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RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, was an American film production and distribution company, one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together ...
- January 25, 1929; 94 years ago (as RKO Productions Inc.)
- Motion pictures
RKO Pictures (also known as RKO Productions, Radio Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, and RKO Teleradio Pictures) is an American film production and distribution company. The original company produced films from 1929 through 1957, with releases extending until its dissolution in 1959.
During its 25 years in film production RKO produced many memorable films, including the Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire musicals, the early pictures of Katharine Hepburn, and most famous of all, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” But the company always struggled financially. It was bought by Howard Hughes in 1948 and ceased film production in 1953.
Oct 8, 2020 · In its lifespan, RKO Pictures achieved just two Best Picture Oscars – for Cimarron in 1931, and The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, which was, in reality, a Samuel Goldwyn production. John Ford was the sole recipient of a Best Director Oscar for an RKO picture – 1953’s The Informer. This pales in comparison to the rest of the Hollywood ...
- 1 min
- The Birth of RKO
- RKO Radio Pictures Inc.
- Notable RKO Pictures
- RKO Studios and Buildings
- RKO General
- The New RKO Pictures
- References
Shut out of the profitable sound-film conversion business driven by the success of Warner Bros.' October 1927 release The Jazz Singer, RCA bought its way into the motion picture industry to gain an outlet for the optical sound-on-film system, Photophone, recently developed by General Electric, RCA's parent company. All of the major studios and thei...
The early years
Declaring that it would make only all-talking films, RKO began shooting at the former FBO studios in early 1929, with William LeBaron as production chief. The studio's first two releases were musicals, the melodramatic Syncopation, which premiered March 3, and the comedic Street Girl (by some obscure calculus, RKO's first "official" production), which debuted July 30. For the lavish musical Rio Rita, RKO spared no expense, including a number of Technicolor sequences. Opening in September to r...
Kane and rebound in the 1940s
Berman, who had received his first screen credit as a nineteen-year-old on FBO's Midnight Molly in 1925, departed in a dispute over studio policy with new RKO president George J. Schaefer, handpicked by the Rockefellers and backed by Sarnoff. With Berman gone, Schaefer became in effect production chief, though other men nominally filled the role. Schaefer was particularly keen on signing up independent producers whose films RKO would distribute. In 1941, the studio landed one of the most pres...
HUAC, Hughes, and decline
Nineteen forty-six was the most profitable year in the history of RKO, but 1947 brought a number of unpleasant harbingers for all of Hollywood. The British government, followed by others, imposed limits on how much capital American movie companies could withdraw annually, curtailing one of the studios' primary sources of earnings. Television was beginning to drain audiences away from the movies; across the board, attendance—and profits—fell. The phenomenon that would become known as McCarthyi...
1920s
1. Syncopation(1929; first RKO release) 2. Street Girl(1929; first official RKO production) 3. Rio Rita (1929; with Technicolorsequences)
1930s
1. Cimarron(1931) 2. The Runaround(1931; first all-Technicolor RKO production) 3. Bird of Paradise(1932) 4. The Most Dangerous Game(1932) 5. What Price Hollywood?(1932) 6. Flying Down to Rio(1933) 7. King Kong(1933) 8. Little Women(1933) 9. Morning Glory(1933) 10. The Gay Divorcee(1934) 11. The Informer(1934) 12. Of Human Bondage(1934) 13. Alice Adams(1935) 14. Becky Sharp (1935; first feature entirely in three-strip Technicolor) 15. The Last Days of Pompeii(1935) 16. Roberta(1935) 17. Top Ha...
1940s
1. Kitty Foyle(1940) 2. My Favorite Wife(1940) 3. Stranger on the Third Floor(1940) 4. Ball of Fire(1941; distribution only) 5. Citizen Kane(1941) 6. The Little Foxes(1941; distribution only) 7. Mr. & Mrs. Smith(1941) 8. Suspicion(1941) 9. Cat People(1942) 10. The Magnificent Ambersons(1942) 11. The Pride of the Yankees(1942; distribution only) 12. I Walked with a Zombie(1943) 13. Mr. Lucky(1943) 14. This Land Is Mine(1943) 15. The Bells of St. Mary's(1945) 16. The Best Years of Our Lives(194...
RKO Hollywood Studios – 780 Gower Ave., Hollywood, Los Angeles/established by Robertson–Cole in 1921; now owned by CBS Paramount TelevisionRKO-Pathé Culver City Studios – 9336 Washington Blvd., Culver City/established by Thomas H. Ince in 1919; now owned by PCCP Studio City Los AngelesRKO Forty Acres (backlot) – Culver City/established by Ince in 1919; razed in 1976RKO Encino Ranch (backlot) – Encino, Los Angeles/established by RKO in 1929; razed in 1954The classic RKO General station lineup consisted of WOR-AM-FM-TV in New York, KHJ-AM-FM-TV in Los Angeles, KFRC-AM-FM in San Francisco, WHBQ-AM-TV in Memphis, the Yankee Network and its flagships WNAC-AM-FM-TV in Boston, and CKLW-AM-FM-TV in Detroit/Windsor. (The Canadian government later tightened rules on foreign ownership of radio and TV outlets...
Beginning with 1981's Carbon Copy, RKO General became involved in the coproduction of a number of feature films (and one TV movie) through a newly created subsidiary, RKO Pictures Inc. Collaborating on an average of about two pictures per year, RKO frequently worked with major names—including Jack Nicholson (The Border [1982]) and Meryl Streep (Ple...
Note: The standard history and reference guide to the studio's films, The RKO Story, by Richard B. Jewell, with Vernon Harbin (New York: Arlington House/Crown, 1982)—and not IMDb.com—is used as the final arbiter of whether specific films made between 1929 and 1957 were RKO solo productions, coproductions, or completely independent productions. Year...
British businessmen Rufus S. Cole and H.F. Robertson create a film distribution company and purchase 13.5 acres on the corner of Gower Street and Melrose Avenue to build a studio. 1922 Robertson-Cole takes the name Film Booking Offices of America (FBO).
May 27, 2023 · RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., or simply RKO, was an American company that produced and distributed movies. It significantly contributed to the cinema industry and played a vital part in the Golden...
