took a personal hand in guiding the company creatively as well as financially. His brand, "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents", would proceed to appear on over a hundred films. Kennedy soon brought stability to FBO, making it one of the most reliably profitable outfits in the minor leagues of the Hollywood studio system. The focus was on films with Main Street appeal and minimal costs. "We are trying", he declared, "to be the Woolworth and Ford of the motion picture industry rather than the Tiffany." Westerns remained the studio's backbone, along with various action pictures and romantic scenarios; as Kennedy put it, "Melodrama is our meat." Gene Stratton-Porter, then, was the gravy: according to the 1926 Exhibitors Herald survey, The Keeper of the Bees, for which shooting was completed while the novel was still being serialized in McCall's, was the number one picture in the entire country that year. The remainder of FBO's top five comprised, once again, three Fred Thomson pictures, along with another Stratton-Porter adaptation. During this period, the average production cost of FBO features was around $50,000, and few were budgeted at anything more than $75,000. By comparison, in 1927–28 the average cost at Fox was $190,000; at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, $275,000. In a broad economization move, in 1927, FBO ended the long-term contracts with writers that were an industry standard, shifting story assignments to a freelance basis. One major expense Kennedy didn't spare: with the powerful United Artists and Paramount studios circling Fred Thomson, Kennedy kept him at FBO for $15,000 a week (assigning the contract to a newly created corporation, Fred Thomson Productions, "for tax purposes"). The actor now had the second-highest straight salary in the entire industry, surpassed only by Tom Mix again, whose new arrangement with Fox paid $17,500. Thomson's were among those few FBO films budgeted at or above $75,000, but they could be relied on to gross in the quarter-million-dollar range. And Kennedy found an angle to make himself even more money. Under the new contract, Kennedy struck a deal in early 1927 with Paramount for the major studio to produce and distribute a series of four Thomson "super westerns". Kennedy participated in the films' financing, recouping his stake plus $100,000 in profits each; Paramount covered Thomson's weekly salary; and the actor's production unit stayed on the FBO lot. Given the lag time between production and exhibition, of the four Thomson features that reached