrew de Bier Everleigh McLaglen was an English boxer and World War I veteran who became a successful film actor.Towards the end of his life he was naturalised as a U.S. citizen.-Early life:...

, also took home an Academy Award; he would appear in a dozen movies for the studio over a span of two decades.

Lacking the financial resources of industry leaders MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...

, Paramount
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...

, and Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...

, RKO turned out many pictures during the era that made up for it with high style in an Art Deco mode, exemplified by such Astaire–Rogers musicals as The Gay Divorcee
The Gay Divorcee
The Gay Divorcee is a 1934 American film based on the musical play Gay Divorce written by Dwight Taylor, Kenneth S. Webb, Samuel Hoffenstein, with screenplay by George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost and Edward Kaufman, from an unproduced play by J. Hartley Manners...

 (1934), their first pairing as leads, and Top Hat
Top Hat
Top Hat is a 1935 screwball comedy musical film in which Fred Astaire plays an American dancer named Jerry Travers, who comes to London to star in a show produced by Horace Hardwick . He meets and attempts to impress Dale Tremont to win her affection...

 (1935). One of the figures most responsible for that style was another Selznick recruit: Van Nest Polglase
Van Nest Polglase
Van Nest Polglase was an American art director. He was nominated for six Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction. Best remembered as head of the design department at RKO Pictures, he worked on 333 films between 1925 and 1957.He was born in Brooklyn, New York and died in Los Angeles,...

, chief of RKO's highly regarded design department
Production designer
In film and television, a production designer is the person responsible for the overall look of a filmed event such as films, TV programs, music videos or adverts. Production designers have one of the key creative roles in the creation of motion pictures and television. Working directly with the...

 for almost a decade. Film historian James Naremore
James Naremore
James Naremore, born James Otis Naremore, is a film and comparative literature scholar based at Indiana University. Now retired, he retains the titles of Chancellor's Professor of Speech Communication, Chancellor's Professor of Comparative Literature, Chancellor's Professor of English, and...

 has described RKO as "chiefly a designer's studio. It never had a stable of important actors, writers, or directors, but ... it was rich in artists and special-effects technicians. As a result its most distinctive pictures contained a strong element of fantasy—not so much the fantasy of horror, which during the thirties was the province of Universal
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....

, but the fantasy of the marvelous and adventurous."

As a group, the studio's craft divisions were among the strongest in the industry. Costumer
Costume design
Costume design is the fabrication of apparel for the overall appearance of a character or performer. This usually involves researching, designing and building the actual items from conception. Costumes may be for a theater or cinema performance but may not be limited to such...

 Walter Plunkett
Walter Plunkett
Walter Plunkett was a prolific costume designer who worked on more than 150 projects throughout his career in the Hollywood film industry....

, who worked with the company from the close of the FBO era through the end of 1939, was known as the top period
Period piece
-Setting:In the performing arts, a period piece is a work set in a particular era. This informal term covers all countries, all periods and all genres...

 wardrobist in the business. Sidney Saunders, innovative head of the studio's paint department, was responsible for significant progress in rear projection
Rear projection effect
Rear projection is part of many in-camera effects cinematic techniquesin film production for combining foreground performances with pre-filmed backgrounds. It was widely used for many years in driving scenes, or to show other forms of "distant" background motion...

 quality. On June 13, 1935, RKO premiered the first feature film shot entirely in advanced three-strip Technicolor, Becky Sharp
Becky Sharp (film)
Becky Sharp is a 1935 film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Miriam Hopkins. Other supporting cast were Frances Dee, Cedric Hardwicke, Billie Burke, Alison Skipworth, Nigel Bruce, and Alan Mowbray. It is based on the play of the same name by Langdon Mitchell, which in turn is based on...

. The movie was coproduced with Pioneer Pictures, founded by Cooper—who departed RKO after two years helming production—and John Hay "Jock" Whitney
John Hay Whitney
John Hay Whitney , colloquially known as "Jock" Whitney, was U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, and a member of the Whitney family.-Family:...

, who brought in his cousin Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney
Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney
Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney was an American businessman, film producer, writer, and government official, as well as the owner of a leading stable of thoroughbred racehorses....

; Cooper had successfully encouraged the Whitneys to purchase a major share of the Technicolor business as well. Though judged by critics a failure as drama, Becky Sharp was widely lauded for its visual brilliance and technical expertise. RKO also employed some of the industry's leading artists and craftsmen whose work was never seen. From the studio's earliest days through late 1935, Max Steiner
Max Steiner
Max Steiner was an Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as...

, regarded by many historians as the most influential composer of the early years of sound cinema, made music for over 100 RKO films. Murray Spivak, head of the studio's audio special effects department, made important advances in the use of rerecording technology first heard in King Kong.

Briskin and Berman

In October 1935 the ownership team expanded, with financier Floyd Odlum
Floyd Odlum
Floyd Bostwick Odlum was a wealthy lawyer and industrialist. He has been described as "possibly the only man in the United States who made a great fortune out of the Depression"...

 leading a syndicate that bought 50 percent of RCA's stake in the company; the Rockefeller brothers
Rockefeller family
The Rockefeller family , the Cleveland family of John D. Rockefeller and his brother William Rockefeller , is an American industrial, banking, and political family of German origin that made one of the world's largest private fortunes in the oil business during the late 19th and early 20th...

, also major stockholders, increasingly became involved in the business. While RKO kept missing the mark in building Hepburn's career, major stars Cary Grant
Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach , better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English actor who later took U.S. citizenship...

 and Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra...

 joined the studio's roster—though Stanwyck would have little success during her few years there. Grant was a trendsetter, one of the first leading men of the sound era to work extensively as a freelancer, under nonexclusive studio deals, while his star was still on the rise. Ann Sothern
Ann Sothern
Ann Sothern was an American film and television actress whose career spanned six decades.-Early life and career:...

 starred in seven RKO films between 1935 and 1937, paired five times with Gene Raymond
Gene Raymond
Gene Raymond was an American film, television, and stage actor of the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to acting, Raymond was also a composer, writer, director, producer, and decorated military pilot.-Stage and movie career:...

.

Soon after the appointment of a new production chief, Samuel Briskin, in late 1935, RKO entered into an important distribution deal with animator Walt Disney
Walt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...

 (Van Beuren consequently folded its cartoon operations). From 1936 to 1954, the studio released his features and shorts; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a 1937 American animated film based on Snow White, a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. It was the first full-length cel-animated feature in motion picture history, as well as the first animated feature film produced in America, the first produced in full...

 (1937) was the highest grossing movie in the period between The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation is a 1915 American silent film directed by D. W. Griffith and based on the novel and play The Clansman, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Griffith also co-wrote the screenplay , and co-produced the film . It was released on February 8, 1915...

 (1915) and Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...

 (1939). Following the change in print branding a few years earlier, the opening and closing logos on RKO movies, other than the Pathé nonfiction line, were changed from "Radio Pictures" to "RKO Radio Pictures" in 1936. In February 1937, Selznick, now a leading independent producer, took over RKO's Culver City studio and Forty Acres
RKO Forty Acres
Forty Acres was a film studio backlot that belonged to RKO Pictures and later Desilu Productions, located in Culver City, California. Best known as Forty Acres, or "the back forty", it had other names such as "Desilu Culver", the "RKO backlot" and "Pathé 40 Acre Ranch" depending on which studio...

, as the backlot was known, under a long-term lease. Gone with the Wind, his coproduction with MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...

, was largely shot there. In addition to its central Hollywood studio, RKO production now revolved around its Encino
Encino, Los Angeles, California
Encino is a hilly district of the city of Los Angeles, California, United States. Specifically, it is located in the central portion of the southern San Fernando Valley and on the north slope of the Santa Monica Mountains...

 backlot. While the Disney association was beneficial, RKO's own product was widely seen as declining in quality and Briskin was gone by the end of the year.

Pandro Berman—who had filled in on three previous occasions—accepted the position of production chief on a noninterim basis. As it turned out, he would leave the job before the decade's turn, but his brief tenure resulted in some of the most notable films in studio history, including Gunga Din
Gunga Din (film)
Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure film directed by George Stevens, loosely based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling, combined with elements of his novel Soldiers Three...

, with Grant and McLaglen; Love Affair, starring Dunne and Charles Boyer
Charles Boyer
Charles Boyer was a French actor who appeared in more than 80 films between 1920 and 1976. After receiving an education in drama, Boyer started on the stage, but he found success in movies during the 1930s. His memorable performances were among the era's most highly praised romantic dramas,...

; and The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939 film)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a 1939 American monochrome film starring Charles Laughton as Quasimodo and Maureen O'Hara as Esmeralda. It was directed by William Dieterle and produced by Pandro S. Berman...

 (all 1939). Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton was an English-American stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and director.-Early life and career:...

