L-KO Motion Picture Company
American film production company 1914–1919
The L-KO Motion Picture Company, also known as the L-KO Kompany, was an American motion picture company founded by Henry Lehrman. It produced silent one-, two- and very occasionally three-reel comedy shorts between 1914 and 1919, released by Universal Pictures. The initials L-KO stand for "Lehrman—Knock Out".
History
By the spring of 1914, Henry "Pathé" Lehrman had directed several important Keystone Cops comedies including The Bangville Police (1913) and Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), Charlie Chaplin's debut. Wooed away from Mack Sennett by producer Fred J. Balshofer, Lehrman left Keystone, along with star performer Ford Sterling, to found Sterling Comedies under the umbrella of the Universal Film and Manufacturing Co., later Universal Pictures. After a relatively short time, Lehrman was fired from Sterling Comedies and founded L-KO as a separate unit within Universal.
L-KO's first comedy star was veteran English comic Billie Ritchie, who had played the role of the drunk in Fred Karno's stage production A Night in the English Music Hall before Chaplin did. Ritchie made his film debut in the first L-KO production, Love and Surgery, released October 25, 1914. Also making their first films in this venture were Gertrude Selby, a comedian who became the main female foil in L-KO comedies, and Fatty Voss, L-KO's answer to Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Louise Orth, who had appeared in some Biograph comedies and would go on to appear in many L-KO's, was also aboard for the first release.
The public source identifies “L-KO Motion Picture Company” as american film production company 1914–1919. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around L-KO, Motion and Picture.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3205873. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 1919 and 1913.
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This entry incorporates text from “L-KO Motion Picture Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.