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.

Robertson-Cole takes the name Film Booking Offices of America (FBO).  FBO produces and distributes a number of films, but the company is small compared to MGM, Paramount, and Fox.

Joseph P. Kennedy buys out the British interests of FBO.

Two titans of their age – David Sarnoff, President of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future President and owner of the Film Booking Office of America (FBO), a movie distribution company – met at an oyster bar in Manhattan. By the time the meal was over, they’d agreed to combine RCA’s Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain with Kennedy’s company (as well as the fledgling Pathe Studios) to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum, or the RKO Corporation.

RKO releases 12 films in the first year, including Dixiana and Hit the Deck which featured Technicolor sequences and the first three of a series of comedies starring the team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey.

David O Selznick is hired as production chief. Cimarron receives Oscar for Best Picture.

RKO’s corporate headquarters in New York moves into the RKO Building, one of the first Rockefeller Center structures to open.

King Kong released. Selznick departs RKO, after only 15 months. Marion C Cooper, the producer of KING KONG, takes over as production.

THE RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD – first of a series of screwball comedies and OF HUMAN BONDAGE, Bette Davis’s first success.

Working with Disney, RKO releases SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

The Saint Series Begins

RKO agrees to distribute films by Samuel Goldwyn resulting in William Wyler’s THE LITTLE FOXES starring Bette Davis, and Howard Hawks’ BALL OF FIRE with Barbara Stanwyck. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, the Falcon Series Begins

Howard Hughes Takes Ownership of the Company after beating out the competition to purchase long-time RKO financier Floyd Odlum’s interest in the company. Production was shut down for six months as Hughes reworked the entire production slate set up by previous production head Dore Schary.  When production started again, his hands-on approach to every detail hindered progress. Fort Apache.

The Set-Up.

The last two production heads under Hughes, Sid Rogell and Sam Bischoff, quit after less than two years due to Hughes’s meddling. Hughes’s time at RKO was marked by dwindling production and a slew of expensive flops

Hughes and RKO corporate head Ned E. Depinet sell their RKO stock to a Chicago syndicate whose own mishandling of the studio bring Hughes back to a controlling interest in 1953. Nicholas Ray’s ON DANGEROUS GROUND (1952, though shooting had been completed two years earlier) and BEWARE, MY LOVELY (1952), – both with Robert Ryan

The Encino backlot is shut down and sold off.

Walt Disney ends his 18 years long distribution deal with RKO and creates his own distribution company.

Howard Hughes sells RKO to General Tire and Rubber Company who start selling broadcast rights to RKO movies to television stations across the country.

Under General Tire, film production is entirely shut down.  A fallow period begins.

In collaboration with Universal Studios, RKO put out five films over the next three years. Although the studio frequently worked with major names—including Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Jack Nicholson in The Border, and Nastassja Kinski in Cat People (all 1982)

RKO signaled the birth of a new era with its acquisition by Ted Hartley and Dina Merrill in 1989.

SHADE is released, starring Thandie Newton, Stuart Townsend, Jaimie Foxx, Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith, and Gabriel Byrne

Today, the modern RKO Pictures produces, finances, and distributes both original entertainment and remakes of its classic films. RKO draws upon its brand and intellectual property assets to develop entertainment properties for production and distribution. RKO’s production strategy includes devoting resources to the repositioning of its famous classic library for current audiences as it develops other businesses and entertainment properties. The company seeks out additional distribution and co-financing ventures for new productions as well as for sequels, remakes, and live stage productions based upon its library of titles.