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 founded in 1928 from a merger of two major theater chains, went back in 1929 in the film company RKO Pictures on.

History

Keith, Albee and Procter

The businessmen Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward Franklin Albee II founded in 1885 a common entertainment company that initially only a vaudeville stage in Massachusetts, the Boston Bijou Theatre included. After they had acquired the exclusive rights to the American art projector and films of the Lumière brothers, they opened in 1896 in New York City its first cinema. Others followed in Philadelphia, Boston and other cities in the American East and Midwest. From 1896 the company moved into his films of the previously founded in American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and from 1905 on by the Edison Studios. In June 1906 Keith and Albee joined their company along with the vaudeville chain of Frederick Freeman Proctor.

Orpheum

Martin Beck founded in 1919 in Delaware, the Orpheum Circuit Inc., a company that also operated a number of vaudeville theaters and cinemas, some of which still operate today. Beck led the company only until 1923, but it persisted and grew more and more.

Merger and transition into the RKO

When Keith - Albee and Orpheum banded together on January 28, 1928 Keith - Albee - Orpheum Corporation, so that was one of the most powerful entertainment companies in the United States were among the almost all the major vaudeville theater in the country.

Joseph P. Kennedy bought in May 1928 on one shares the majority of the new company. Together with its investments in the production and distribution companies FBO he sold it in October 1928 on the Radio Corporation of America, which endowed these acquisitions with their sound and in January 1929 as RKO Pictures made ​​into an independent company.

The until then used as a vaudeville theater venues of Keith - Albee and Orpheum Circuit Inc. have all been converted into theaters. The form of entertainment Vaudeville survived only as a supplement program for the feature films shown.