When sound was first added to films, the Radio Corporation of America (which these days goes by merely RCA), decided that sound their bag, and were determined to be the leading producers of talkies, or at least, they wanted to make sure that when you thought of Movies -- you thought of Radio. To that end, they trademarked the term "Radio Picture," which is what they called their movies. But, they needed to make sure that theaters would show all their "Radio Pictures". Their solution -- buys lots of movie theaters and force 'em to. The "Keith-Albee-Orphreum" chain of movie and vaudeville house was willing to merge, and thus was born in October of 1928, the "Radio - Keith - Orphreum Corporation" -- or "R.K.O" for short. (The exact fate of Albee has been lost to the ages) RKO then proceeded to spend most of the 1930's in bankruptcy. It did find time to make a few movies then, including some high-quality horror flicks, including King Kong, Son of Kong, The Cat People, and I Walked With a Zombie. Despite making many good films over the years, financial troubled always loomed. RKO's studios were sold to Desilu (Lucille Ball's company) in 1953, and it stopped making movies altogether in 1957. It survived as a corporation, living off it's holdings, until the 1980's when it was swallowed up by other companies. Among the other movies made by RKO were Orson Wells's Citizen Kane, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (before Walt left to start his own studio), Hitckcock's Notorious, and vaudeville-stripper-turned-actress Lili St. Cyr's finest hour: Son of Sinbad (1955).