, who gave a now fabled performance as Quasimodo
Quasimodo
Quasimodo is a fictional character in the novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. Quasimodo was born with a hunchback and feared by the townspeople as a sort of monster but he finds sanctuary in an unlikely love that is fulfilled only in death. The role of Quasimodo has been played by...

 in the latter, returned periodically to the studio, headlining six more RKO features. For Maureen O'Hara
Maureen O'Hara
Maureen O'Hara is an Irish film actress and singer. The famously red-headed O'Hara has been noted for playing fiercely passionate heroines with a highly sensible attitude. She often worked with director John Ford and longtime friend John Wayne...

, who made her American screen debut in the film, it was the first of ten pictures she would make for RKO through 1952. After costarring with Ginger Rogers for the eighth time in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is an American biographical musical comedy, released in 1939 and directed by H.C. Potter. The film stars Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edna May Oliver, and Walter Brennan....

 (1939), Fred Astaire departed the studio.

The studio's B Western
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...

 star of the period was George O'Brien, who made eighteen RKO pictures, sixteen between 1938 and 1940. The Saint in New York
The Saint in New York (film)
The Saint in New York is a 1938 crime film, based on Leslie Charteris's novel of the same name. Released by RKO Pictures, The Saint in New York marks the first screen appearance of Simon Templar - "the Saint"...

 (1938) successfully launched a B detective series featuring the character Simon Templar
Simon Templar
Simon Templar is a British fictional character known as The Saint featured in a long-running series of books by Leslie Charteris published between 1928 and 1963. After that date, other authors collaborated with Charteris on books until 1983; two additional works produced without Charteris’s...

 that would run through 1943. The Wheeler and Woolsey comedy series ended in 1937 when Woolsey became ill (he died the following year). RKO filled the void by releasing independently produced features such as the Dr. Christian
Dr. Christian
Dr. Christian was a long-running radio series with Jean Hersholt in the title role. It aired on CBS from 1937 to 1954.After Hersholt portrayed the character Dr. John Luke, based on Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, the obstetrician who delivered and cared for the Dionne Quintuplets, in the 20th Century Fox...

 series and the Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy
Laurel and Hardy were one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comedy double acts of the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema...

 comedy The Flying Deuces
The Flying Deuces
The Flying Deuces, also known as Flying Aces, is a 1939 comedy film starring Laurel and Hardy, in which the duo join the French Foreign Legion. It is a partial remake of their 1931 short film Beau Hunks.- Plot :...

 (1939). The studio soon had its own new B comedy star in Lupe Vélez
Lupe Vélez
Lupe Vélez was a Mexican film actress. Vélez began her career in Mexico as a dancer, before moving to the U.S. where she worked in vaudeville. She was seen by Fanny Brice who promoted her, and Vélez soon entered films, making her first appearance in 1924. By the end of the decade she had...

: The Girl from Mexico (1939) was followed by seven frantic installments of the Mexican Spitfire series, all featuring Leon Errol
Leon Errol
Leon Errol , was an Australian-born American comedian and actor, popular in the first half of the 20th century.-Biography:...

, between 1940 and 1943. The studio's technical departments maintained their reputation as industry leaders; Vernon Walker's special effects unit became famous for its sophisticated use of the optical printer
Optical printer
An optical printer is a device consisting of one or more film projectors mechanically linked to a movie camera. It allows filmmakers to re-photograph one or more strips of film...

 and lifelike matte
Matte (filmmaking)
Mattes are used in photography and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image. Usually, mattes are used to combine a foreground image with a background image . In this case, the matte is the background painting...

 work, an art that would reach its apex with 1941's Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...

.

Kane and Schaefer's troubles

Pan Berman had received his first screen credit in 1925 as a nineteen-year-old assistant director
Assistant director
The role of an Assistant director include tracking daily progress against the filming production schedule, arranging logistics, preparing daily call sheets, checking cast and crew, maintaining order on the set. They also have to take care of health and safety of the crew...

 on FBO's Midnight Molly. He departed RKO in December 1939 after policy clashes with studio president George J. Schaefer, handpicked the previous year by the Rockefellers and backed by Sarnoff. With Berman gone, Schaefer became in effect production chief, though other men—including the former head of the industry censorship board
Production Code
The Motion Picture Production Code was the set of industry moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of the vast majority of United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Hollywood's chief censor of the...

, Joseph I. Breen—nominally filled the role. Schaefer, announcing his philosophy with a new studio slogan, "Quality Pictures at a Premium Price", was keen on signing up independent producers whose films RKO would distribute. In 1941, the studio landed one of the most prestigious independents in Hollywood when it arranged to handle Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn was an American film producer, and founding contributor executive of several motion picture studios.-Biography:...

's productions. The first two Goldwyn pictures released by the studio were highly successful: The Little Foxes
The Little Foxes (film)
The Little Foxes is a 1941 American drama film directed by William Wyler. The screenplay by Lillian Hellman is based on her 1939 play of the same name...

, directed by William Wyler
William Wyler
William Wyler was a leading American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter.Notable works included Ben-Hur , The Best Years of Our Lives , and Mrs. Miniver , all of which won Wyler Academy Awards for Best Director, and also won Best Picture...

 and starring Bette Davis, garnered four Oscar nominations, while the Howard Hawks–directed Ball of Fire
Ball of Fire
Ball of Fire is a 1941 American romantic comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, and starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. The RKO Pictures film is about a group of professors laboring to write an encyclopedia and their encounter with a nightclub performer who provides her own unique knowledge...

 at last brought Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck
Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress. She was a film and television star, known during her 60-year career as a consummate and versatile professional with a strong screen presence, and a favorite of directors including Cecil B. DeMille, Fritz Lang and Frank Capra...

 a hit under the RKO banner. However, Schaefer agreed to terms so favorable to Goldwyn that it was next to impossible for the studio to make money off his films. David O. Selznick loaned out his leading contracted director for two RKO pictures in 1941: Alfred Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941 film)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a 1941 screwball comedy film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Norman Krasna, and starring Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery...

 was a modest success and Suspicion
Suspicion (film)
Suspicion is a romantic psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine as a married couple. It also stars Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty, Isabel Jeans, Heather Angel, and Leo G...

 a more substantial one, with an Oscar-winning turn by Joan Fontaine
Joan Fontaine
Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland , known professionally as Joan Fontaine, is a British American actress. She and her elder sister Olivia de Havilland are two of the last surviving leading ladies from Hollywood of the 1930s....

.

That May, RKO released Citizen Kane, coproducing with director Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...

's Mercury Productions. While it opened to strong reviews and would go on to be hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made, it lost money at the time and brought down the wrath of the Hearst
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst was an American business magnate and leading newspaper publisher. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887, after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father...

 newspaper chain on RKO. The next year saw the commercial failure of Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons
The Magnificent Ambersons (film)
The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1942 American drama film written and directed by Orson Welles. His second feature film, it is based on the 1918 novel of the same name by Booth Tarkington and stars Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins...

—like Kane, critically lauded and overbudget—and the expensive embarrassment of his aborted documentary It's All True
It's All True (1942 film)
It's All True was the title of an unfinished Orson Welles feature film of three stories about Latin America. "My Friend Bonito" was shot in 1941 and both "The Story of Samba" and "Four Men on a Raft" in 1942...

. The three Mercury productions combined to drain $2 million from the RKO coffers, major money for a corporation that had reported an overall deficit of $1 million in 1940 and a nominal profit of a bit more than $500,000 in 1941. Many of RKO's other artistically ambitious pictures were also dying at the box office and it was losing its last exclusive deal with a major star as well. Rogers, after winning an Oscar in 1941 for her performance in the previous year's Kitty Foyle
Kitty Foyle (film)
Kitty Foyle, subtitled The Natural History of a Woman, is a 1940 film starring Ginger Rogers, Dennis Morgan, James Craig, Ernest Cossart and Gladys Cooper.-Plot:...

, held out for a freelance contract like Grant's; after 1943, she would appear in just one more RKO production, thirteen years later. On June 17, 1942, Schaefer tendered his resignation. He departed a weakened and troubled studio, but RKO was about to turn the corner. Propelled by the box-office boom of World War II and guided by new management, RKO would make a strong comeback over the next half-decade.

Rebound under Koerner

By the end of June 1942, Floyd Odlum had taken over a controlling interest in the company via his Atlas Corporation, edging aside the Rockefellers and Sarnoff. Charles Koerner, former head of the RKO theater chain and allied with Odlum, had assumed the title of production chief some time prior to Schaefer's departure. With Schaefer gone, Koerner could actually do the job; announcing a policy of "entertainment, not genius" (a snipe at Schaefer's artistic ambitions in general and his sponsorship of Welles in particular), he brought the studio much-needed stability until his death in February 1946. The change in RKO's fortunes was virtually immediate: corporate profits rose from $736,241 in 1942 (the theatrical division compensating for the studio's $2.34 million deficit) to $6.96 million the following year. The Rockefellers sold off their stock and, early in 1943, RCA dispensed with the last of its holdings in the company as well, cutting David Sarnoff's ties to the studio that was largely his conception. In June 1944, RKO created a television production subsidiary, RKO Television Corporation, to provide content for the new medium. RKO became the first major studio to produce for television with Talk Fast, Mister, a one-hour drama filmed at RKO-Pathé studios in New York and broadcast by the DuMont
DuMont Television Network
The DuMont Television Network, also known as the DuMont Network, DuMont, Du Mont, or Dumont was one of the world's pioneer commercial television networks, rivalling NBC for the distinction of being first overall. It began operation in the United States in 1946. It was owned by DuMont...

 network's New York station, WABD
WNYW
WNYW, virtual channel 5 , is the flagship television station of the News Corporation-owned Fox Broadcasting Company, located in New York City. The station's transmitter is atop the Empire State Building and its studio facilities are located in the Yorkville section of Manhattan...

