7
The Comedy Sensation of the Screen World
THE END OF THE COMIQUE SERIES, just four entries into a twenty-two-picture commitment, was not yet official. In December 1919, Roscoe Arbuckle traveled to New York to scout material for the new year.
“I have all the money I want,” he told Variety, “and at the conclusion of my present contract, I will stop making pictures myself, but may be interested in having others appear before the camera just to keep them occupied. While I am east, I am having Buster Keaton make a picture on his own. Let ’em all have a chance. I don’t want to be hoggish.”
A week later, the paper reported in front-page news that Arbuckle had acquired the screen rights to Edmund Day’s 1907 melodrama The Round-up with an eye toward playing Sheriff “Slim” Hoover, a role popularized on Broadway by Maclyn Arbuckle, a rotund actor who was of no relation. The significance of the development was that the play wasn’t a comedy, and that any film version would by necessity be a feature, not a short. “Arbuckle is ambitious to do more legitimate things before the camera. He has grown tired of confining his acting to slapstick and firmly believes he is capable of finer work.”
Meanwhile, the picture Arbuckle was having Keaton make “on his own” was slowly taking shape. The loosely worked-out story was of Buster’s own devising, and the crew would be Roscoe’s own, otherwise on hiatus while the star was out of town. But Keaton wasn’t ready to start just yet, and he waited until Arbuckle’s return to select a leading lady. One of the girls they jointly interviewed was Bartine Burkett, a twenty-one-year-old actress working for Eddie Cline as one of the Fox Sunshine Comedy Girls. A native of Robeline, Louisiana, she had been in pictures since 1916 and met Lou Anger’s principal qualification for the job in that she came cheap.
“The first thing Roscoe said was, ‘We’re going to lunch before we interview you. Wanna go with us?’ Without hesitation, I said, ‘I’d love to.’ Hollywood actresses were known then, as now, to be the hungriest women in the world. I remember having lots of fun with those two at lunch, and when we were through and walked back to the studio, Mr. Arbuckle casually said, ‘Goodbye—I guess you’ll do as Buster’s first leading lady.’ Buster said nothing, but took me by the arm and piloted me to their studio office, had me go in first, then he came in and carefully closed and locked the door. I was puzzled and surprised by this, but, strangely, not in the least disturbed or frightened. It seemed the longer I knew Buster, the more I understood that no one could ever have, for a moment, been frightened by him in any way. He looked at me and asked, ‘Do you like juggling?’ I said, ‘Uh huh,’ and he took some balls out of a drawer and entertained me with the best juggling act I’ve ever seen.”
Over the holidays, Arbuckle played host to Adolph Zukor, who was paying one of his occasional visits to the Famous Players studio in Hollywood. Since their earliest days on Forty-Eighth Street, Keaton and Arbuckle had relieved the stress of grinding out gags by resorting to the time-honored device of the practical joke. A whopping good prank engaged the mind, made enemies, imperiled life and limb. Yet the cruelest of these tended to be the most banal, such as the withdrawn chair or the hot foot. The main requirement for a joke around the Comique studio was that it had to be funny and that, ideally, it rose to the level of artistry. “Our practical jokes were of the sort the victims could laugh at with us later on,” Buster said proudly. “They were quite ingenious.”
A good example of the black art as practiced by Keaton and Arbuckle was the treatment accorded the visiting Zukor, who, while not exactly Arbuckle’s employer, was nevertheless his customer. Zukor, they reasoned, must have a pretty good sense of humor if he distributed their pictures, so they created an elaborate scenario. Roscoe had leased a Tudor-style mansion in the West Adams district, a $100,000 showplace known as the Randolph Huntington Miner residence, and there he decided to throw a formal dinner party in the guest’s honor. And since Zukor had never personally met Buster, it was he who would serve that night as Roscoe’s butler. (“We relied,” said Keaton, “on the theory that no one looks at the butler.”) A guest list was assembled: Sid Grauman, a well-known practical joker whose new Million Dollar Theatre played the Paramount and Artcraft pictures produced by Famous-Lasky, Viola Dana, Alice Lake, Bebe Daniels, and Anna Q. Nilsson. All were in on the joke, and the women were coached ahead of time so as to avoid giving it away.
Keaton began by serving the shrimp cocktail to the men, boorishly ignoring the ladies and earning a loud and vulgar rebuke from the master. Back in the kitchen, he made an ungodly racket preparing to serve the first course while Roscoe was left to explain to his guests at the dining table all about the “servant problem.” What happened next appeared in Variety: “Buster made his first entrance with a huge soup tureen, the contents of which he promptly upset. Then he dropped a huge turkey on the floor, leaned over to pick it up when the door leading to the kitchen struck him in the rear and projected him on top of the fowl. At this juncture, Arbuckle seized a bottle of wine and whammed Keaton over the bean, knocking him unconscious.”
Dragged into the kitchen, Keaton snuck up the back stairs, changed his clothes, and presented himself at the front door as a late arrival. Seated next to Kansas City exhibitor Frank Newman, it dawned on them what had happened, and Grauman was the first to lose his composure. Zukor didn’t smile but said evenly, “Very clever boys, very clever!”
