RKO Pictures

RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.
Industry	Motion pictures
Fate	Closed
Predecessors	Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation; Film Booking Offices of America;
Founded	October 23, 1928; 96 years ago (original); 2009; 15 years ago (revival)
Founder	David Sarnoff
Defunct	March 7, 1959; 65 years ago (original)
Headquarters	11301 West Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, US
Parent	Radio Corporation of America (Technicolor SA); Atlas Corporation; General Tire and Rubber Company (ARH);
Website	www.rko.com

RKO Pictures is a company in the United States that makes and sells movies. It was first known as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. RKO was an acronym for Radio-Keith-Orpheum, the original parent company of RKO Radio Pictures.^[1] It was one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The company was made by the merger of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) theater chain and the Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) studio in October 1928. It was put together by David Sarnoff of RCA. His goal was to create a market for RCA's photophone, which was their sound-on-film technology. By the mid-1940s, the studio was under the control of investor Floyd Odlum.

RKO is well known for the musicals it made in the 1930s. These starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Other well-known actors got their start at RKO. Among these were Katharine Hepburn, Robert Mitchum, and Cary Grant. Many praise RKO's work on film noir. Val Lewton's low-budget horror movies are also praised by movie critics. RKO made two of the most famous movies in history. These are King Kong and Citizen Kane. They also made movies with other studios. These include the well known It's a Wonderful Life and Notorious. RKO also took care of sales for movies made by Walt Disney from 1937 to the mid-1950s. They also took care of sales for Samuel Goldwyn.

In 1948, Howard Hughes took over RKO and this lead to a time of decline. Then in 1955, it was bought by the General Tire and Rubber Company. RKO stopped making new movies in 1957, and mostly shut down two years later. In 1959, the assets of RKO moved to a new company called RKO General. In 1981, RKO was revived under the name RKO Pictures Inc. In 1989, it was sold to new owners. They run it using the name RKO Pictures LLC.

RKO Pictures Media

David Sarnoff (1929), by Samuel Johnson Woolf, National Portrait Gallery
Rio Rita (1929), first smash hit for RKO (then releasing films under the "Radio Pictures" banner)
King Kong (1933), one of Hollywood's great spectacles
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made the annual list of top ten box office stars from 1935 to 1937. Top Hat (1935) was the third of the eight RKO films featuring the duo as co-leads.
Katharine Hepburn's last film for RKO, Bringing Up Baby (1938), was a bomb. Today it is regarded as one of Hollywood's finest screwball comedies.
Orson Welles in the title role of Citizen Kane (1941), often cited as the greatest film of all time.
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946). RKO made over $1 million profit on the coproduction with David O. Selznick's Vanguard Films.
Crossfire (1947) was a hit, but no American studio would hire blacklisted director Edward Dmytryk again until he named names to HUAC in 1951. Producer Adrian Scott did not get another screen credit for two decades. He died before he could see it.