Here’s fifteen minutes of different logos–both opening and closing–of RKO movies. I’m sure you’ll be tempted after a few minutes to either turn it off  or scrub through them, but I urge you to set aside fifteen minutes and stare, glassy-eyed, at the screen. Something odd happens as they progress–they begin to tell a story. I don’t know what exactly the story is, but it feels like you’re on some kind of cultural journey through the decades. We see the early radio tower that sits on top of the universe logo, which speaks to the late 1920s/early 1930s fascination with the nascent medium; the later art deco versions; robust wartime logos (really its the music that makes it wartime fodder, but so what?) and technicolor westerns which are RKO mid-century stuff. There’s also the weird RKO-Pathe rooster crowing logo and a bunch of Italian RKO logos turn up as well. There was always a slightly fringy vibe to RKO which endeared it to me from early on. The movies weren’t visually as shiny as MGM or as sleek as Paramount but the filmmaking was more adventurous on most levels–Welles, Val Lewton, Howard Hawks, George Stevens, Astaire/Rogers all did superb work at the studio and I’ve often had the feeling that filmmakers were left alone a bit more than at other studios. Film noir was virtually invented at the studio. The fringe factor took over in the late 40s when Howard Hughes bought (and destroyed) the place but somehow the name struggled on right though a few years ago. In the 1990s, the studio (not the physical plant which was long gone but the rights to the movies) was bought by the actress and heiress Dina Merrill and her sociapath husband Ted Hartley. They embarked on a thwarted mission to hire independent filmmakers–in other words guys who came cheap–to update old RKO titles and make new movies out of them. I was one of those lucky filmmakers. I wrote a new version of a Rosalind Russell movie from the late 1940s called ‘The Velvet Touch’.There was never any hope of it being made–the entire venture of buying the studio was clearly a gift from Dina to her new husband. She was a lovely woman. Ted Hartley was a dolt, a liar and a thief. Their marriage was apparently a happy one. He got the better of that deal.