It is significant that in the three years Joseph Schenck produced the Norma Talmadge and Fatty Arbuckle pictures, he kept his day job as general booking manager for the Loew vaudeville circuit, a position he had held since its inception. Over time, his portfolio grew to include his sister-in-law Constance Talmadge’s movies, a string of Mutt and Jeff cartoons, and Special Films, Inc., a kind of repository for projects that didn’t fit into any of the other categories. Schenck, in partnership with his brother, also retained his interest in Palisades Park. Combined, his personal earnings for the year 1919 were estimated at between $1.5 million and $2 million. All this, of course, took a toll on his involvement with the Loew organization, and most of his responsibilities had fallen to his lieutenant, a man named Jake Lubin. It was at Loew’s advice—and out of fairness to Lubin—that Schenck finally announced his retirement from the Loew circuit in order to give more and better attention to his picture interests. He would, he said, locate an office of his own around Times Square.
Marcus Loew was moving into production as well, and while he was still amassing theaters, he purchased Metro Pictures Corporation, now the home studio of Alice Lake, Viola Dana, Bert Lytell, and Nazimova, for a price in the range of $3 million. Metro had no comedy stars, so when Schenck told Loew that Roscoe Arbuckle was moving into features and that he was going to start making two-reelers with Buster Keaton, Loew instantly said, “We’ll contract for him.” And suddenly, the first film Keaton was to make on his own took on an unexpected urgency. Filming of The High Sign got under way the week of January 12, 1920, but since two other companies were already sharing the Lehrman studio in Arbuckle’s absence, Keaton and his crew were forced out onto location, principally along the Venice oceanfront and, to make his entrance, Redondo Beach, where, appropriately, he was thrown off a passing train. The intertitle:
Our Hero came from Nowhere—
he wasn’t going Anywhere
and got kicked off
Somewhere.
Buster helps himself to a paper, opening it to find it is one increasingly larger sheet of unruly newsprint. But in it he sees a want ad for a boy to run a shooting gallery. (“Must be expert shot to attract crowd.”) To sharpen his aim, he lifts a gun from a distracted cop, replacing it with a banana, and wanders off to the beach for some target practice. There, in a good-luck cameo, he encounters Al St. John, who witnesses some fancy shooting before predictably becoming a target himself. Satisfied, Buster applies for the job, but the business is really a front for a gang of Black Handers called the Blinking Buzzards. And, presently, he finds himself recruited as both bodyguard and assassin of their current extortion target, the town miser August Nickelnurser. Throughout it all, the gang members give each other the high sign—hands crossed at the nose, fingers outstretched to symbolize the wingspread of a bird.
Ingram B. “Cupid” Pickett, Keaton, and Bartine Burkett in The High Sign, Buster’s first film as star as well as director.
Keaton seemed to enjoy the intricate process of making the movie, ensuring that each gag, no matter how outlandish, served the logical development of the story. “Even at this time,” he later explained, “the moving picture comedy was getting to be more legitimate, logical, and consistent, and the people were more human and less like the heroes of the comic strips. They were beginning to put things on the screen because they arose from the situation, as in stage plays, and not because they were supposed to be independently funny or because certain properties that could be used happened to be at hand.”
Bartine Burkett would remember a man clearly tickled by what he was capturing. “I’ve never known anyone to laugh more than he,” she wrote. “In fact, when we were shooting, he spoiled many a scene by cracking up with laughter.”
Keaton assumed a brotherly air with her, collecting her each morning at her family home, and taking her to the weekly dances at the Hollywood Hotel, where he would diligently fill her dance card, cajoling the reluctant, and then disappear.
“He was always expected up in Viola Dana’s apartment….I’m sure they did a bit of drinking, and I would not see Buster again until right on the dot of eleven thirty—he would appear and announce that it was time for me to go home—my family having told him in no uncertain terms that I must be home before midnight….I could always smell liquor on his breath, but this never posed a problem, for he seemed to always have himself well in hand.”
The infatuation between Vi Dana and Buster had run its course, and she was by then seriously involved with daredevil stunt pilot Ormer Locklear—so much so that Locklear had to deny rumors in the press that the actress and he were secretly married. Bartine remembered “long lapses between working dates” reflecting the casual way in which the company worked. Once, while trapped shooting The Round-up on location at Lone Pine, Arbuckle sent for prints of his Comique comedies, and Keaton, Lou Anger, Jean Havez, and cameraman Elgin Lessley decided to take the week off and deliver them personally.
“They had a shot,” Buster remembered, “and Arbuckle says, ‘Put an Indian makeup on Keaton and let me shoot him.’ George Melford, the director, says ‘All right.’ ”
Keaton did the shot expertly, and collected a $5 stunt check for his trouble. Then he and the others went quail hunting for the balance of the week.
On the days Bartine did work, Keaton would chauffeur her between Hollywood and Culver City, tossing off greetings to the cars and pedestrians headed in the opposite direction.
“His timing was fantastic!” she recalled. “We would be deep in conversation, but when someone approached and passed us, either on foot or in some vehicle, he would interrupt, bow ceremoniously, and inquire of this person the state of his health. Where was his wife today? How many children did he now have in school? Whatever happened to that one who was expelled? All that kind of thing, without ever repeating himself. I would sit there literally doubled up with laughter.”
