Jewell co-authored the excellent RKO Story years ago but thankfully came back with this entertaining history, which goes from the beginning of the studio until the end of the George Schaefer regime in the 1940s - admittedly frustrating, since I was hoping to go through until the end (which only would have been another decade) but presumably volume two is on its way.
RKO was always an odd kind of studio - one of the eight majors, with big backing (RCA, Joseph Kennedy), impressive resources... but it always seemed in a permanent state of crisis, and its eventual death mustn't have been that surprising in the late 1950s. Many reasons for this are raised here, chief of which seems to be management instability - the people in charge kept changing; they had David O. Selznick for a time and could have kept him (and then gotten him back) but foolishly didn't; ditto Pando Berman. (Later they had Charles Koerner who died.)
George Schaefer has a high reputation because he backed Citizen Kane but here comes across as a bit of a stubborn idiot who didn't suit his job and cost the studio millions. They also displayed a bewildering inability to produce stars, letting talents like Joan Fontaine, Lucille Ball and Joel McCrea through their fingers, and being unable to hold onto Astaire and Rogers or Kate Hepburn, and even Orson Welles (who surely could have been used as an actor more).
Still whenever RKO looked weak they manged to pull a rabbit out of the hat: King Kong, Astaire-Rogers, Little Women, Ginger Rogers vehicles, Garson Kanin, Val Lewton, Gunga Din, The Saint. Jewel covers most of this, with particular looks at Astaire-Rogers, Hepburn, Gunga Din, Kong, Welles' films and some other key movies such as Bachelor Mother.
Well written, superbly researched, although it did take me a while to wrap my head around all the non famous crucial executives who appear in it because there are so many. Studios really do work better when they are benign dictatorships and RKO's problem is that it wasn't - or had crap dictators.
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