, on December 18, 1944. In collaboration with Mexican businessman Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta
Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta
Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta or Emilio Azcárraga Sr. was a Mexican businessman son of Basque immigrants Mariano Azcárraga and Emilia Vidaurreta....

, RKO established Estudios Churubusco
Estudios Churubusco
Estudios Churubusco is one of the oldest and largest movie studios in Latin America located in the Churubusco neighborhood of Mexico City.It was inaugurated in 1945 after a 1943 agreement between RKO and Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta...

 in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...

 in 1945.

With RKO on increasingly secure ground, Koerner sought to increase its output of handsomely budgeted, star-driven features. However, the studio's only remaining major stars under anything like extended contracts were Grant, whose services were shared with Columbia Pictures, and O'Hara, shared with Twentieth Century-Fox. Lacking in-house stars, Koerner and his successors under Odlum arranged with the other studios to loan out their biggest names or signed one of the growing number of freelance performers to short-term, "pay or play" deals. Thus RKO pictures of the mid- and late forties offered Bing Crosby
Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was an American singer and actor. Crosby's trademark bass-baritone voice made him one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, with over half a billion records in circulation....

, Henry Fonda
Henry Fonda
Henry Jaynes Fonda was an American film and stage actor.Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins...

, and others who were out of the studio's price range for extended contracts. John Wayne
John Wayne
Marion Mitchell Morrison , better known by his stage name John Wayne, was an American film actor, director and producer. He epitomized rugged masculinity and became an enduring American icon. He is famous for his distinctive calm voice, walk, and height...

 appeared in 1943's A Lady Takes a Chance on loan from Republic Pictures
Republic Pictures
Republic Pictures was an independent film production-distribution corporation with studio facilities, operating from 1934 through 1959, and was best known for specializing in westerns, movie serials and B films emphasizing mystery and action....

; he was soon working regularly with RKO, making nine more movies for the studio. Gary Cooper
Gary Cooper
Frank James Cooper, known professionally as Gary Cooper, was an American film actor. He was renowned for his quiet, understated acting style and his stoic, but at times intense screen persona, which was particularly well suited to the many Westerns he made...

 appeared in RKO releases produced by Goldwyn and, later, the startup International Pictures, and Claudette Colbert
Claudette Colbert
Claudette Colbert was a French-born American-based actress of stage and film.Born in Paris, France and raised in New York City, Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the 1920s, progressing to film with the advent of talking pictures...

 starred in a number of RKO coproductions. Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films. She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Actress. She is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute...

 appeared under a variety of hats: on loan out from Selznick in The Bells of St. Mary's
The Bells of St. Mary's
The Bells of St. Mary's is a 1945 American film which tells the story of a priest and a nun at a school who set out, despite their good-natured rivalry, to save the school from being shut down. It stars Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman...

 (1945), the biggest hit of any in-house RKO production during the 1940s; in the coproductions Notorious (1946) and Stromboli
Stromboli (film)
Stromboli is a 1950 Italian-American film directed by Roberto Rossellini and featuring Ingrid Bergman...

 (1950); and in the independently produced Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc (1948 film)
Joan of Arc is a 1948 Technicolor film directed by Victor Fleming; starring Ingrid Bergman as the French religious icon and war heroine. It was produced by Walter Wanger. It is based on Maxwell Anderson's successful Broadway play Joan of Lorraine, which also starred Bergman, and was adapted for the...

 (1948). Freelancing Randolph Scott
Randolph Scott
Randolph Scott was an American film actor whose career spanned from 1928 to 1962. As a leading man for all but the first three years of his cinematic career, Scott appeared in a variety of genres, including social dramas, crime dramas, comedies, musicals , adventure tales, war films, and even a few...

 appeared in one major RKO release annually from 1943 through 1948.

In similar fashion, many leading directors made one or more films at RKO during this era, including Alfred Hitchcock once more, with Notorious, and Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...

, with This Land Is Mine (1943), reuniting Laughton and O'Hara, and The Woman on the Beach (1947). John Ford's The Fugitive
The Fugitive (1947 film)
The Fugitive is a 1947 drama film starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, based on the novel The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. It was shot on location in Mexico by Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.-Plot:...

 (1947) and Fort Apache
Fort Apache (film)
Fort Apache is a 1948 Western film directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda. The film was the first of the director's "cavalry trilogy" and was followed by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande , both also starring Wayne...

 (1948), which appeared right before studio ownership changed hands again, were followed by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a 1949 Western film directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. The film was the second of Ford's trilogy of films focusing on the US Cavalry ; the other two films were Fort Apache and Rio Grande...

 (1949) and Wagon Master
Wagon Master
Wagon Master is a 1950 Western film directed by John Ford and starring Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., Joanne Dru, and Ward Bond.-Plot:Learning of their ability as experienced horsemen, Mormon Elder Wiggs , hires Travis Blue and Sandy Owens to guide a small group of Mormons across the West to the...

 (1950); all four were co-productions between RKO and Argosy, the company run by Ford and RKO alumnus Merian C. Cooper. Of the directors under long-term contract to RKO in the 1940s, the best known was Edward Dmytryk
Edward Dmytryk
Edward Dmytryk was an American film director who was amongst the Hollywood Ten, a group of blacklisted film industry professionals who served time in prison for being in contempt of Congress during the McCarthy-era 'red scare'.-Early life:Dmytryk was born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada,...

, who first came to notice with the remarkably profitable Hitler's Children (1943). Shot on a $205,000 budget placing it in the bottom quartile of Big Five studio productions, it was one of the ten biggest Hollywood hits of the year. Another low-cost war-themed film directed by Dmytryk, Behind the Rising Sun, released a few months later, was similarly profitable.

Focus on B movies

Much more than the other Big Five studios, RKO relied on B pictures to fill up its schedule. Of the thirty-one features released by RKO in 1944, for instance, ten were budgeted below $200,000, twelve were in the $200,000 to $500,000 range, and only nine cost more. In contrast, a clear majority of the features put out by the other top four studios were budgeted at over a half a million dollars. A focus on B pictures limited the studio's financial risk; while it also limited the potential for reward (Dmytryk's extraordinary coups aside), RKO had a history of making better profits with its run-of-the-mill and low-cost product than with its A movies. The studio's low-budget films offered training opportunities for new directors, as well, among them Mark Robson
Mark Robson
Mark Robson was a Canadian-born film editor, film director and producer in Hollywood.-Career:Born in Montreal, Quebec, he moved to the United States at a young age. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles then found work in the prop department at 20th Century Fox studios...

, Robert Wise
Robert Wise
Robert Earl Wise was an American sound effects editor, film editor, film producer and director...

, and Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann was an American actor and film director, most notably of film noirs and Westerns. As a director, he often collaborated with the cinematographer John Alton and with James Stewart in his Westerns.-Biography:...

. Robson and Wise received their first directing assignments with producer Val Lewton
Val Lewton
Val Lewton was an American film producer and screenwriter, best known for a string of low-budget horror films he produced for RKO Pictures in the 1940s.-Early life:...

, whose specialized B horror unit also included the more experienced director Jacques Tourneur
Jacques Tourneur
Jacques Tourneur was a French-American film director.-Life:Born in Paris, France, he was the son of film director Maurice Tourneur. At age 10, Jacques moved to the United States with his father. He started a career in cinema while still attending high school as an extra and later as a script clerk...

. The Lewton unit's moody, atmospheric work—represented by films such as Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie
I Walked with a Zombie
I Walked with a Zombie is a 1943 horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur. It was the second horror film from producer Val Lewton for RKO Pictures; the first was the very successful Cat People, also directed by Tourneur...

 (1943), and The Body Snatcher
The Body Snatcher (film)
The Body Snatcher is a 1945 horror film directed by Robert Wise based on the short story The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson. The film's producer Val Lewton helped adapt the story for the screen, writing under the pen name of "Carlos Keith". The film was marketed with the tagline The...

 (1945)—is now highly regarded. Richard Dix concluded his lengthy RKO career with the 1943 Lewton production The Ghost Ship
The Ghost Ship
The Ghost Ship is a black-and-white horror and crime film starring Richard Dix, Russell Wade, and Skelton Knaggs. The film is about a young merchant marine officer who begins to suspect that his ship's captain is mentally unbalanced and endangering the lives of the ship's crew...