But as work progressed on The High Sign, Keaton grew increasingly convinced the film was no good. Never before had he directed without Arbuckle present. There were, of course, others to bounce ideas off, but there wasn’t the deep well of experience that came from having worked both sides of the camera as Roscoe had. It was he, after all, who had taught Buster picture technique, and Keaton, at one point, may have asked him to step in, for Bartine could remember shooting a scene in a flooded basement that was actually directed by Arbuckle. It was, however, Keaton’s hand as a director that stayed with her. He was, she said, “very good because he had a sense of comedy. He knew what he was doing about it, and…just by telling me what to do and how to do it in his own way, he was always sort of different. His direction was not anything like any I had had.”
When the picture was finished, Keaton wanted it shelved. Lou Anger, who had $12,000 of the company’s money tied up in it, at least wanted to see how it would play in front of an audience. They took it out, but Keaton already knew he needed a stronger debut to put the new series over. One problem was particularly vexing. Throughout the picture, the Buzzards’ high sign had been used to punctuate gags and goose the laughs. So Keaton pulled one on the audience: The banana he plants on the cop finds its way into the hands of a Buzzard, who eats it and drops the peel on the sidewalk. Buster rounds the corner, giving every indication he’s going to slip on it, but then he steps right past it instead and gives the high sign as he disappears from the frame. In preview, the gag fell flat. “Not a titter,” he said in a 1954 talk with author Paul Gallico, “and nobody can figure out why. Finally, I get the idea and we go back and shoot the scene over again. We do it the same, only this time, after I walk over the peel and into the camera, giving the high sign, the camera follows me and I slip on another banana peel that I haven’t seen and down I go. Yaks! The audience wants his comic to be human, not clever.”
The first motion picture to star Buster Keaton reached the screen as a feature, not a short, and brought with it a complicated history. When Bronson Howard’s The Henrietta first appeared in 1887, it was widely hailed as the playwright’s masterpiece, a timely satire about “the American passion for speculation, the money madness that was dividing families.” It proved so popular it was retooled for modern tastes in 1913 by Winchell Smith, author of Brewster’s Millions, and Victor Mapes. Inelegantly titled The New Henrietta, the play featured Howard’s original star, William H. Crane, once more in the role of Wall Street banker Nicholas Van Alstyne, and Douglas Fairbanks as his feckless son, Bertie. Two years later, Fairbanks starred in a film adaptation called The Lamb, but it bore only a passing resemblance to the play, and Fairbanks embraced the idea of faithfully remaking it with the original stage cast in 1919. Now in charge of his own studio, Fairbanks brought Winchell Smith out from New York to oversee the film and engaged scenarist June Mathis to write the screenplay. Pulling the Henrietta cast together took longer than expected, and the actor’s interest began to wane. He moved on to The Mollycoddle, an action picture more in keeping with his emerging screen image, and in March 1920, Marcus Loew snapped up Smith, Mathis, Crane, and The New Henrietta as a package. And with Doug Fairbanks out of the picture, it made perfect sense to drop the studio’s new comedy star into the plum role of Bertie the Lamb.
According to one report, Buster Keaton was still tinkering with The High Sign in Culver City when The New Henrietta began filming on March 23 at the Metro studios in Hollywood. At around the same time, word leaked out that Roscoe Arbuckle had renegotiated his deals with Joe Schenck and Adolph Zukor and would be limiting his future output to five-reel features.
“I’ll do Brewster’s Millions and The Traveling Salesman,” Arbuckle said, “instead of the two-reelers which take me twenty-four hours a day to make—and I can’t sleep nights when I’m making one.”
Over the next month, the elements of Keaton’s production team were put into place. Eddie Cline was hired away from Fox to direct (or, more accurately, co-direct), Jean Havez was retained to write the scripts (such as they were), and Metro was getting the old Lone Star studio at Cahuenga and Romaine Streets into shape for Keaton’s exclusive use, clearing it of old sets. In charge of the operation would again be Lou Anger.
Keaton, as Bertie Van Alstyne, unwittingly heads off a raid on the slumping Henrietta Mine stock in The Saphead (1920).
Across the street, Keaton had the run of the Metro lot, where his pal Viola Dana was making a picture called The Chorus Girl’s Romance. They posed for stills together, clowning, she down on the ground, an alarmed look on her face, Buster casually “applying cave man tactics” with his right foot squarely on her neck. They were both Metro stars now, in the social swim that stretched from Venice to downtown Los Angeles, Vi with Lieutenant Locklear, Buster living on West Adams with Roscoe and Minta Arbuckle and occasionally escorting Alice Lake. A typical night at the Palm Court of the Alexandria Hotel placed them among the young royals of Hollywood—Charlie Chaplin with actress Florence Deshon, Lew Cody with Bebe Daniels, Blanche Sweet with director Marshall Neilan, Dagmar Godowsky with actor Frank Mayo.
“The evening would begin generally in the ballroom of the Alexandria with two reprobates falling down the main staircase: Buster Keaton and Lew Cody, both acrobats,” said cameraman Byron Haskin. “They’d do 108s down this stairway—KA-RA-LA-BOOM!—into the middle of the dance floor. You knew the evening had begun! The dance floor was so solidly packed every night that you could lift your feet and still stay up.”
