How a radio company built the studio behind Citizen Kane

RKO Radio Pictures was a Hollywood studio formed in 1928 by a radio company that needed customers for its sound system. Movies were turning into talking pictures, and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had a system for recording sound on film, called Photophone. David Sarnoff, the RCA executive behind the deal, put together a studio of its own to use it. That studio went on to release King Kong and Citizen Kane.

RKO became one of the Big Five, the five largest Hollywood studios of the era, the ones that also owned chains of theaters. It is also the only one of them that stopped making films altogether. Relay's catalog credits RKO on more than 30 films, made from 1929 to 1940. Seven of them are below.

How did a radio company end up making movies?

RKO is short for Radio-Keith-Orpheum. In October 1928 RCA took control of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and a small studio called FBO (Film Booking Offices), and merged them. RCA now had a studio to make films with its sound system and theaters to show them in. The production arm launched in January 1929 and said it would make only all-talking films.

What happened to RKO?

After King Kong in 1933 came the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance musicals from 1934 to 1939, and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane in 1941. From 1942 Val Lewton, a producer working on small budgets, ran a horror unit that began with Cat People.

The decline began in May 1948, when Howard Hughes, the aviator and film producer, took control. In 1955 the tire maker General Tire and Rubber bought RKO through its broadcasting arm, and the old films went to television. RKO stopped making films in 1957, the year Desilu, the television company of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, bought its studio lot.

Which RKO films are on Relay?

Street Girl (1929)

This is the first film RKO produced, though its opening was held back until after another picture, which made it the studio's second release. Betty Compson plays a violinist down on her luck who joins a struggling band and turns it into a success, with Jack Oakie and John Harron as the musicians.

Drama

Rio Rita (1929)

Rio Rita was RKO's first big hit and its biggest of 1929, adapted from a Broadway musical staged by Florenz Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer. Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, a comedy pair Ziegfeld had put together for the stage show, made their film debut here and became RKO's first big comedy team.

Musical/Dance

Danger Lights (1930)

Louis Wolheim plays the boss of a railroad yard who takes in a young drifter, with Robert Armstrong and Jean Arthur. It was shot in Natural Vision, an experimental widescreen process, and it was the only feature made with it. RKO also made a standard version, and the widescreen print has not survived.

Drama

The Animal Kingdom (1932)

David O. Selznick, then RKO's head of production and later the producer of Gone with the Wind, made this adaptation of Philip Barry's play as part of a push for grown-up stories. Leslie Howard plays a publisher torn between Daisy, the artist he lived with, played by Ann Harding, and the woman he marries, played by Myrna Loy.

Comedy

Love Affair (1939)

Charles Boyer plays a French playboy and Irene Dunne an American singer who fall in love on an ocean liner and agree to meet on top of the Empire State Building in six months. It was nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Its director, Leo McCarey, remade it himself in 1957 as An Affair to Remember, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.

Comedy

The Flying Deuces (1939)

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made this one away from their usual producer, Hal Roach, after Laurel walked out on him and was suspended. The independent producer Boris Morros made it, and RKO released it. Stan and Ollie join the French Foreign Legion after a romantic disaster in Paris.

Comedy

My Favorite Wife (1940)

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, a pair since The Awful Truth in 1937, star in an update of Tennyson's poem Enoch Arden. A wife presumed dead after seven years lost at sea comes home on the day her husband remarries. McCarey was due to direct, but a bad car accident left him as producer, and Garson Kanin took over. In 1962 Marilyn Monroe began a remake, Something's Got to Give, that was never finished.

Comedy

Where to go next

• For an RKO thriller that shared its jungle set with King Kong, see The Most Dangerous Game.
• For the studio Laurel and Hardy walked away from, see Hal Roach Studios.
• For a smaller studio of the same years, see Republic Pictures.