RKO Pictures facts for kids
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| Industry | Motion pictures |
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| Predecessors |
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| Founded | October 23, 1928 (as RKO Productions Inc.) |
| Founder | David Sarnoff |
| Headquarters | 1270 Avenue of the Americas,
Manhattan, New York City, US
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| Parent |
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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. 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. The 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.
Images for kids
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Radio Pictures ad in The Film Daily, 1929
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Early Radio-Keith-Orpheum logo
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Rio Rita (1929), first smash hit for RKO (then releasing films under the "Radio Pictures" banner)
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King Kong (1933), one of Hollywood's great spectacles
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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the only performers ever to make the annual list of top box office stars while with RKO. Top Hat (1935) was the fourth of the nine films in which they costarred between 1933 and 1939.
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Katharine Hepburn's last film for RKO, Bringing Up Baby (1938), was a bomb. Today it is regarded as one of the finest screwball comedies.
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Orson Welles in the title role of Citizen Kane (1941), often cited as the greatest film of all time.
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Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946). RKO made over $1 million profit on the coproduction with David O. Selznick's Vanguard Films.
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Film art at low budget: I Walked with a Zombie (1943), produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur
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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.
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Jet Pilot, a Hughes pet production launched in 1949. Shooting wrapped in May 1951, but it was only released in 1957 due to his interminable tinkering. RKO was by then out of the distribution business. The movie was released by Universal-International.
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Classic closing ident of RKO Radio Pictures
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See also
In Spanish: RKO Pictures para niños