Katherine Albert, who had a small but important role in The New Henrietta, remembered Keaton as “an earnest young man in those days, trying very hard to make a go of what he thought his one big chance.” In playing a relatively straight part in an important feature, Keaton was doing what Arbuckle had just done in The Round-up but with far less name recognition. Given the challenge, his measured performance as young Van Alstyne was a quiet triumph, his first dramatic turn since his days with the Fenberg company in 1906. To the Los Angeles Times he gave an interview in which he groused over the “kippy clothes” he was required to wear and joshed about joking up the role the way he had Little Lord Fauntleroy. “Don’t know why they chose me for the part anyhow,” he said, “only I’ve got a blank pan. Saw a nice, fluffy pie on the set the other day that would’ve looked good on the hero’s face, but he got away just in time. Winchell Smith watches me all the time. He’s the author and he’s afraid I’ll do something all wrong. I had to be shaved in a scene the other day, and Mr. Smith was scared to death. He thought I might try to get funny and eat the soap! Mr. Smith certainly does worry about me.”
Smith indeed helped shape Keaton’s performance, shrewdly guarding the integrity of the play and drawing out his natural gifts as an actor while the credited director, Englishman Herbert Blaché, saw to the camerawork. (“I didn’t pay enough attention to him,” Keaton, who could scarcely remember him, admitted.) Most of the publicity went to the seventy-five-year-old Crane, whose history with the material went back more than thirty years. But the new screenplay had thrown the weight of the story to Bertie’s character, so much so that a month into filming the title was officially changed to The Saphead, the Henrietta in the original having been, among other things, a racehorse and a mining conglomerate. “William H. Crane was really the star of The Saphead,” said Albert, “but before it was finished deadpan Keaton had tucked it under his arm and walked away with it.”
Production on The Saphead wrapped on May 16, 1920, and the Metro annex, which, as the Lone Star, had housed Charlie Chaplin and company back when Chaplin made a dozen two-reel comedies for Mutual, was ready for occupancy. Built in 1914, it had office space, dressing rooms, an on-site laboratory, and an open stage that measured 100 by 150 feet and rose four feet above the yard.
“So I had a city lot there,” said Keaton, “a good-size block for a studio. We had all the room in the world for one company—plenty of room.”
Joe Schenck, he recalled, presented him with a new contract, paying him $1,000 a week and 25 percent of the profits.
“I suggested that I make only features in the future, but he wouldn’t agree. Schenck insisted that I return to the two-reel field. I couldn’t convince him that comedy features were the coming thing. If I’d won that argument it could have made a big difference in my career. Neither Chaplin nor [Harold] Lloyd were making features at that time[*] and I would have had a head start on both of them.”
The deal with Metro, which was finalized on June 1, 1920, committed the ten stockholders of the Comique Film Company—a group which included Joe and Nicholas Schenck, Lou Anger, and songwriter Irving Berlin—to delivering eight two-reel comedies “with Buster Keaton as the star or feature player” within one year. In return, the distributor agreed to reimburse Comique the documented cost of each film (not to exceed $45,000) as an advance against 70 percent of the gross receipts. Production on the first picture under the agreement was to commence within thirty days.
In Hollywood, Anger gave Keaton and Eddie Cline a budget of $30,000—the same as for an Arbuckle comedy. The story, developed in collaboration with Jean Havez and gagman Joe Mitchell, was based on a simple premise: A newly married couple is given a kit home from the Portable House Co. to build themselves. More than twenty-five thousand American families had assembled dwellings such as these since the creation of the Sears Modern Homes Department in 1908, their houses shipped to city lots and farms direct from one of the company’s dedicated mills. But what would happen if the numbers on the boxes got mixed, making it impossible to assemble it correctly? What would the thing look like? And what problems would it present to a newly married couple? As a premise, it was, as Picture-Play’s Malcolm Oettinger later put it, “mechanically perfect.”
Shooting began the week of May 24. Since Bartine Burkett was starring in her own series of one-reel comedies for Universal, her place as Buster’s leading woman was taken by twenty-year-old Sennett starlet Sibye Trevilla, who had worked with the likes of Charlie Murray, Ben Turpin, and Raymond Griffith, and who would assume the name Sybil Seely for the Keaton pictures. And from back in Muskegon, where Buster’s appearances in the Arbuckles were closely followed, Joe Roberts, vaudeville veteran and the Keaton family’s enormous Edgewater neighbor, was recruited to play a cameo as a surly deliveryman with an upright piano slung over his shoulder.
As with The High Sign, Keaton and his team went for gags that logically arose from the situation, but the new story was simpler and more consistent in its point of view than with the earlier picture, an exercise in what Orson Welles called “the comedy of futility.” Gags, Keaton once said, were either natural or mechanical. “Both get laughs, but the natural gag is the one we lay awake nights trying to dream of.” And he had in Eddie Cline, a true veteran of screen comedy, someone who had fallen into picture work as a jack-of-all-trades and could see a scene from every conceivable angle.
Born in Kenosha in 1891 and reared on Chicago’s East Side, Edward Francis Cline was brought to Los Angeles at the age of twelve. He played baseball in high school, pitching for Polytechnic, and was good enough to be offered a professional contract. (This alone would have qualified him for a job at the Keaton studio.) He joined Sennett as an extra in the fall of 1914, and was soon one of the Keystone Cops. Sennett, he found, took a lot of his ideas from French farces, and employed a full-time translator to write synopses. But the self-styled King of Comedy’s instincts were loud and crude, as befit the times. “I had my idea of comedy—rough, slapstick, and funny,” Sennett said. “I’d make that or nothing.”