. Tim Holt
Tim Holt
Tim Holt was an American film actor perhaps best known for co-starring in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.-Early life:...

 was RKO's cowboy star of the era, appearing in forty-six B Westerns and more than fifty movies altogether for the studio. In 1940, Chester Lauck
Chester Lauck
Chester "Chet" Lauck , played the character of Lum Edwards on the classic American radio comedy Lum and Abner.Chester Lauck was raised in Mena, Arkansas, where he met his future comedy partner Norris Goff...

 and Norris Goff
Norris Goff
Norris Goff was an American comedian in radio and film best known for his portrayal of Abner Peabody on the rural comedy Lum and Abner....

 brought their famous comic characters Lum and Abner
Lum and Abner
Lum and Abner was an American radio comedy network program created by Chester Lauck and Norris Goff that aired from 1931 to 1954. Modeled on life in the small town of Waters, Arkansas, near where Lauck and Goff grew up, the showed proved immensely popular...

 from radio to RKO for a six-film run. The Falcon
The Falcon (literary character)
The character of Gay Stanhope Falcon, also known simply as The Falcon, was created in 1940 by Michael Arlen in his short story, "Gay Falcon", which was first published in 1940 in Town & Country magazine...

 detective series began in 1941; the Saint and the Falcon were so similar that Saint creator Leslie Charteris
Leslie Charteris
Leslie Charteris , born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, was a half-Chinese, half English author of primarily mystery fiction, as well as a screenwriter. He was best known for his many books chronicling the adventures of Simon Templar, alias "The Saint."-Early life:Charteris was born to a Chinese father...

 sued RKO. The Falcon was first played by George Sanders
George Sanders
George Sanders was a British actor.George Sanders may also refer to:*George Sanders , Victoria Cross recipient in World War I...

, who had appeared five times as the Saint. He bowed out after four Falcon films and was replaced by his brother, Tom Conway
Tom Conway
Tom Conway was a British film and radio actor, and elder brother of actor George Sanders.-Early life:...

. Conway had a nine-film run in the part before the series ended in 1946. Johnny Weissmuller
Johnny Weissmuller
Johnny Weissmuller was an Austro-Hungarian-born American swimmer and actor best known for playing Tarzan in movies. Weissmuller was one of the world's best swimmers in the 1920s, winning five Olympic gold medals and one bronze medal. He won fifty-two US National Championships and set sixty-seven...

 starred in six Tarzan
Tarzan
Tarzan is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani "great apes"; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer...

 pictures for RKO between 1943 and 1948 before being replaced by Lex Barker
Lex Barker
Lex Barker was an American actor best known for playing Tarzan of the Apes and leading characters from Karl May's novels.-Early life:...

.

Film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

, to which lower budgets lent themselves, became something of a house style at the studio; indeed, the RKO B Stranger on the Third Floor
Stranger on the Third Floor
Stranger on the Third Floor is a film noir thriller, featuring Peter Lorre, co-written by Nathaniel West, and released by RKO Radio Pictures. The picture was directed by Boris Ingster....

 (1940) is widely seen as initiating noir's classic period. Its cinematographer
Cinematography
Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...

, Nicholas Musuraca, who began at FBO in the 1920s and stayed with RKO through 1954, is a central figure in creating the look of classic noir. Design chief Albert D'Agostino
Albert S. D'Agostino
Albert S. D'Agostino was an American art director. He was nominated for five Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction...

—another long-termer, who succeeded Van Nest Polglase in 1941—and art director Walter Keller, along with others in the department, such as art directors Carroll Clark
Carroll Clark
Carroll Clark was an American art director. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction. He worked on 173 films between 1927 and 1968...

 and Jack Okey and set decorator
Set decorator
A set decorator is in charge of the set dressing on a film set, which includes the furnishings, wallpaper, lighting fixtures, and many of the other objects that will be seen in the film. Props and set dressing often overlap, but are provided by different departments...

 Darrell Silvera
Darrell Silvera
Darrell Silvera was an American set decorator. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction...

, are similarly credited. The studio's 1940s list of contract players was filled with noir regulars: Robert Mitchum
Robert Mitchum
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time...

 (who graduated to major star status) and Robert Ryan
Robert Ryan
Robert Bushnell Ryan was an American actor who often played hardened cops and ruthless villains.-Early life and career:...

 each made no fewer than ten film noirs for RKO. Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame
Gloria Grahame was an American Academy Award–winning actress.Grahame began her acting career in theatre, and in 1944 she made her first film for MGM. Despite a featured role in It's a Wonderful Life , MGM did not believe she had the potential for major success, and sold her contract to RKO Studios...

, Jane Greer
Jane Greer
Jane Greer was a film and television actress who was perhaps best known for her role as femme fatale Kathie Moffat in the 1947 film noir Out of the Past.-Career:...

, and Lawrence Tierney
Lawrence Tierney
Lawrence Tierney was an American actor, known for his many screen portrayals of mobsters and hardened criminals, which mirrored his own frequent brushes with the law....

 were also notable studio players in the field. Freelancer George Raft
George Raft
George Raft was an American film actor and dancer identified with portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s...

 starred in two noir hits: Johnny Angel
Johnny Angel
Johnny Angel is a film noir directed by Edwin L. Marin, written by Frank Gruber and Steve Fisher from the novel Mr. Angel Comes Aboard by Charles Gordon Booth. The movie features George Raft, Claire Trevor, Signe Hasso, and Hoagy Carmichael....

 (1945) and Nocturne
Nocturne (1946 film)
Nocturne is a black-and-white film noir starring George Raft and Lynn Bari. The film was produced by longtime Alfred Hitchcock associate Joan Harrison, scripted by Jonathan Latimer, and directed by Edwin L. Marin.-Plot:...

 (1946). Tourneur, Musuraca, Mitchum, and Greer, along with D'Agostino's design group, joined to make the A-budgeted Out of the Past
Out of the Past
Out of the Past is a 1947 film noir directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. The film was adapted by Daniel Mainwaring , with uncredited revisions by Frank Fenton and James M...

 (1947), now considered one of the greatest of all film noirs. Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....

 began his directing career with the noir They Live by Night
They Live by Night
They Live by Night is a film noir, based on Edward Anderson's Depression era novel Thieves Like Us. The film was directed by Nicholas Ray and starred Farley Granger as "Bowie" Bowers and Cathy O'Donnell as "Keechie" Mobley...

 (1948), the first of a number of well-received films he made for RKO.

HUAC and Howard Hughes

RKO, and the movie industry as a whole, had its most profitable year ever in 1946. A Goldwyn production released by RKO, The Best Years of Our Lives
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Best Years of Our Lives is a 1946 American drama film directed by William Wyler, and starring Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, and Harold Russell, a United States paratrooper who lost both hands in a military training accident. The film is about three United States...

, was the most successful Hollywood film of the decade. But the legal status of the industry's reigning business model was increasingly being called into doubt: the U.S. Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

 ruled in Bigelow v. RKO
Bigelow v. RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.
Bigelow v. RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., 327 U.S. 251 , was a decision by the United States Supreme Court allowing an action to recover compensatory damages under the antitrust statutes. The jury had returned a verdict for $120,000 in petitioner's favor, covering a five year period where plaintiff...

 that the company was liable for damages under antitrust statutes for having denied an independent movie house access to first run films
First run films
A film is said to be in its first run when it has been just released. In North America most new films earn most of their theatrical viewers in the first few weeks after their release. In North America different movie theatres pay different rates to show films depending on how recently they have...

—a common practice among all of the Big Five. With profits at a high point, Floyd Odlum cashed in by selling off about 40 percent of his shares in the company to a group of investment firms. After Koerner's death, Radio-Keith-Orpheum president N. Peter Rathvon and RKO Radio Pictures president Ned Depinet had exchanged positions, with Depinet moving to the corporate offices in New York and Rathvon relocating to Hollywood and doubling as production chief while a permanent replacement was sought for Koerner. On the first day of 1947, producer and Oscar-winning screenwriter Dore Schary
Dore Schary
Isadore "Dore" Schary was an American motion picture director, writer, and producer, and playwright who became head of production at MGM and eventually president of the studio...

, who had been working at the studio on loan from Selznick, took over the role.

RKO appeared in good shape to build on its recent successes, but the year brought a number of unpleasant harbingers for all of Hollywood. The British government imposed a 75 percent tax on films produced abroad; along with similarly confiscatory taxes and quota laws enacted by other countries, this led to a sharp decline in foreign revenues. The postwar attendance boom peaked sooner than expected and television emerged as a competitor for audience interest. Across the board, profits fell—a 27 percent drop for the Hollywood studios from 1946 to 1947. The phenomenon that would become known as McCarthyism
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...

 was building strength, and in October, the House Un-American Activities Committee
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities or House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"...

 (HUAC) began hearings into Communism in the motion picture industry. Two of RKO's top talents, Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott
Adrian Scott
Robert Adrian Scott was an American screenwriter and film producer. He was one of the Hollywood Ten and later blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses.-Biography:...

, refused to cooperate. As a consequence, they were fired by RKO per the terms of the Waldorf Statement
Waldorf Statement
The Waldorf Statement was a two-page press release issued on December 3, 1947, by Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, following a closed-door meeting by forty-eight motion picture company executives at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel...

