Film Booking Offices of America (FBO), registered as FBO Pictures Corp., was an American film studio of the silent era, a midsize producer and distributor of mostly low-budget films. The business began in 1918 as Robertson-Cole, an Anglo-American import-export company. Robertson-Cole began distributing films in the United States that December and opened a Los Angeles production facility in 1920. Late that year, R-C entered into a working relationship with East Coast financier Joseph P. Kennedy. A business reorganization in 1922 led to its assumption of the FBO name, first for all its distribution operations and ultimately for its own productions as well. Through Kennedy, the studio contracted with Western leading man Fred Thomson, who grew by 1925 into one of Hollywood's most popular stars. Thomson was just one of several silent screen cowboys with whom FBO became identified.
The studio, whose core market was America's small towns, also put out many romantic melodramas, action pictures, and comedic shorts. Pauline Frederick and Sessue Hayakawa were the major stars of its R-C period. Subsequently, Evelyn Brent and Richard Talmadge were FBO's biggest non-Western stars. Tom Tyler played the lead in twenty-nine cowboy pictures for the studio. Alberta Vaughn headlined five FBO short series. The studio's most prolific directors included Ralph Ince, William Seiter, and Emory Johnson. From 1925 forward, adaptations of the works of Gene Stratton-Porter were consistently among its top box office attractions.
In 1926, Kennedy led an investment group that acquired the company, and he ran it hands-on—traveling frequently to California—with considerable success. Exhibitors cited The Keeper of the Bees, based on a Stratton-Porter novel, as the year's most popular film. In early 1928, Kennedy froze Fred Thomson out of the movie business as FBO signed the premier silent Western star, Tom Mix. That August, using RCA Photophone technology, FBO became the second Hollywood studio to release a feature-length "talkie". Two months later, Kennedy and RCA executive David Sarnoff arranged the merger between FBO and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater circuit that created RKO, one of the major studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. FBO's assets were folded into the new company, and it was dissolved in early 1929.
Business history The R-C years
The company that would become FBO began as Robertson-Cole, an importer, exporter, and motion picture distributor with headquarters in London and New York, founded in 1918 by Englishman Harry F. Robertson and American Rufus S. Cole.Codori (2020), pp. 113–17; Nasaw (2012), pp. 68–69; Miyao (2007), p. 169. Beauchamp (2009, p. 35), among others, misidentifies Cole as British. The company handled American-made trucks, cars, automobile accessories, and Bell & Howell motion picture equipment; its initial film distribution focus was on the Northern European, South Asian, and Latin American markets.Codori (2020), p. 113–14; Nasaw (2012), p. 69. From its U.S. office, R-C Pictures, as it was often branded, started American motion picture distribution late in 1918, purchasing film rights from independent production companies and selling them on to Exhibitors Mutual Distributing, a corporate successor of the Mutual Film studio. In November, R-C contracted to serve as the sole provider to Exhibitors Mutual, and its first acquisitions were released the following month.Slide (2013), p. 3; Miyao (2007), p. 169; Codori (2020), p. 114–15. For its top-of-the-line "product", it purchased the movies of star actor Sessue Hayakawa, whose films were produced by his own company, Haworth Pictures Corporation.Miyao (2007), p. 169; Codori (2020), pp. 115, 117. In a popular star poll taken at the time that encompassed over a hundred actors, Hayakawa placed forty-fourth. In May 1916, five after months the release of his breakout film, The Cheat, a similar poll had ranked him number one. Miyao (2007), p. 3. Other companies also made films expressly for R-C distribution: B.B. Features, Jesse D. Hampton Productions, National Film Corporation, Winsome Stars.Codori (2020), p. 114; Slide (2013), p. 175. To accompany its features, Robertson-Cole also acquired a wide variety of serials and other shorts, from Supreme Comedies with Harry Depp and Teddy Sampson to a biweekly series, On the Borderland of Civilization, filmed by adventurer Martin Johnson. Late in 1919, independent motion picture producer Frank Hall acquired Exhibitors Mutual and integrated it into his new Hallmark Exchanges. In January 1920, Robertson-Cole purchased Hallmark, securing the capacity to directly distribute the films to which it owned rights, including the in-house productions then being planned.Codori (2020), p. 115; Jewell (1982), p. 8.