Keystone’s brand of comic mayhem required less talent than fortitude, and it was easy for someone with no particular training to get a job. There was, though, the chance to learn from some of the true giants of the art form, men like Chaplin, Ford Sterling, Charlie Murray, and Mack Swain. “We used to meet in an old barn,” said Cline, “and under the tutelage of these fine masters we were taught the fundamentals of broad pantomime.”
Cline himself became a director in 1916 and was instrumental in developing the Sennett Bathing Beauties, who supplanted the Keystone Cops. “Some of the Cop pictures earned Sennett as much as $50,000 net. But they had run their course, not so much through the repetition of the gags which motivated them, but rather because the American public had changed its views on acting. The Keystone Cops and the central figures who played around them were pantomimists, pure and simple. When pictures became more articulate through improvement in the camera as well as in the technique of acting itself, the Keystoners were out of place.”
By the time Cline signed on with Comique, he was a firm believer in Keaton’s mantra of logic and consistency, a thoroughly modern approach to the job of making people laugh. And at the core of the new picture would be a pair of well-rounded characters, a believable young couple who clearly love each other and are cheerfully assuming the arduous task of building a house for themselves. Sybil Seely wasn’t necessarily hired for her acting chops, but she turned out to be an ideal match for Buster, energetic and expressive and, like Alice Lake, willing to do her fair share of the hard and sometimes dangerous work. Their chemistry was unmistakable, warm and natural. Then someone came up with a framing device in which the action progresses over seven days, with the passage of each day delineated by a leaf from the calendar. Yet, the resulting title, One Week, suggested a lampoon of the old Elinor Glyn potboiler Three Weeks.
Utilizing the new studio and its surrounding neighborhood, the marriage of Buster and Sybil is staged, establishing the animosity of Handy Hank, “the fellow she turned down.” Hank, it turns out, is sourly driving their honeymoon car, an uncomfortable circumstance that leads to their abandoning it for another while still in motion, Sybil managing the jump effortlessly while Buster is caught between the two cars until a motorcycle catches him, roughly carrying him off in the opposite direction. In the distance, he sees Hank abandon the first car for the second and gives chase, halting them with the unwitting help of a traffic officer. Regaining control of the driverless first car, they arrive at the lot Buster’s Uncle Mike has given them to greet the arrival of their new house. Buster opens the directions:
1. To give this house a snappy appearance put it up according to the numbers on the boxes.
The next day, Tuesday, they are already well along, Buster sawing away as Sybil prepares breakfast on a camping stove. Hank comes upon the scene, notices the numbers marking the boxes, and, unseen, gleefully alters them with black paint. The funhouse effects begin almost immediately as an entire wall rotates on its axis, carrying Sybil skyward while Buster is dropped to the ground. Unsure of where she has gone, he wanders away, only to have the wall come crashing down around him, a window opening saving him from certain injury. It’s a gag he had used previously in Back Stage, where the device was merely a featherweight scenery flat, and it’s a gag he’d revisit again to even greater effect.
On Wednesday, the completed house is revealed to be a cubist nightmare of a structure, its windows at odd yawning angles, its doors leading nowhere, its roof wholly inadequate to the necessity of keeping the elements out. It’s architecture as if by Caligari, bold and senseless, and Buster stands puzzled before it, scratching his head. Sybil is unfazed. Good-naturedly she beckons him, draws him to the side, where she has painted two hearts and an arrow on the wall, and he cannot resist but to give her a kiss. There’s nothing artificial here, an elaborate sight gag followed by a warm, human interlude, a genuine rapport between two characters affirmed and then reaffirmed.
Buster regards his handiwork in One Week (1920). Built on the Metro Pictures lot, this kit house was as much a character in the picture as any of the human participants.
Walls rotate. Floors sag as if made of rubber. Nerves fray. Buster tacks down a rug, then carves a hole in the center of it to retrieve his jacket. Sybil, taking a bath, drops the soap and asks the cameraman to cover the lens while she reaches for it. Then Buster walks through a door in the bathroom and drops twelve feet to the ground below. It was, he recalled, “a sensational fall,” but the aftermath gave him a bad scare—his first in three years of making movies.
“To lessen the impact, we dug a deep, very wide hole in the garden, filled this with straw, and replaced the squares of sod on top of the straw. The lawn looked solid but collapsed like paper when I fell on it. I only felt a jar at the time. It was about two hours before quitting and I finished out the day. But as I was getting dressed I discovered that my left elbow had swelled to double its normal size. I could not even get my jacket on. My other elbow, my back, and both arms were also swelling up fast. Al Gilmore, my unit’s physical trainer, put me under a shower with the water as hot as I could stand. He kept me there for fifteen minutes, then got me under an ice-cold shower for almost as long. When I was dry he rubbed me down with olive oil. That was to prevent the horse liniment, which he applied next, from taking my skin off. Under this treatment the swelling went down little by little.”
