were produced under the label of Gothic Pictures or Gothic Productions. With neither the backing of large corporate interests nor the daily money generator of its own theater chain and far from its London owners, the company faced persistent cash-flow difficulties. The significant financial drain of its reliance on short-term, high-interest loans continued. Kennedy takes command While still at the Hayden, Stone investment firm, Kennedy had boasted to a colleague, "Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them." In 1925, he set out to do so, forming his own group of investors led by wealthy Boston lawyer Guy Currier, Filene's department store owner Louis Kirstein, and Union Stockyards and Armour and Company owner Frederick H. Prince. In August 1925, Kennedy traveled to England with an offer to buy a controlling stake in Film Booking Offices for $1 million. The bid was initially rejected—Graham's had poured $7 million into the company—but in February 1926, FBO's owners decided to take the money. From the studio's New York City headquarters, Kennedy swiftly addressed its perennial cash-flow problems, setting up a new business, the Cinema Credits Corporation, to provide FBO with reliable financing at favorable terms. By March, he was traveling to Hollywood, where one of his first steps was to cut loose the various independent producers resident at the studio. The president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, Will Hays—the industry's future censor in chief—was delighted by the new face on the scene; in his eyes, Kennedy signified both a desirable image for the film trade and Wall Street's faith in its prospects. As renowned journalist Terry Ramsaye wrote in Photoplay the following year, Hays had been seeking "to endow the febrile motion picture industry with an atmosphere of Americanism and substantiality. Kennedy is a valuable personality from this point of view. He is exceedingly American" (historian Cari Beauchamp explains the connotation: "not Jewish", in contrast to most of the studio heads). Ramsaye went on to celebrate Kennedy's "background of lofty and conservative financial connections, an atmosphere of much home and family life and all those fireside virtues of which the public never hears in the current news from Hollywood." Studio chief Fineman departed around the time of Kennedy's purchase to work at the larger First National Pictures. The new owner appointed Edwin King to replace him, but