Word: rko
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...familiar pilot was back at the controls of RKO Pictures last week. Howard Hughes, who sold control of the studio only two months ago for $7,093,940 to a group headed by Chicago Promoter Ralph Stolkin, moved back into control without putting up any cash. Noah Dietrich, Hughes's right-hand man and executive vice president of Hughes Tool Co., is expected to become RKO president. With Dietrich and two other satellites on the five-man board, Hughes has complete control, although the Stolkin group still holds the majority (29%) stock interest...
After a flood of unfavorable publicity had forced four Stolkin men to step down from the board, Stolkin turned to Hughes because he still has a sizable financial interest in RKO (the group still owes Hughes some $6,000,000, to be paid off in 2½ years), and seemed to be the only one willing to try to put the studio's humpty-dumpty operation together. Hughes, reluctant to step back into RKO, promised to keep his eccentric hand off picture production...
Even at that, he and his associates will have to perform something like a miracle to get RKO on its feet. The studio has been losing $100,000 a week, has made one picture in the last five months, has been sued by a group of stockholders and has no movie production boss. Hughes's first move was to announce plans for five movies; his next task will be to try to persuade a big-name producer to take the job. Meanwhile, RKO's 15,000 stockholders could only hope that one of the most harrowing scripts since...
Blackbeard, the Pirate (Edmund Grainger; RKO Radio), an expensively Technicolored penny dreadful, casts Robert Newton as the infamous 18th century privateer Edward Teach, popularly known as Blackbeard. In this fanciful biography, Blackbeard is as blackhearted a buccaneer as ever sailed the Spanish Main. As one of his own crew puts it, he "would make the flesh crawl on a squid." His shaggy beard daintily decorated with red ribbons, Blackbeard goes about flogging, stabbing and stringing up his enemies with the greatest of gusto, laughing fiendishly all the while. He cuts his rivals' throats, runs them through the gizzards...
...twin picture is also a double debut. It is the first offering of Huntington Hartford, 40-year-old art patron and heir to A & P millions, who decided to turn producer, with plans to deliver two pictures a year during the next three years for RKO release. It also introduces to the screen (as the beguiling bride of Crane's sheriff) Marjorie Steele, a onetime cigarette girl in a Hollywood nightspot, who is Hartford's wife in real life...