Friday the thirteenth brings the housewarming and a violent storm, which causes the structure to shift on its foundation and then spin like a merry-go-round. The guests indoors are thrown around the room, while outside Buster tries hurling himself through the one ground-level door but keeps missing and bouncing off the clapboard. When he is finally successful, he’s thrown around the interior in one continuous shot and back out the same door. Eventually Sybil and the guests are thrown clear of the house and into the chaos of the mud and the wind and the driving rain. When Kevin Brownlow marveled at the combined effect during a 1964 interview, Keaton emphasized the simplicity of it all. “We built it on a turntable,” he said, “and buried the control belt….You just dig a ditch down about that far and lay your stuff in there and then put boards over it and then shovel dirt and grass on top of it. And that’s it.” Setting up such a gag, he estimated, took about three days out of the schedule.
On Saturday, with the storm now past, the house is a shambles, a decrepit shadow of its former self. “Now look at the darned thing!” Sybil cries.
“I guess it’s not used to the climate,” Buster suggests, kissing her gently.
Just then a man walks up and shows them that they’ve built on the wrong lot. “Yours is across the railroad track,” he says, pointing. Sybil considers having a meltdown, while Buster starts fashioning a way of moving the house by rolling it along on barrels.
Sunday finds them carefully towing it behind their car, but the chain breaks as the house is trundling over the track, and no amount of effort can budge it. Around the bend, a train is approaching, and Buster pulls Sybil to safety. The two cover their eyes, expecting the worst.
Then the near miss: The train is actually on an adjacent track, and it harmlessly roars past, leaving the misshapen house intact. Buster and Sybil look, can’t believe it, and heave a collective sigh of relief. But it’s the banana peel gag writ large, and a train coming from the opposite direction races into the shot, smashing into the house and reducing it to kindling. (“I always wanted an audience to outguess me,” Keaton said, “and then I’d double-cross them sometimes.”) Collecting themselves, Buster takes Sybil’s hand and places a FOR SALE sign on the rubble, thoughtfully attaching the assembly directions as well. Then, hand in hand, the two walk off into the distance, having just completed the best and most important two-reel comedy of the season.
Keaton poses with Sybil Seely, the former Sennett Bathing Beauty who was his leading lady in his first three comedy releases. Their chemistry was unmistakable, but their teaming was interrupted by Sybil’s pregnancy. Replaced by Virginia Fox, she returned for one of Keaton’s strongest two-reelers, The Boat (1921).
With One Week in the can, Keaton permitted himself a short vacation before embarking on the second of the eight films he owed the distributor. Having lured Joe Roberts west, he now sent for his mother and father, taking a lease on a four-bedroom house on Ingraham Street in the Wilshire Park district with the aim of putting Joe Keaton back into pictures. The new short was shaping up to be a prison yarn, with the two Joes as malevolent inmates, Sybil as a cute society girl (and warden’s daughter), Eddie Cline as the jail’s amiable hangman, and Buster as an innocent victim of mistaken identity. Filmed over the month of July, Convict 13 lacked the Big Idea that so beautifully animated One Week, and may have been conceived as little more than a showcase for Roberts and Keaton père. Starting off on a golf course, Keaton mined material explored previously by Chaplin, with the action only catching fire in the final third, when Joe Keaton initiates a breakout with a couple of well-placed kicks and Buster saves the day by reprising a gag from the later days of The Three Keatons where he subdues the old man—and about a dozen others—by taking a speed bag from the prison gym and swinging it from a length of rope. In the end, Sybil wakes him from a bad dream, trivializing all that’s come before.
Understandably, Keaton never talked much about Convict 13, but now he was working at a fever pitch, building a backlog of pictures ahead of the September 1 release of One Week. In August he began work on what was referred to as a “rural comedy,” Sybil Seely and Joe Keaton its only announced players.
“Two or three writers and I would start with an idea,” Buster said of the development process, “and then we’d work out a strong finish and let the middle take care of itself, as it always does. Sometimes we’d work out a gag in advance; other times it would work itself out as we went along.”
For what came to be known as The Scarecrow, the idea was the matter of courtship and marriage in the American heartland, and the strong finish would be the marriage part, which would take place aboard a speeding motorcycle, Buster at the handlebars, Sybil in the sidecar, and the minister perched somewhere in between.
To open the picture on a scene of domestic harmony, Keaton created the cinematic equivalent of Ed Gray’s house in Bluffton, a one-room bachelor pad that Buster and Joe Roberts have tricked out with space-saving conveniences. The console phonograph converts into a gas-burning stove and oven. The bookcase has an icebox built into it. Condiments hover over the dining table like a culinary mobile, each item dangling from its own dedicated string. The bread basket is on wheels, the communal dinner napkin retractable. The bathtub automatically empties as it collapses into a settee. The bed folds into the wall and reveals in its place an upright organ.
Both men are friendly rivals for Sybil’s hand in marriage. Joe Keaton is her father, and Luke, on loan from Arbuckle, is her dog. She makes her pop a cream pie, but when she sets it out to cool, Luke devours it, making it look as if he’s foaming at the mouth. “Mad dog!” Buster shouts as he takes off in a run, and Luke, as he always so expertly does, gives chase. The pursuit is long and furious, through the ruins of an old building, in and out of windows, up and down ladders. Watching from a safe distance, Big Joe ducks into a drugstore and emerges with crutches, iodine, arnica, dog bite, cotton, and gauze, all of which Buster will likely need if the chase doesn’t end well. Keaton dives into an enormous haystack, momentarily throwing Luke off the scent until he sees the hay and his quarry loaded onto a conveyor belt and fed into a grinder. Fascinated, the dog sits and watches with rapt attention, patiently waiting for Buster’s remains to shoot out the other end of the machine. When he miraculously surfaces intact, Luke happily rushes to him and offers to shake. “Friends?” says Buster, taking his paw.
