"Kennedy has no previous experience in show business" was an often repeated phrase in the coverage of his purchase, but that was hardly the case. Kennedy had been methodically planning his move for six years. As he told a fellow broker, "Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them." He would come very close to doing just that, the only man in the history of Hollywood to run three studios at the same time. He also helped foment the talkie revolution and pioneered a model of corporate control and vertical integration that the entertainment industry takes for granted today. In the process, he wiped out several studios, slashed hundreds of jobs, and devastated the careers of two of Hollywood's biggest stars, one of whom, Gloria Swanson, was also his mistress."
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2002/04/joekennedy200204
RKO was consolidated by Joe and his buddy General Sarnoff in order to push the talkies we're told...
"Yet back in October of 1927, when Al Jolson announced from the screen, "You ain't heard nothing yet," there were two men besides the Warner brothers who knew instantly that he was right, and that there was a potential for huge profit. That same month, at the Oyster Bar in New York's Grand Central Terminal, Joe Kennedy met with David Sarnoff, the 36-year-old head of the Radio Corporation of America, who had also founded the first nationwide radio network, the National Broadcasting Company, the year before. Kennedy had a studio; Sarnoff had the technical equipment to add sound. They knew they needed more components to realize their grand vision of an entertainment conglomerate that would merge these technologies, but they were off to a great start. Telling no one else, they put their heads together and came up with a plan."
ibid.
http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/wp-con ... arnoff.jpg
http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/ ... arnoff.pdf
...they were rivals of ole T. Keith Glennan of course. T. Keith was pushing the talkies through Western Electric and AT&T...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Keith_Glennan
According to the narrative crafty Joe also sent poor Gloria's royal bullshit artist of a husband back to Paris to run Pathé Studios...
"Kennedy's next order of business was to have Gloria's husband, Henri, sent back to Paris as head of Pathé Studios in Europe, for in addition to his other roles Kennedy was now a "special adviser" to Pathé at $2,000 a week plus stock options; within weeks he was running the whole show. No man had ever controlled two studios at the same time, but his competitors seem not to have looked upon the situation with suspicion."
ibid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_de_La_Falaise
So when Joe was finished hustlin' poor Gloria...
"Swanson's pre-Kennedy accountant soon reported that, from the records he could get his hands on, it looked like everything—the bungalow Kennedy had built for her at Pathé, the mink coat he had "given" her, along with all the expenses of Queen Kelly—had been billed to Gloria Productions and were now debts, totaling upwards of a million dollars, for which she was solely responsible."
ibid.
...he could sell Pathé to his old partner General Sarnoff we're told...
"Six months after he left Swanson holding the bag, Kennedy, who by this time owned a substantial amount of Pathé's preferred stock, sold that studio to RKO for almost $5 million. Thus ended what he referred to as "my stay in the business." Once again his timing was perfect. He had sold his stock-market holdings before the crash in 1929, and he now got out of the movie business just before the Depression caught up to Hollywood. Over the next few years box-office receipts dropped by almost 50 percent. Kennedy's vision that only a few major studios would survive proved absolutely correct—picture companies that numbered in the hundreds at the time he had entered the business could now be counted on two hands. At his own lecture at Harvard four years earlier, Kennedy had predicted that the industry was "on the eve now of big consolidations." No one had dreamed that Kennedy was planning on doing most of the consolidating himself."
ibid.
Ten years later Pathé would donate three thousand miles of news reels to Nelson's mommy's institute of the muses of course...
https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdf ... 7.pdf?2010
I'm sure the general that ran the moma for the first ten years of its existence really appreciated the gift...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anson_Goodyear
Here's a newsreel of Joe's protégé and booze business partner, James Roosevelt, going to work for Samuel Goldwyn...
full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOP8FL_mC7o
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Roosevelt
...and here's another newsreel announcing the death of Joe's son, Bobby.
The solemn chap making the announcement is Kennedy aide Frank Mankiewicz...
full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujPidSx7Vus
Frank's dad, Herman, was the screenwriter for Citizen Kane we're told. Citizen Kane was released by RKO of course...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_J._Mankiewicz
