The Lives of Robert Ryan. J.R. Jones

       six

      Caught

      The Shrine Auditorium may have been a temple of self-congratulation on Oscar night, but outside its walls the movie business was in serious trouble. Ticket sales had boomed after the war when soldiers were streaming home, but in 1947 domestic box office revenue plummeted as people like the Ryans started families and moved into the suburbs. Britain and other countries, hoping to revive their own war-ravaged film industries, levied tariffs on US imports, diminishing the once-lucrative European market. And the federal government renewed its antitrust campaign against the major film studios, pressuring them to sell their theater chains. If that happened, the entire business model for the studio system would collapse.¹

      Dore Schary had come to RKO promising to cut costs, and the board of directors reaffirmed its confidence in him after the HUAC hearings. But in his first year as production chief, the studio’s annual profit had plunged from $12 million to $5 million. In February 1948 the trade papers reported that Floyd Odlum, RKO’s chairman and majority stockholder since 1936, would sell his controlling interest in the studio to Howard Hughes, the aviation giant and mercurial moviemaker who had produced such landmark pictures as Hell’s Angels (1930) and Scarface (1932).

      In early May, Ryan made a quick trip to New York for the Berlin Express premiere, and by the time he returned to the West Coast, Hughes had struck a deal with Odlum, purchasing 24 percent of RKO for the grand sum of $8.8 million — then the largest cash transaction in the history of the movie business. The announcement sent shock waves through the studio: Hughes had a reputation as a controlling and capricious moviemaker. For years his pet project had been The Outlaw, a sexually suggestive western starring Jane Russell and her thirty-eight-inch bust; shot over a maddening nine months in 1940 and 1941, the picture had been held up first by the Production Code Administration and then by various state censorship boards, finally winning wide release in 1946. Hughes’s latest infatuation was starlet Faith Domergue, and many thought he was buying RKO in order to distribute Vendetta, the film he had been constructing around her to the tune of $2 million.