By now, Keaton’s screen persona was coming into sharp focus. From vaudeville he brought the integrity and deportment that had become so familiar to live audiences, while the screen permitted a level of inventiveness he could never fully explore onstage. He was also unafraid of suggesting complex relationships with other characters, whether it was marriage with Sybil, friendship with Big Joe, or pals with Luke, all of which were grounded in the realities of everyday life, a seriousness rarely invoked in other two-reel comedies. Lastly there was the Keaton visage, unusual if not unique in the world of film, unsmiling but certainly not without expression or feeling. There were those who would fail to see the humanity in him, who preferred the emoting that Chaplin brought fully featured to his pictures, but for audiences that considered the viewing experience a collaborative effort, he instinctively invited them into the action, and what they saw in return was a reflected humanity, a bit of themselves in what was superficially regarded as a blank pan.
The Scarecrow was emerging as a rollicking windup toy of a movie when the first trade review of One Week appeared in August. “Put all your money on this Keaton comedy,” Joseph L. Kelley urged exhibitors in Motion Picture News, “it’s a feature in itself. Unfortunately it is only two reels, but into this two reels Buster Keaton, guided by the experienced hands and fun-making skill of director Eddie Cline, has crowded more good, clean, wholesome comedy than has been seen in similar reelage in a long time. Not only is the comedy of the real hilarious brand, but without an exception every incident, every situation are original and present a front new to the comedy-loving public….Buster is a show in himself and is one of the few eccentric comedians working before the camera who appreciates that the day of the pie-throwing comedy has passed.”
A cause for celebration, the News review was followed the next day by a similar rave for Convict 13 in Wid’s Daily: “Convict 13 gives ample proof that Buster Keaton’s first two-reel comedy, One Week, was more than a flash in the pan. It’s another winner. This comedy organization seems on the high road to big success. The two pictures shown so far reveal the hand of an expert in every department. This ‘hand’ is undoubtedly the result of the combined heads of Keaton and Eddie Cline, who is sharing in the directing. They have included in this a number of new gags, and the comedy sequences are working out with such an easy rapidity that their effect is tremendously funny.”
Added Edward Weitzel in Moving Picture World: “The combination of comic gifts possessed by this young man who has known the smell of greasepaint since he was five years of age has put him into the front rank of screen comedians. Attracting attention by his remarkable acrobatic stunts, he has developed into an actor of rare skill along certain lines. His work is as clean-cut and legitimate as that of the best actors of serious parts and he is in a class by himself.”
Metro supported the release of One Week with full-page advertising in the trades (“ENTER BUSTER KEATON” was the headline) and a publicity guide for exhibitors that offered exploitation tips, sample ad designs, and editorial content that could be fed to the papers. “One Week starts Buster Keaton on his larger career for the screen,” it trumpeted. “He has begun where other comedians have left off. He has packed his first two-reel subject with a bundle of brand new gags that will set your patrons laughing until (if they wear ’em) their false teeth will drop out and their waist-bands will shimmy.”
The company reported “a great wave of interest” in the forthcoming series and that prints of One Week were in stock at all twenty-five Metro exchanges. The rollout, however, was slow in coming. The first places to see the picture were towns like Denton, Texas, and Sandusky, Ohio. Thanks to Sid Grauman, the film opened in Los Angeles at the Million Dollar on September 15, but it wasn’t until the end of the month that the Jacob Lourie group followed Grauman’s example and took the film for its two Boston houses, the Beacon and the Franklin Park. More notice came Keaton’s way with the release of The Saphead on October 18, features naturally commanding more press attention than shorts, and when the selection of Buster’s new leading lady was announced, it made papers nationwide.
It was a couple of weeks ahead of the release of One Week that Sybil Seely learned she was pregnant and would have to sit out the balance of the season. Earlier in the year she had married writer Jules Furthman, and it may have been at his urging that she stepped away from the rigorous Keaton series when she was scarcely two months along. Sybil’s replacement, Virginia Fox, also came from Sennett, where she had appeared alongside Sybil as one of the Bathing Beauties under Eddie Cline’s direction. The official word (which may not have been far from the truth) was that she was picked because, at five feet, she was small enough to stand under Buster’s outstretched arm.
The Scarecrow wrapped with another chase, the two Joes scrambling, Buster and Sybil making their escape on a purloined motorbike, inadvertently scooping up a man of the cloth along the way. Buster loosens an oversize nut and slips it on Sybil’s finger for the impromptu ceremony, and all three ride headlong into a river for the rousing finale, splashing to a soggy iris just as the couple is pronounced man and wife. As with Convict 13, the picture was shot in a breezy four weeks, expertly assembled by Keaton himself, and was ready for trade reviewers in early October. By then, work had already commenced on the fourth Keaton comedy, which carried the working title Back Yard.
Gradually, One Week made its way into larger markets, placements fueled by strong word of mouth. “It is certainly great,” wrote George Mayne of the Swanson Theatre Circuit in Salt Lake City. “I expected good work from [Keaton], but he more than surprised me. Our audience simply went wild over his work, it was so different and original. I look for him to rank as the leading funmaker of America.”
