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American film executive W. Ray Johnston was a former newspaper reporter who entered the motion-picture business as secretary to the president of the Thanhouser Film Corporation, Charles Hite. Johnston married Hite's sister Violet in 1914, the same year he was named treasurer of the Syndicate Film Corporation, a subsidiary set up to handle the Thanhouser serial The Million Dollar Mystery (1914). The following year, Johnston founded the Arrow Film Corp. with Thanhouser stockholder W. E. Shallenberger, which offered a line-up that included the Who's Guilty series of crime dramas. By the late 1910s, Arrow was mainly a distributor. An astute businessman if not exactly a visionary filmmaker, Johnston founded Rayart in 1924, a company thoroughly geared toward the independent states rights market. Three years later, Johnston's company was earning a reported $1, 250,000 from its production of low-budget westerns and action melodramas. Rayart was merged with a couple of other minor companies to form Monogram in 1931, with Johnston staying on as president and Trem Carr as head of production. Johnston left the company, now Republic Pictures, in 1936 after a falling out with chairman Herbert I. Yates and immediately organized a second Monogram. The new organization bearing that name became well known for its magnificent futuristic logo, less so for its seemingly endless string of mostly rather static crime dramas. Johnston was still at the helm by 1952 when in an effort to upgrade its image, Monogram became Allied Artists.