, the major studios' pledge to "eliminate any subversives". Scott, Dmytryk, and eight others who also defied HUAC—dubbed the Hollywood Ten—were blacklisted
Hollywood blacklist
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or...

 across the industry. Ironically, the studio's major success of the year was Crossfire
Crossfire (film)
-External links:* review at DVD Savant by Glenn Erickson* film trailer at YouTube...

, a Scott–Dmytryk film. Odlum concluded it was time to exit the film business, and he put his remaining RKO shares—approximately 25 percent of the outstanding stock—on the market. Before the turn of the year, the Pathé-branded newsreel was sold to Warner Bros. For her performance in The Farmer's Daughter (1947), a coproduction with Selznick's Vanguard Films, Loretta Young
Loretta Young
Loretta Young was an American actress. Starting as a child actress, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953...

 won the Best Actress Oscar the following March. It would turn out to be the last major Academy Award for an RKO picture.

In May 1948, eccentric aviation tycoon and occasional movie producer Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...

 gained control of the company, beating out British film magnate J. Arthur Rank
J. Arthur Rank
Joseph Arthur Rank, 1st Baron Rank was a British industrialist and film producer, and founder of the Rank Organisation, now known as The Rank Group Plc.- Family business :...

 as the buyer of Odlum's interest. During Hughes's tenure, RKO suffered its worst years since the early 1930s, as his capricious management style took a heavy toll. Production chief Schary quit almost immediately due to his new boss's interference and Rathvon soon followed. Within weeks of taking over, Hughes had dismissed three-fourths of the work force; production was virtually shut down for six months as the conservative Hughes shelved or canceled several of the "message picture
Message picture
A message picture is a motion picture that, in addition to or instead of being for entertainment, intends to communicate a certain message or ideal about society. Message pictures usually present the message they want to deliver in the form of a morality play, and are usually serious works...

s" that Schary had backed. Once shooting picked up again, Hughes quickly became notorious for meddling in minute production matters, particularly the presentation of actresses he favored. All of the Big Five saw their profits dwindle in 1948—from Fox, down 11 percent, to Loew's/MGM, down 62 percent—but at RKO they virtually vanished: from $5.1 million in 1947 to $0.5 million, a drop of 90 percent. The production-distribution end of the RKO business, now deep in the red, would never make a profit again.

Offscreen, Robert Mitchum's arrest and conviction for marijuana possession—he would serve two months in jail—was widely assumed to mean career death for RKO's most promising young star, but Hughes surprised the industry by announcing that his contract was not endangered. Of much broader significance, Hughes decided to get the jump on his Big Five competitors by being the first to settle the federal government's antitrust suit against the major studios, which had won a crucial Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 US 131 was a landmark United States Supreme Court anti-trust case that decided the fate of movie studios owning their own theatres and holding exclusivity rights on which theatres would...

 Under the consent decree
Consent decree
A consent decree is a final, binding judicial decree or judgment memorializing a voluntary agreement between parties to a suit in return for withdrawal of a criminal charge or an end to a civil litigation...

 he signed, Hughes agreed to dissolve the old parent company, Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp., and split RKO's production-distribution business and its exhibition chain into two entirely separate corporations—RKO Pictures Corp. and RKO Theatres Corp.—with the obligation to promptly sell off one or the other. While Hughes delayed the divorcement procedure until December 1950 and didn't actually sell his stock in the theater company for another three years, his decision to acquiesce was one of the crucial steps in the collapse of classical Hollywood's studio system
Studio system
The studio system was a means of film production and distribution dominant in Hollywood from the early 1920s through the early 1960s. The term studio system refers to the practice of large motion picture studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under...

.

Turmoil under Hughes

While Hughes's time at RKO was marked by dwindling production and a slew of expensive flops, the studio continued to turn out some well-received films under production chiefs Sid Rogell and Sam Bischoff, though both became fed up with Hughes's meddling and quit after less than two years. (Bischoff would be the last man to hold the job under Hughes.) There were B noirs such as The Window
The Window
The Window is a 1949 American black-and-white suspense film noir, based on the short story "The Boy Cried Murder" by Cornell Woolrich. The film, which was a critical success, was produced by Frederic Ullman, Jr. for $210,000 but earned much more, making it a box office hit for RKO Pictures...

 (1949), which turned into a hit, and The Set-Up
The Set-Up (1949 film)
For 2011 Set Up see hereThe Set-Up is an American film noir boxing drama directed by Robert Wise and featuring Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter. The screenplay was adapted by Art Cohn from a 1928 poem written by Joseph Moncure March. The film is about the boxing underworld.-Plot:Stoker Thompson ...

 (1949), directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Ryan, which won the Critic's Prize at the Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...

. The Thing from Another World
The Thing from Another World
The Thing from Another World , is a 1951 science fiction film based on the 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell . It tells the story of an Air Force crew and scientists at a remote Arctic research outpost who fight a malevolent plant-based alien being...

 (1951), a science-fiction drama coproduced with Howard Hawks's Winchester Pictures, is seen as a classic of the genre. In 1952, RKO put out two films directed by Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...

, Rancho Notorious
Rancho Notorious
Rancho Notorious is a 1952 Western shot in Technicolor, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Marlene Dietrich as the matron of a criminal hideout called Chuck-a-Luck...

 and Clash by Night
Clash by Night
Clash by Night is a black-and-white drama with some film noir aspects, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Marilyn Monroe and Robert Ryan. The movie was based on the play by Clifford Odets, adapted by writer Alfred Hayes...

. The latter was a project of the renowned Jerry Wald
Jerry Wald
Jerry Wald was an American producer and screenwriter for motion pictures and radio shows.Born Jerome Irving Wald in Brooklyn, New York, he had a brother and sons who were active in show business. Jerry began writing a radio column for the New York Evening Graphic while a student at New York...

Norman Krasna
Norman Krasna
Norman Krasna was an American screenwriter, playwright, and film director. He is best known for penning screwball comedies, melodrama, and early films noir. Krasna also directed three films during a forty-year career in Hollywood...

 production team, lured by Hughes from Warner Bros. with great fanfare in August 1950.

The company also began a close working relationship with Ida Lupino
Ida Lupino
Ida Lupino was an English-born film actress and director, and a pioneer among women filmmakers. In her 48-year career, she appeared in 59 films and directed seven others, mostly in the United States. She appeared in serial television programmes 58 times and directed 50 other episodes...

. She starred in two suspense films with Robert Ryan—Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground
On Dangerous Ground
On Dangerous Ground is a film noir directed by Nicholas Ray and produced by John Houseman. The screenplay was written by A. I. Bezzerides based on the novel Mad with Much Heart, by Gerald Butler...

 (1952, though shooting had been completed two years earlier) and Beware, My Lovely
Beware, My Lovely
Beware, My Lovely is a suspense film produced by Collier Young/Ida Lupino's production company The Filmakers.-Plot:The film is set in 1919 or 1920 in an unnamed small town. A widow impulsively hires handyman to look after her house...

 (1952), a coproduction between RKO and Lupino's company, The Filmakers. Of more historic note, Lupino was Hollywood's only female director during the period; of the five pictures The Filmakers made with RKO, Lupino directed three, including her now celebrated The Hitch-Hiker
The Hitch-Hiker (1953 film)
The Hitch-Hiker is a film noir directed by Ida Lupino about two fishing buddies who pick up a mysterious hitchhiker during a trip to Mexico....

 (1953). Exposing many moviegoers to Asian cinema for the first time, RKO distributed Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 filmsIn 1946, Kurosawa co-directed, with Hideo Sekigawa and Kajiro Yamamoto, the feature Those Who Make Tomorrow ;...

's epochal Rashomon
Rashomon (film)
The bandit's storyTajōmaru, a notorious brigand , claims that he tricked the samurai to step off the mountain trail with him and look at a cache of ancient swords he discovered. In the grove he tied the samurai to a tree, then brought the woman there. She initially tried to defend herself with a...

 in the United States, sixteen months after its original 1950 Japanese release. The only smash hits released by RKO in the 1950s came out during this period, but neither was an in-house production: Goldwyn's Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen (film)
Hans Christian Andersen is a 1952 Hollywood musical film directed by Charles Vidor, with words and music by Frank Loesser. The story was by Myles Connolly, its screenplay was by Moss Hart and Ben Hecht , and was produced by The Samuel Goldwyn Company...

 (1952) was followed by Disney's Peter Pan
Peter Pan (1953 film)
Peter Pan is a 1953 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and based on the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up by J. M. Barrie. It is the fourteenth film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series and was originally released on February 5, 1953 by RKO Pictures...

 (1953).

In early 1952, Hughes fought off a lawsuit by screenwriter Paul Jarrico
Paul Jarrico
Paul Jarrico was an American screenwriter and film producer who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses during the era of McCarthyism.-Early years:...

