...RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) Pictures is an American film production and distribution company. As Radio Pictures Inc. and then RKO Radio Pictures Inc., it was one of the so-called Big Five studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) theater chains and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928.The current online edition of Encyclopædia Britannica erroneously claims that RKO resulted "from the merger of the Radio Corporation of America, the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theatre chain, and the American Pathé production firm." See RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. entry. Retrieved 11/24/06. Many other online resources make the same demonstrably false claim or similar ones (e.g., that the RCA Photophone business was made part of RKO).Note also the following:

• Many sources incorrectly describe Keith-Albee-Orpheum as the union of three theater chains; in fact the name describes the union of just two chains, B. F. Keith Corp. (doing business as Keith-Albee) and Orpheum Circuit Inc. Edward F. Albee was Benjamin F. Keith's right-hand man; he took over the company after its founder's death in 1914.
• Many sources incorrectly give FBO's full name as "Film Booking Office of America"; the proper name is Film Booking Offices of America, which may be confirmed by examining its official logo.

As an example of the many erroneous descriptions of RKO's early history that are routine even in reputable sources, take the summary history of the company's origins in Balio, Tino, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995 [1]), p. 16. The following corrections must be made to a single paragraph:

• FBO's full name was not "Film Booking Office."
• RCA Photophone was not "amalgamated" with FBO and KAO under the Radio-Keith-Orpheum holding company (see, e.g., Lasky [2], p. 120).
• The company did not "contain" anything close to "three hundred theaters" (see note 2, below).
• The company did not "contain...four studios" in either standard meaning of the term—production company or permanent production facility. After its purchase of Pathé (U.S.) in January 1931, RKO could be said to "contain" two studios in the former sense; as for the latter sense, after the purchase, RKO possessed the former FBO studio in Hollywood, a backlot it had established in Encino in 1929, and the Pathé studio/backlot in Culver City—three "studios" by even a generous count. And note that Balio does not mention the Pathé purchase. RCA chief David Sarnoff engineered the merger in order to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone. By the mid-1940s, the studio was under the control of investor Floyd Odlum.
Read full entry

This entry is from Wikipedia,the leading user-contributed encyclopedia.It may not have been reviewed by professional editors(See full disclaimer)