combine the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain with FBO, as talks began between Sarnoff and the lead investment firm behind KAO. After his return in late September, Kennedy ultimately agreed to the plan, which would involve his divestiture from both businesses. On October 23, 1928, RCA announced it was merging Film Booking Offices and Keith-Albee-Orpheum to form the new motion picture business Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), with Sarnoff as chairman. Kennedy, who retained Pathé and the PDC assets it had absorbed, made more than $4 million in profit from converting and selling off his stock in the deal. Joseph I. Schnitzer, ranking FBO vice-president, was elevated to president of the new company's production arm, replacing Kennedy. William LeBaron, the last FBO production chief, retained his position after the merger, but the new studio, dedicated to full sound production, cut ties with FBO's roster of silent screen performers. In its final year of operation, of FBO's top five box office films according to theater owners, three were again Gene Stratton-Porter adaptations, including The Keeper of the Bees, first released in October 1925 and making its fourth appearance in the annual balloting; the others were the Austrian import Moon of Israel and The Great Mail Robbery. During the transitional period, the first RKO feature release, Syncopation in March 1929, was packaged to exhibitors with two FBO low-budget "programmers". Movies that Film Booking Offices had either produced or arranged to distribute were released under the FBO banner through the end of the year. The last official FBO production to reach American theaters was Pals of the Prairie, directed by Louis King and starring Buzz Barton and Frank Rice, released July 7, 1929. Cinematic legacy A large majority of FBO/Robertson-Cole pictures, produced during the silent era and the transitional period of the conversion to sound cinema, are considered to be lost films, with no copies known to exist. Much of FBO's cinematic legacy thus endures only in still images, other publicity materials, and written accounts. All told, just 30 percent of American silent feature films have been preserved (25 percent more or less complete, plus another 5 percent in incomplete versions). The overall survival rate of features produced by R-C/FBO is similar: of 449 movies identified by the National Film Preservation Board as R-C/FBO productions, 125 are known to survive in some form—28 percent, though with only two (0.4 percent) in a legacy studio archive. The losses, moreover, were