, who had been caught up in the latest round of HUAC hearings—Hughes had fired him and removed his name from the credits of a recent release. The studio owner subsequently ordered 100 RKO employees on "leave of absence" while he established a "security office" to oversee an ideological vetting system. "We are going to screen everyone in a creative or executive capacity", he declared. "The work of Communist sympathizers will not be used." As more credits were expunged, some in the industry began to question whether Hughes's hunt for subversives served primarily as a convenient rationale for further curtailing production and trimming expenses.

In September, Hughes and his corporate president, Ned E. Depinet, sold their RKO studio stock to a Chicago-based syndicate with no experience in the movie business; the syndicate's chaotic reign lasted until February 1953, when the stock and control were reacquired by Hughes. The studio's net loss in 1952 was over $10 million, and shooting had taken place for just a single in-house production over the last five months of the year. During the turmoil, Samuel Goldwyn ended his 11-year-long distribution deal with RKO. Wald and Krasna escaped their contracts and the studio as well. The deal that brought the team to RKO had called for them to produce sixty features over five years; in just shy of half that time, they succeeded in making four. The Encino backlot shut down permanently in 1953 and the property was sold off. In November, Hughes finally fulfilled his obligations under the 1948 consent decree, divesting RKO Theatres; Albert A. List purchased the controlling interest in the business and renamed it List Industries. Hughes soon found himself the target of no less than five separate lawsuits filed by minority shareholders in RKO, accusing him of malfeasance in his dealings with the Chicago group and a wide array of acts of mismanagement. "RKO's contract list is down to three actors and 127 lawyers", quipped Dick Powell
Dick Powell
Richard Ewing "Dick" Powell was an American singer, actor, producer, director and studio boss.Despite the same last name he was not related to William Powell, Eleanor Powell or Jane Powell.-Biography:...

.

Looking to forestall the impending legal imbroglio, in early 1954 Hughes offered to buy out all of RKO's other stockholders. Convinced that the studio was sinking, Walt Disney ended his arrangement with RKO and set up his own distribution firm, Buena Vista Pictures. By the end of the year, at a cost of $23.5 million, Hughes had gained near-total control of RKO Pictures, becoming the first virtual sole owner of a studio since Hollywood's pioneer days. Virtual, but not quite actual. Floyd Odlum reemerged to block Hughes from acquiring the 95 percent ownership of RKO stock he needed to write off the company's losses against his earnings elsewhere. Hughes had reneged on his promise to give Odlum first option on buying the RKO theater chain when he divested it and was now paying the price. With negotiations between the two at a stalemate, in July 1955, Hughes turned around and sold RKO pictures to the General Tire and Rubber Company
General Tire
The General Tire and Rubber Company is an American manufacturer of tires for motor vehicles.General Tire was founded in 1915 in Akron, Ohio by William F. O'Neil. Products included the low-pressure "General Balloon Jumbo" and the "Dual 90" tire...

 for $25 million. For Hughes, this was the effective end of a quarter-century's involvement in the movie business. Historian Betty Lasky describes Hughes's relationship with RKO as a "systematic seven-year rape."

General Tire and studio's demise

In taking control of the studio, General Tire restored RKO's links to broadcasting. General Tire had bought the Yankee Network
Yankee Network
For the radio network of the New York Yankees, see New York Yankees Radio Network.The Yankee Network was an American radio network. It was founded in 1930 by John Shepard III; in 1949, a controlling interest in the network was purchased by General Tire when Robert Shepard chairman of the network's...

, a New England regional radio network, in 1943. In 1950, it purchased the West Coast regional Don Lee Broadcasting System
Don Lee (broadcaster)
Donald Musgrave Lee was the exclusive west coast distributor of Cadillac automobiles in the early 20th century. In 1919 Lee purchased the Earl Automobile Works of Hollywood, California. Harley Earl, the son of the company's owner, was kept on as manager...

, and two years later, the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, owner of the WOR TV and radio stations in New York City. The latter acquisition gave General Tire majority control of the Mutual Broadcasting System
Mutual Broadcasting System
The Mutual Broadcasting System was an American radio network, in operation from 1934 to 1999. In the golden age of U.S. radio drama, MBS was best known as the original network home of The Lone Ranger and The Adventures of Superman and as the long-time radio residence of The Shadow...

, one of America's leading radio networks. General Tire then merged its broadcasting interests into a new division, General Teleradio.

Thomas O'Neil, son of General Tire's founder William O'Neil and chairman of the broadcasting group, saw that the company's new television stations, indeed all TV outlets, were in need of programming. With the purchase of RKO, the studio's library was his, and rights to the 742 films to which RKO retained clear title were quickly put up for sale. C&C Television Corp., a subsidiary of beverage maker Cantrell & Cochrane, won the bidding in December 1955. It was soon offering the films to independent stations in a package called "MovieTime USA". RKO Teleradio Pictures—the new company created from the merger of General Teleradio and the RKO studio—retained the broadcast rights for the cities where it owned TV stations. By 1956, RKO's classic movies were playing widely on television, allowing many to see such films as Citizen Kane for the first time. The $15.2 million RKO made on the deal convinced the other major studios that their libraries held profit potential—a turning point in the way Hollywood did business.

The new owners of RKO made an initial effort to revive the studio, hiring veteran producer William Dozier
William Dozier
William Dozier was an American film and television producer and actor.He began in the film industry...

 to head production. In the first half of 1956, the production facilities were as busy as they had been in a half-decade. RKO Teleradio Pictures released Fritz Lang's final two American films, While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a 1956 film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Douglas Morrow. The film, considered film noir, was the last American film directed by Lang.-Plot:...

 (both 1956), but years of mismanagement had driven away many directors, producers, and stars. The studio was also saddled with the last of the inflated B movies such as Pearl of the South Pacific (1955) and The Conqueror
The Conqueror (film)
The Conqueror is a 1956 CinemaScope epic film produced by Howard Hughes and starring John Wayne as the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. Other performers included Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendáriz. Directed by actor/director Dick Powell, the film was principally shot near St...

 (1956) that enchanted Hughes. The latter, starring John Wayne, was the biggest hit produced at the studio during the decade, but its $4.5 million in North American rentals did not come close to covering its $6 million cost.

After a year and a half without a notable success, General Tire shut down production at RKO for good at the end of January 1957. The Hollywood and Culver City facilities were sold later that year for $6.15 million to Desilu Productions
Desilu Productions
Desilu Productions was a Los Angeles, California-based company jointly owned by actors Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who were married to each other from 1940 to 1960....

, owned by Desi Arnaz
Desi Arnaz
Desi Arnaz was a Cuban-born American musician, actor and television producer. While he gained international renown for leading a Latin music band, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra, he is probably best known for his role as Ricky Ricardo on the American TV series I Love Lucy, starring with Lucille Ball, to...

 and Lucille Ball
Lucille Ball
Lucille Désirée Ball was an American comedian, film, television, stage and radio actress, model, film and television executive, and star of the sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy...

, who had been an RKO contract player from 1935 to 1942. Desilu would be acquired by Gulf and Western Industries in 1967 and merged into G+W's other production company, Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...

; the former RKO Hollywood studio became home to Paramount Television (now CBS Paramount Television
CBS Paramount Television
CBS Television Studios is an American television production/distribution company that was formed on January 17, 2006 by CBS Corporation merging Paramount Television and CBS Productions...

), which it remains to this day. The renovated Culver City studio is now owned and operated as an independent production facility. Forty Acres, the Culver City backlot, was razed in the mid-1970s. List Industries, the former RKO Theatres Corp., was acquired by Glen Alden Corp. in 1959. After Glen Alden's 1967 acquisition of the Stanley Warner theater group, the two chains were merged into RKO–Stanley Warner Theatres. Cinerama
Cinerama
Cinerama is the trademarked name for a widescreen process which works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply-curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. It is also the trademarked name for the corporation which was formed to market it...

 purchased the exhibition circuit from Glen Alden in 1971.

With the closing down of production, RKO also shut its distribution exchanges; from 1957 forward, remaining pictures were released through other companies, primarily Universal-International
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....

. The final RKO film, Verboten!
Verboten!
Verboten! is a 1959 film written, produced and directed by Samuel Fuller. It was the last film of the influential but troubled RKO studio, which co-produced it with Fuller's own Globe Enterprises. It was filmed at the RKO Forty Acres backlot...

, a coproduction with director Samuel Fuller
Samuel Fuller
Samuel Michael Fuller was an American screenwriter, novelist, and film director known for low-budget genre movies with controversial themes.-Personal life:...

's Globe Enterprises, was released by Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

 in March 1959. That same year, "Pictures" was stripped from the corporate identity; the holding company for General Tire's broadcasting operation and the few remaining motion picture assets was renamed RKO General. In the words of scholar Richard B. Jewell, "The supreme irony of RKO's existence is that the studio earned a position of lasting importance in cinema history largely because of its extraordinarily unstable history. Since it was the weakling of Hollywood's 'majors,' RKO welcomed a diverse group of individualistic creators and provided them...with an extraordinary degree of freedom to express their artistic idiosyncrasies.... [I]t never became predictable and it never became a factory."

