theaters in 1927, three were FBO releases. The studio put out fifty-one features in total that year; for the twelve-month period ending November 15, theater owners judged FBO's top three films to all be Gene Stratton-Porter adaptations, with two Thomson oaters following. Sound enters the picture The advent of sound film would drastically alter the studio's course: Negotiations that began in late 1927 with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) on a deal for sound conversion led to the January 1928 announcement that RCA, parent company General Electric, and allied shareholder Westinghouse had purchased a major interest in FBO. Four months later, as part of a strategy conceived with RCA general manager David Sarnoff, Kennedy and associated investors acquired control of Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO), a vaudeville exhibition chain owning approximately one hundred theaters across the United States, affiliated with many more, and with two small studios under its control: Pathé Exchange and Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC), Cecil B. DeMille's former boutique outlet. FBO's The Perfect Crime, starring Clive Brook and Irene Rich, opened on August 4, 1928, at the Rivoli movie palace in Manhattan's Theater District. The first film directed by admired cinematographer Bert Glennon, it was also the first feature-length "talkie" to appear from a studio other than Warner Bros. since the epochal premiere of Warners' The Jazz Singer ten months before. The Perfect Crime had been shot silently in anticipation of a silent release. Using the RCA Photophone sound-on-film system, dialogue and "mystery sound effects" were dubbed in afterward. Savaging it as a "jabberwocky of inane incidents", the New York Times review concluded, "What it is all about can be called only an open question. A guess at the solution, however, would be that FBO had a mystery story, and in an effort to keep up with the times had synchronized it.... The synchronization is faulty in many, many places, and several vocal selections are added in curious out-of-the-way scenes." A trade paper report described the studio's plans to add "synchronized music, sound effects and dialogue" to five other silently shot films. To date, FBO's experiments with sound had all been funded by RCA; on August 22, as Kennedy was crossing the Atlantic for a European vacation, Variety announced that he had finally signed a formal licensing agreement to pay for his studio's use of Photophone recording. While Kennedy traveled, RCA launched a bid to acquire control of and