Keith Albee Orpheum
The Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation was the owner of a chain of vaudeville theaters and cinemas in the United States . The company, which was created in 1928 from the merger of two large theater chains, was merged into the film company RKO Pictures in 1929 .
history
Keith, Albee and Procter
Businessmen Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II founded a joint entertainment company in 1885, which initially comprised only one vaudeville stage in Massachusetts , the Boston Bijou Theater . After they had acquired the American exclusive rights to the projection technology and the films of the Lumière brothers , they opened their first movie theater in New York City in 1896 . More followed in Philadelphia , Boston, and other cities in the American East and Midwest . From 1896 on, the company obtained its films from the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, founded the previous year, and from 1905 on from Edison Studios . In June 1906 Keith and Albee merged their company with Frederick Freeman Proctor's vaudeville chain .
Orpheum
Martin Beck founded in 1919 Delaware the Orpheum Circuit Inc., a company that also ran a series of vaudeville theaters and cinemas, some of which still operate. Beck only managed the company until 1923, but it continued and continued to grow.
Merger and transition to the RKO
When Keith-Albee and Orpheum merged on January 28, 1928 to form the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation , it became one of the most powerful entertainment companies in the United States, which owned almost all of the country's major vaudeville theaters.
Joseph P. Kennedy bought a majority of the shares in the new company in May 1928. Together with his shares in the production and distribution company FBO , he sold them on in October 1928 to the Radio Corporation of America , which equipped these acquisitions with its audio technology and made it an independent company in January 1929 as RKO Pictures .
The venues of Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuit Inc., which were still used as vaudeville theaters, were all converted into cinemas. The entertainment form Vaudeville survived here only as a supplementary program to the films shown.
literature
- Arthur Frank Wertheim: Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers , Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, ISBN 1403968268