RKO General

One of North America's major radio and television broadcasters from the 1950s through the late 1980s, RKO General traces its roots to the 1943 purchase of the Yankee Network
Yankee Network
For the radio network of the New York Yankees, see New York Yankees Radio Network.The Yankee Network was an American radio network. It was founded in 1930 by John Shepard III; in 1949, a controlling interest in the network was purchased by General Tire when Robert Shepard chairman of the network's...

 by General Tire
General Tire
The General Tire and Rubber Company is an American manufacturer of tires for motor vehicles.General Tire was founded in 1915 in Akron, Ohio by William F. O'Neil. Products included the low-pressure "General Balloon Jumbo" and the "Dual 90" tire...

. In 1952, the company united its newly expanded broadcasting interests into a division dubbed General Teleradio. With the tire manufacturer's acquisition of the RKO film studio in 1955, its media businesses were brought together under the rubric of RKO Teleradio Pictures. In 1959, following the breakup of the movie studio, the media division was given the name it would operate under for the next three decades, RKO General. In addition to its broadcasting activities, RKO General was also the holding company for many of General Tire's (and, after its parent company's reorganization, GenCorp
GenCorp
GenCorp is an American technology-based manufacturer based in Rancho Cordova, California. Established in 1915, GenCorp was formerly the General Tire and Rubber Company....

's) other noncore businesses, including soft-drink bottling, hotel enterprises, and, for seventeen years, the original Frontier Airlines
Frontier Airlines (1950-1986)
Frontier Airlines was formed from a merger of Arizona Airways, Challenger Airlines, and Monarch Airlines on June 1, 1950. They established their headquarters at Stapleton Airport in Denver. However, the airline dated itself to November 27, 1946, when Monarch Airlines began service in Colorado,...

.

The RKO General radio lineup included some of the highest rated, most influential popular music stations in North America. In May 1965, KHJ (AM)
KHJ (AM)
KHJ Radio in Los Angeles, California broadcasts Spanish-language entertainment programming as La Ranchera. It was also one of America's most formidable Top 40 radio stations in the 1960s and 1970s as 93 KHJ before changing its format in 1980....

 in Los Angeles introduced the Boss Radio
Boss Radio
Boss Radio was the name of two radio programming formats, both launched in the early 1960s: One in the United States, and one in the United Kingdom. Although the names were the same, the formats were quite different.-Boss Radio in the United States:...

 variation of the top 40 format. The restrictive programming style was soon adopted by many of RKO's other stations and imitated by non-RKO broadcasters around the country. RKO's FM station in New York pioneered numerous formats under a variety of call letters, including WOR and WXLO ("99X"); in 1983, as WRKS ("98.7 Kiss FM"), it became one of the first major stations to regularly program rap music
Hip hop music
Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...

. In 1979, RKO General created the RKO Radio Network
RKO Radio Network
The RKO Radio Networks, a subsidiary of RKO General, were the first commercial radio networks to distribute programming entirely by satellite. When it began operations on October 1, 1979, the initial RKO network was the first new full-service American radio network in 40 years. Satellite...

, reportedly the first broadcasting web linked via satellite.

The company's television stations, for the most part non–network affiliated, were known for showing classic films (both RKO productions and many others) under the banner of Million Dollar Movie, launched by New York's WOR-TV
WWOR-TV
WWOR-TV, virtual channel 9 , is the flagship station of the MyNetworkTV programming service, licensed to Secaucus, New Jersey and serving the Tri-State metropolitan area. WWOR is owned by Fox Television Stations, a division of the News Corporation, and is a sister station to Fox network flagship...

 in 1954. In June 1962, RKO General and Zenith Electronics
Zenith Electronics
Zenith Electronics Corporation is a brand of the South Korean company LG Electronics. The company was previously an American manufacturer of televisions and other consumer electronics, and was headquartered in Lincolnshire, Illinois. LG Electronics acquired a controlling share of Zenith in 1995...

 initiated what became the first extended venture into subscription television service: through early 1969, Hartford, Connecticut's WHCT-TV
WUVN
WUVN is the Connecticut affiliate for the Spanish language Univision television network. It is licensed to Hartford. Owned by Entravision, the station broadcasts its digital signal on UHF channel 46...

 aired movies, sports, classical and pop music concerts, and other live performances without commercials, generating income from descrambler installation and weekly rental fees as well as individual program charges. However, RKO General's most notable legacy is what may be the longest licensing dispute in television history. It began in 1965, when General Tire was accused of obliging vendors to buy advertising with one of its stations if they wanted to keep their contracts. More than two decades' worth of legal actions ensued, eventually forcing GenCorp (the parent company since 1983 of both General Tire and RKO General) to sell off its broadcast holdings under FCC
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...

 pressure. RKO General exited the media business permanently in 1991.

Later incarnations

Beginning with 1981's Carbon Copy
Carbon Copy (film)
Carbon Copy is a 1981 British-American comedy film, directed by Michael Schultz. The film stars George Segal, and features Denzel Washington....

, RKO General became involved in the coproduction of a number of feature films and TV projects through a subsidiary created three years earlier, RKO Pictures Inc. In collaboration with Universal Studios, RKO put out five films over the next three years. Though the studio frequently worked with major names—including Burt Reynolds
Burt Reynolds
Burton Leon "Burt" Reynolds, Jr. is an American actor. Some of his memorable roles include Bo 'Bandit' Darville in Smokey and the Bandit, Lewis Medlock in Deliverance, Bobby "Gator" McCluskey in White Lightning and sequel Gator, Paul Crewe and Coach Nate Scarborough in The Longest Yard and its...

 and Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton
Dolly Rebecca Parton is an American singer-songwriter, author, multi-instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best known for her work in country music. Dolly Parton has appeared in movies like 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias and Straight Talk...

 in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (film)
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a 1982 film adaptation of the musical of the same name released by Universal Pictures, which was co-written and directed by Colin Higgins...

, Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...

 in The Border, and Nastassja Kinski
Nastassja Kinski
Nastassja Kinski is a German-born American-based actress who has appeared in more than 60 films. Her starring roles include her Golden Globe Award-winning portrayal of the title character in Tess and her roles in two erotic films , as well as parts in Wim Wenders' films The Wrong Move; Paris,...

 in Cat People
Cat People (1982 film)
Cat People is a 1982 American erotic horror film directed by Paul Schrader and starring Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell and John Heard. The film co-stars Annette O'Toole, Ruby Dee, Ed Begley, Jr. and John Larroquette. Jerry Bruckheimer served as executive producer...

 (all 1982)—it met with little success. Starting with the Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...

  vehicle Plenty
Plenty (film)
Plenty is a 1985 British drama film directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Meryl Streep . It was adapted from David Hare's play of the same name.-Plot:...

 (1985), RKO took on more projects as sole studio backer. Films such as the erotic thriller Half Moon Street
Half Moon Street
Half Moon Street is a 1986 British-American erotic thriller film about an American woman working at a British escort service who becomes involved in the political intrigues surrounding one of her clients...

 (1986) and the Vietnam War drama Hamburger Hill
Hamburger Hill
Hamburger Hill is a 1987 American war film about the actual assault of the U.S. Army's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, part of the 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division 'Screaming Eagles', on a well-fortified position, including trenchworks and bunkers, of the North Vietnamese Army on Ap Bia...

 (1987) followed, but production ended as GenCorp underwent a massive reorganization following an attempted hostile takeover. With RKO General dismantling its broadcast business, RKO Pictures Inc., along with the original RKO studio's trademark
Trademark
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...

, remake
Remake
A remake is a piece of media based primarily on an earlier work of the same medium.-Film:The term "remake" is generally used in reference to a movie which uses an earlier movie as the main source material, rather than in reference to a second, later movie based on the same source...

 rights, and other remaining assets, was spun off and put up for sale. After a bid by RKO Pictures' own managers failed, it was acquired in late 1987 by Wesray Capital Corporation
Wesray Capital Corporation
Wesray Capital Corporation was an early private equity firm focussing on leveraged buyout investments. The firm was founded by former US Secretary of the Treasury William E...

—under the control of former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon
William E. Simon
William Edward Simon was a businessman, a Secretary of Treasury of the U.S. for three years, and a philanthropist. He became the 63rd Secretary of the Treasury on May 8, 1974, during the Nixon administration. He was reappointed by President Ford and served until 1977. Outside of government, he was...

 and Ray Chambers
Ray Chambers
Raymond G. Chambers currently serves as United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Malaria. He was appointed to this position by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in February 2008...

—and linked with their Six Flags
Six Flags
Six Flags Entertainment Corp. is the world's largest amusement park corporation based on quantity of properties and the fifth most popular in terms of attendance. The company maintains 14 properties located throughout North America, including theme parks, thrill parks, water parks and family...

 amusement parks to form RKO/Six Flags Entertainment Inc.