In March, the inaugural "convention of the branch managers and field supervisors of the Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation" was announced. The company currently boasted a slate of twenty-five movies in theaters around the country, with its top films co-branded "Superior Pictures". See also Codori (2020), p. 116. The first R-C feature productions began to appear, including The Third Woman that same month, directed by Charles Swickard and starring Carlyle Blackwell and Louise Lovely, and The Wonder Man, directed by John G. Adolfi and starring boxer Georges Carpentier, which had a premiere on May 29 and went into general release in July. While the AFI catalog describes The Wonder Man as "the first picture produced by Robertson-Cole" (Jewell , p. 8, uses almost identical language), The Third Woman was clearly released first. Indeed, though AFI lists The Third Woman as an April release, it was both reviewed and listed as a "current picture" in the Exhibitors Herald cover dated March 20—and actually published ten days earlier. The production history of the March 1920 R-C release A Woman Who Understood is unclear. A film from star Bessie Barriscale's own production company had come out as recently as February (The Luck of Geraldine Laird); as AFI notes, Variety referred to A Woman Who Understood as a "'B.B.' feature," and at least one print ad identified it as a "B.B. Picture". Stating that "no other information has been located connecting this to Bessie Barriscale's own company", AFI lists it as an R-C production. A detailed survey of her career from the Women Film Pioneers Project lists it under B.B. Features/B. B. Productions. With its move into production, Robertson-Cole needed its own filmmaking studio: in June, it acquired a lot around fifteen acres (six hectares) in size in Los Angeles's fortuitously named Colegrove district, then adjacent to but soon to be subsumed by Hollywood.Jewell (1982) describes the lot as 13.5 acres (p. 8); Beauchamp (2009) describes it as seventeen acres (pp. 35, 76). Shiel (2012) states that the studio was originally built on thirteen acres (p. 149); elsewhere, he states that, "by the 1920s", Robertson-Cole owned twenty acres in Hollywood (p. 113). The address of the studio (later owned by RKO, Desilu, and now Paramount) was and remains 780 Gower Street. Goodwin (1987), p. 346. For a modern view, see this map—the old FBO facility occupies the western quarter of the Paramount Studios area. For images of the studio's administration building during its FBO days, see Crafton (1997), p. 136; Beauchamp (2009), p. 77. For exterior shoots, the company purchased 460 acres in Santa Monica, to be known as the "R-C Ranch". In September, contracts were signed for the construction on the Colegrove property of an administration building with a massive neoclassical façade and eight stages, each occupying nearly a third of an acre.Shiel (2012), p. 149. The first film to shoot at the facility, while it was still being built, was the independent production Kismet (1920), directed by Louis J. Gasnier.Jewell (1982), p. 8. With the West Coast operation up and running, Hayakawa's production company was absorbed into Robertson-Cole.Miyao (2007), p. 169.
Rufus Cole also entered into a working relationship with Hallmark investor Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future U.S. president John F. Kennedy and then a broker at the New York banking firm of Hayden, Stone. In December, after lengthy negotiations, Kennedy set up his own wholly owned company, Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation of New England, to handle the business's films in an area where he had a controlling interest in a regional theater chain (though it was locked out of Massachusetts by the leading exhibitors).Beauchamp (2009), pp. 33–37; Goodwin (1987), pp. 340–41; Nasaw (2012), pp. 68–71, 73. In February 1921, the movie heralded as Robertson-Cole's first "official" production came out: The Mistress of Shenstone, directed by Henry King and starring Pauline Frederick, a former headliner with Famous Players–Lasky and Goldwyn Pictures.Jewell (1982), p. 8. At the same time, the business was $5 million in debt from the L.A. studio purchase and draining money—banks were reluctant to issue lines of credit to any but the biggest film companies, and R-C was forced to pay interest rates as high as 18 percent to so-called bonus sharks to access working capital. The company's primary investor, the Graham's of London firm, turned to Kennedy to find a buyer, giving him a seat on the R-C board, paying him a monthly adviser's fee, and promising a sizable commission. Though he failed to arrange the sale Graham's was looking for (and his own offer to buy 25 percent of the business was turned down), Kennedy would become deeply involved with the studio in the coming years.Beauchamp (2009), pp. 38–44; Goodwin (1987), pp. 340, 342; Nasaw (2012), pp. 69–70, 73–74; Beauchamp (1998), p. 157.
A new identity