Rayart Pictures

Rayart Pictures was one of the early film production and distribution companies, independent from the major Hollywood studios in the United States, during the later silent film era from the mid-to-late 1920s and into the sound era in 1929 and 1930.

Rayart was established by W. Ray Johnston in 1924, after whom the company was named. It was a producer and distributor of low-budget films for smaller theaters,^[1] and like the other so-called Poverty Row studios,^[2] was based in a small plot off Sunset Strip, by Gower Street.^[3]

In 1929 Rayart entered the new field of sound pictures, releasing the first feature-length talking western Overland Bound, featuring silent stars Leo Maloney and Allene Ray. Its success prompted Ray Johnston to establish a subsidiary, Raytone Talking Pictures, Inc.,^[4] reflecting the new sound-film technology (like Fox Film's Movietone). Raytone scored an early coup by acquiring some of Walt Disney's now obsolete silent shorts (the Alice Comedies) and reissuing them with synchronized music and sound effects.

Johnston, noting the popularity of movie musicals, rented the Metropolitan studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey and filmed "several talking shorts every week".^[5] One of them, Campus Sweetheart, was filmed in July 1929 and featured the young Ginger Rogers (billed fifth). Several of the Raytone shorts, among them Pep and Personality, Jazzmania, and College Pep, featured Tommy Christian and His Palisades Orchestra; Christian was the house bandleader at the Palisades amusement park ballroom in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.^[6] Johnston expanded one of the Tommy Christian shorts into a seven-reel feature, Howdy Broadway, filmed in September 1929. Christian, appearing as himself, played a college bandleader hoping for success on Broadway. "The entire budget likely did not exceed the cost of Bessie Love's sequined top hat in Broadway Melody", smirked historian Richard Barrios, "and this type of musical-at-any-cost madness shows how vigorous the public's yen for backstage films was perceived to be."^[7]

Johnston merged Rayart and Raytone into a new company, Continental Pictures, then Syndicate Pictures, and finally (in March 1931) Monogram Pictures.^[8] Johnston was president, with his Rayart colleague Trem Carr as vice president. With Johnston at the helm, Monogram became a prolific producer of low-budget Hollywood features. Johnston was the studio's president until 1945, when he became chairman of the board; he served in that capacity for Monogram and its successor Allied Artists until 1963.^[9]