In 1989, RKO Pictures, which had produced no films while under Wesray control, was spun off yet again. Actress and Post Cereals heiress Dina Merrill
Dina Merrill
-Early life:Merrill was born Nedenia Marjorie Hutton in New York City, New York, the only child of Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her second husband, Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton...

 and her husband, producer Ted Hartley
Ted Hartley
Ted Hartley has been a US Navy fighter pilot, an investment banker, an actor, producer, and is currently CEO of RKO Pictures. He is married to actress Dina Merrill. He has one son, Philippe Hartley .- Early life :...

, acquired a majority interest and merged the company with their Pavilion Communications. After a brief period as RKO/Pavilion, the business was reorganized as RKO Pictures LLC. With the inaugural RKO production under Hartley and Merrill's ownership, False Identity (1990), the company also stepped into the distribution business. In 1992, it handled the well-regarded independent production Laws of Gravity, directed by Nick Gomez
Nick Gomez
Nick Gomez is an American film director and actor. He has directed for a number of television and film studios. He has also acted in a few minor films...

. RKO's next significant release came in 1998 with Mighty Joe Young
Mighty Joe Young (1998 film)
The Music was composed and conduced by James Horner. The Soundtrack was released on December of the year 1998.- Tracklist :...

, a remake of a 1949 RKO movie that was itself something of a King Kong redux. In the early 2000s, the company was involved as a coproducer on TV movies and modestly budgeted features at the rate of about one annually. In 2003, RKO coproduced a Broadway stage version of the 1936 Astaire–Rogers vehicle Swing Time
Swing Time
Swing Time is a 1936 RKO musical comedy film set mainly in New York City and stars Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Helen Broderick, Victor Moore, Eric Blore and Georges Metaxa, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields...

, under the title Never Gonna Dance.

In 2003, as well, RKO Pictures entered into a legal battle with Wall Street Financial Associates (WSFA). Hartley and Merrill claimed that the owners of WSFA fraudulently induced them into signing an acquisition agreement by concealing their "cynical and rapacious" plans to purchase RKO with the intention only of dismantling it. WSFA sought a preliminary injunction prohibiting RKO's majority owners from selling their interests in the company to any third parties. The WSFA motion was denied in July 2003, freeing RKO to deal with another potential purchaser, InternetStudios.com. In 2004, that planned sale fell through when InternetStudios.com apparently folded. The company's minimal involvement in new film production continues to focus on its remake rights: Are We Done Yet?
Are We Done Yet?
Are We Done Yet? is a 2007 family comedy film starring Ice Cube. The film is both a remake of the classic Cary Grant comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and a sequel to 2005's comedy Are We There Yet? The film was directed by Steve Carr from a screenplay by Hank Nelken...

, based on Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a 1948 American comedy film directed by H.C. Potter and starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. The film was written and produced by the team of Melvin Frank and Norman Panama...

 (1948), was released in April 2007 to dismal reviews. Later in the year, RKO launched a horror division, Roseblood Movie Company. As of early 2010, Roseblood's mission had expanded, according to the RKO website, to encompass the "popular horror/thriller genre ... youth-oriented feature length motion pictures that are edgy, sensuous, scary and commercial." The most recent RKO release is Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009 film)
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, a 2009 American film, is a remake of the 1956 film of the same name by Fritz Lang. Written, directed and filmed by Peter Hyams, the new version starred Michael Douglas and Amber Tamblyn. The production was announced in February 2008 and filming began the following...

 (2009), a remake of a 1956 RKO film
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a 1956 film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Douglas Morrow. The film, considered film noir, was the last American film directed by Lang.-Plot:...

 directed by Fritz Lang. A stage version of Top Hat toured Great Britain in the second half of 2011.

Studio library

RKO Pictures LLC is the owner of all the trademarks and logos
Logos
' is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus ' is an important term in...

 connected with RKO Radio Pictures Inc., as well as the rights concerning stories, screenplays (including 800 to 900 unproduced scripts), remakes, sequels, and prequels connected with the RKO library. The television, video, and theatrical distribution rights, however, are in other hands: The U.S. and Canadian TV—and, consequently, video—rights to the bulk of the RKO film library were sold at auction in 1971 after the holders, TransBeacon (a corporate descendant of C&C Television), went bankrupt. The auctioned rights were split between United Artists
United Artists
United Artists Corporation is an American film studio. The original studio of that name was founded in 1919 by D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks....

 and Marian B. Inc. (MBI). In 1984, MBI created a subsidiary, Marian Pictures Inc. (MBP), to which it transferred its share of the RKO rights. Two years later GenCorp's subsidiaries, RKO General and RKO Pictures, repurchased the rights then controlled by MBP. In the meantime, United Artists had been acquired by MGM. In 1986, MGM/UA's considerable library, including its RKO rights, was bought by Turner Broadcasting for its new Turner Entertainment
Turner Entertainment
Turner Entertainment Company, Inc. is an American media company founded by Ted Turner. Now owned by Time Warner, the company is largely responsible for overseeing its library for worldwide distribution Turner Entertainment Company, Inc. (commonly known as Turner Entertainment Co.) is an American...

 division. During RKO Pictures' brief Wesray episode, Turner acquired many of the distribution rights that had returned to RKO via MBP, as well as both the theatrical rights and the TV rights originally held back from C&C for the cities where RKO owned stations.

In October 1996, Turner Broadcasting was merged into Time Warner
Time Warner
Time Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...

, which controls and distributes the bulk of the RKO library today, though RKO Pictures retains the copyright. As for RKO's primary release deals, the Disney pictures originally distributed by the studio are controlled by the Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Walt Disney Productions established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into...

. Rights to the Goldwyn features released by RKO, which had been held by the Samuel Goldwyn Company
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
The Samuel Goldwyn Company was an independent film company founded by Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., the son of the famous Hollywood mogul, Samuel Goldwyn, in 1979.-Background:...

, are controlled by the Goldwyn family estate, with distribution rights assigned to MGM.

Ownership of the major European TV and video distribution rights to RKO's library is divided on a virtual country-by-country basis: In the UK, many of the RKO rights are currently held by Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....

. In 1981, RAI
RAI
RAI — Radiotelevisione italiana S.p.A. known until 1954 as Radio Audizioni Italiane, is the Italian state owned public service broadcaster controlled by the Ministry of Economic Development. Rai is the biggest television company in Italy...

, the public broadcasting service, acquired the Italian rights to the RKO library, which it now shares with Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi , also known as Il Cavaliere – from knighthood to the Order of Merit for Labour which he received in 1977 – is an Italian politician and businessman who served three terms as Prime Minister of Italy, from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011. Berlusconi is also the...

's Fininvest
Fininvest
Fininvest is a financial holding company controlled by Silvio Berlusconi's family and managed by Silvio Berlusconi's eldest daughter Marina Berlusconi.-Structure:...

. In France, the rights are held by Ariès. The German rights were acquired in 1969 by KirchGruppe on behalf of its KirchMedia division, which went bankrupt in 2002. EOS Entertainment's Beta Film purchased many of KirchMedia's rights in 2004, and the library is now distributed by Kineos, created in 2005 as a Beta Film–KirchMedia joint venture. In Spain, the RKO features are now distributed by Manga Films. The Latin American rights were acquired in the 1970s by Leo Darcyl on behalf of its television distribution company, Telefilms.

Logos

Most Radio Pictures Inc. and RKO Radio Pictures Inc. films produced between 1929 and 1957 have an opening logo displaying the studio's famous trademark, the spinning globe and radio tower, nicknamed the "Transmitter." It was inspired by a two-hundred-foot tower built in Colorado for a giant electrical amplifier, or Tesla coil
Tesla coil
A Tesla coil is a type of resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891. It is used to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity. Tesla coils produce higher current than the other source of high voltage discharges, electrostatic machines...

, created by inventor Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer...

. Orson Welles referred to the design as his "favorite among the old logos, not just because it was so often a reliable portent. ... It reminds us to listen." The studio's closing logo, a triangle enclosing a thunderbolt, was also a well-known trademark. Instead of the Transmitter, many Disney films released by the studio originally appeared with colorful versions of the RKO closing logo as part of the main title sequence. For decades, re-releases of these films had Disney/Buena Vista
Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group
Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, Inc. is a corporation which develops scripts and oversees theatrical production for The Walt Disney Company's production companies and imprints. The Group, one of Hollywood's major film studios, is based at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California...

logos replacing the RKO insignia, but the originals have been restored in many recent DVD editions. The Hartley–Merrill RKO Pictures has created new versions of the Transmitter and the closing thunderbolt logo.

Sources

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External links

RKO Radio Pictures history

RKO Pictures LLC
  • RKO Pictures the Hartley–Merrill company's website
  • Ted Hartley personal website of RKO Pictures LLC's chairman and CEO
  • "Newman Helms Doc" article by Michael Fleming on planned Hartley documentary, Variety.com, September 11, 2003


RKO library and logos
  • C&C RKO 16 mm Prints extensive discussion of RKO preservation and rights issues, by David Chierichetti; part of eFilmCenter website
  • The RKO Logo essay by Rick Mitchell; part of Hollywood: Lost and Found website
  • RKO Pictures Logos detailed descriptions by Nicholas Aczel and Sean Beard
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