Gasped Hollywood's Daily Variety: "The most amazing coup in the history of the film business." The cause of Variety's amazement was a large and lightning-quick profit turned for General Teleradio, Inc. by its canny President Thomas F. O'Neil.
Groundwork for the coup was laid six months ago, when Teleradio (subsidiary of General Tire & Rubber Co.) paid Industrialist Howard Hughes $25 million for RKO Radio Pictures and RKO's well-stocked film library (TIME, Aug. 1, 1955). In December, O'Neil got back more than half the investment by selling television and foreign rights on 740 feature-length movies, almost all RKO owns, and...
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