Benjamin Franklin Keith

Warner to Seven Arts Productions in 1967, after which the old cinema warhorse retired.

The deal was a bust for General Tire, which shut down RKO Studios in January 1957. The studio's production facilities were sold to Desilu Productions, which was owned by TV superstar Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz. Ironically, Ball had signed a seven-year contract with R. K. O.

Hughes didn't actually sell off RKO Theatres until 1953, and two years later, he sold off the studio to General Tire & Rubber Co. for $25 million (approximately $200 million in today's money, when factored for inflation), by which time it was a shadow of itself.

as a corporate entity was terminated in 1950 when Hughes signed a consent decree with the federal government in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1948 Paramount decision that ordered the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains. The studio was split up into a production-distribution business, RKO Pictures Corp. , and an exhibition chain, RKO Theatres Corp.

After buying the studio in 1948, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes ran it into the ground. Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp.

, she served as a supporting player in A pictures and as a leading player at the studio's B pictures unit until 1942, enjoying the title "Queen of the B's. " She moved over to M. G. M.

)Radio-Keith-Orpheum Studios was one of the major studios of Hollywood, producing the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals and Citizen Kane (1941), which many consider the greatest motion picture ever made.

in 1936. Warner Bros. itself was sold by Jack L.

as a 24-year-old starlet in 1935. In her seven years at R. K. O.

Vaudeville acts in some theaters survived, but only as an added feature, typically as an interlude for the feature film, as shown in the James Cagney 1933 movie Footlight Parade (1933) from Warner Bros. In the musical-comedy, Cagney is the harassed producer of vaudeville interludes used at major movie theaters in New York City. (Ironically, one of the movie companies Joe Kennedy considered acquiring was First National Pictures, which eventually merged with Warner Bros.

His wheeling and dealing done, Kennedy got out of the film industry for good in 1931, selling the last remaining film asset under his direct control, Pathé, to RKO, with which it was merged. Vaudeville bills were soon dropped from the former K-A-O theaters after they were wired for sound.

Aside from Astaire & Rogers, its major stars in the 1930s included Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

) Studios, one of the major Hollywood film studios from 1929 through the early 1950s. B. F. Keith was one of those romantic youths who joined a circus, eventually working for P. T. Barnum and then the Forepaugh Circus.

David Sarnoff became the chairman of the board of RKO, and a motion picture production unit, Radio Pictures, was created in 1929, its name -- like that of the parent corporation -- paying homage to RCA, which owned a controlling share in the new studio throughout the 1930s.

in early 1928, and a controlling interest in K-A-O was acquired by Joseph Kennedy, the financier father of future U. S. President John F. Kennedy and U. S. Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corp. consisted of a chain of vaudeville and movie theaters in the U. S. and Canada that had 1. 05 million seats. Kennedy, who already controlled the small film producer/distributor F. B. O. (Film Booking Office), envisioned the K-A-O chain of theaters as the exhibition arm of a new major motion picture studio. Later that year, Kennedy brokered a deal with David Sarnoff's Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to create Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) from K-A-O and his own Film Booking Office. Sarnoff had been looking for a venue for his company's new optical sound-on-film process, as other studios were wedded to the rival process created by Western-Electric. Sarnoff likely was the major force behind the deals that Kennedy had pulled off earlier.

in 1928 and gained access to its Vitaphone sound-on-film process, the first to be used in commercial motion pictures but which was soon obsolete. First National was dropped as a separate marque by Warner Bros.

His interest went to his son Andrew Keith and subsequently was acquired by Albee after Andrew's death in 1918. The Keith and Albee chain eventually was merged with the Orpheum theater chain to form Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corp.

Keith retired from the running of the theater chain in 1909 and died at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida on March 26, 1914.

The Keith and Albee chain of theaters was expanded via a merger with Frederick Freeman Proctor's theater chain in 1906. They were not nickelodeon owners, but legitimate theater impresarios who incorporated short films as part of their vaudeville bill. B. F.

In 1905, they signed a deal with Thomas Edison's Edison Studios to supply their theaters with movies.

Keith and Albee's Union Square Theatre in New York City was the first to exhibit motion pictures, the Lumière Cinématographe, on June 29, 1896. Owning the American rights to the Lumière cinema equipment, they signed a contract with Biograph Studios for the production of films to be shown in their theaters in Boston, New York Philadelphia, and other locations in the East and Midwest. They began buying up small theaters throughout the East and Midwest to expand their empire of vaudeville theaters that also showcased the new medium.

In 1883, he and his partner Colonel William Austin opened a museum of curiosities in Boston, Massachusetts. Two years later, he and his new partner, Edward Franklin Albee II (the father of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee) opened Boston's Bijou Theatre. The Bijou ran a continuous variety show program from 10:00 A. M. to 11:00 P. M. daily, a format that came to be known as vaudeville. There was no intermission.

The theater-owner Benjamin Franklin Keith was born in Hillsboro Bridge (Hillsborough), New Hampshire on January 26, 1846. He is the theatrical impresario generally credited with the creation of vaudeville in America, which evolved out of variety theater. The theatrical empire he helped build became one of the building blocks for Joseph P. Kennedy's and David Sarnoff's Radio-Keith-Orpheum (R. K. O.