Arbuckle, meanwhile, worked the spectators, generously dictating a letter to go to some twenty-five thousand fans. “I did not desert the two-reelers,” he wrote, “until I felt perfectly sure I had found a worthy successor—one that could make you laugh more than I did. That man is Buster Keaton.”
When the picture finally opened in New York the week of October 24, it debuted simultaneously at two Broadway houses, the Rivoli and the Strand.
“This is a refreshing, entertaining, and altogether novel two-reeler,” judged Variety, “well able to arouse and keep an audience in good humor.” In time, Keaton’s shambolic solo debut would amass worldwide rentals of $114,798, returning a handsome profit.
In Back Yard, which came to be known as Neighbors, Keaton explored the same themes of courtship and marriage as in The Scarecrow but this time in an urban setting. In contrast to the vast country landscapes in the former picture, the scene of Buster and Virginia’s burgeoning romance became the constricted space between two tenement houses, clotheslines connecting them overhead and a gated fence dividing the common yard. The set gave Keaton three levels of elevation and a span of some thirty feet in which to execute some truly original gags, particularly one in which he leaps from Virginia’s third-floor window, rides a clothesline back to his own building, slides down and around a banister and back out a second-floor window, riding another clothesline back into Virginia’s building, where he crashes into Joe Roberts, her hostile father. At six three and nearly three hundred pounds, Roberts made an ideal screen heavy opposite Buster, who was a full nine inches shorter and about half his weight.
The cast of Neighbors admires the signage on the new Keaton studio in Hollywood. Built in 1914 as the Climax Studio, it went through multiple occupants until Charles Chaplin arrived in 1916 to produce a dozen two-reel comedies for Mutual—a series that included such highspots as One A.M., The Pawnshop, and Easy Street.
Big Joe sends him back on the same clothesline dangling by his feet, causing Buster to helplessly shift positions with a rug his father (Joe Keaton, in a nod to typecasting) is in the process of beating. A mighty whack sends Buster swinging, and he knocks Joe a good six feet onto the dirt. Rousing himself, Joe unclips Buster’s feet, dropping him headfirst into a barrel of rainwater. But the barrel has no bottom, and Buster’s head is stuck in mud, his struggling legs splayed above him.
“Are you comfortable?” Joe inquires. The old man tries unscrewing him as Big Joe offers encouragement from the opposite window.
“I know a better way than that to break his neck,” he shouts.
“He’s my son,” returns Joe, “and I’ll break his neck any way I please.”
Buster became so consumed with choreographing the final scenes in the picture, which included a walking three-high shoulder stand worthy of any circus act, he completely forgot it was the day of his twenty-fifth birthday. That night, with the picture wrapped, Joe and Myra hosted a gala party on Ingraham Street, and all of Buster’s studio personnel, from Lou Anger down to office boy Luke McGluke, were present. Also on hand were Alice Lake, Roscoe Arbuckle, Viola Dana, Vi’s sister Shirley Mason, her husband Bernard Durning, and Buster’s pal Lew Cody. It was October 4, 1920, and for a newly minted screen star named Buster Keaton, life couldn’t get much better.
Convict 13 was released on October 27 and found a ready market for more pictures from the man responsible for One Week. In New York, the managing directors for the Strand and the Rivoli confirmed bookings for more Keaton shorts, and small-town managers reporting in to the “What the Picture Did for Me” department of Exhibitors Herald registered their collective enthusiasm.
“Book the series and start advertising,” urged Joe Yaeger of the Shuler Auditorium in Raton, New Mexico. “His work with William H. Crane in Metro’s coming big feature will undoubtedly help to put him into a distinctive class by himself. Original high-class slapstick comedies with a plot and punch fit for any audience.”
Metro supported with another round of full-page ads, this time selling the entire series with One Week, Convict 13, and The Scarecrow highlighted as the first titles ready. “Book ’em and prepare for an avalanche of business!” the headlines screamed. “Crowds are fighting to see his comedies!”
Keaton was also starting to gain notice in the commercial press, reflecting a growing awareness that screen comedy was acquiring a fresh new vocabulary, one not rooted in personality so much as technique.
Just as Convict 13 was playing its first engagements, Keaton embarked on his fifth picture for Metro, The Haunted House. He was now halfway through his first year’s commitment and benefiting from a regular routine of production that had him filming four weeks out of six and writing and editing in between, his only leisure the impromptu baseball games that broke out nearly every day. But where the grind of making short comedies wore on Roscoe Arbuckle, Keaton was invigorated by the challenge. “Sometimes we’d do nothing all day,” he said. “Then the next day twenty minutes of film.”
Most of Keaton’s waking hours were given over to the development of gags, the logic of gags, the mechanics of gags. “Shaving was a great time to round out a routine,” he noted, adding that the bathtub was another good place to think. “We always carried three men on our scenario staff and worked with them, and by the time…we were ready to start a picture, my head technical man that builds my sets, my head prop man, my head electrician, assistant director—everybody knows what we’ve been talking about for weeks.” This also effectively made everyone on the staff a gagman. By carrying the entire picture around in his head, Keaton had the flexibility to try new things as he went. “I would shoot material for five or six two-reel films in order to make a successful single film, because in assembling the film I would cut out four-fifths of the scenes in order to keep only the best.”
In a 1962 interview, Keaton described himself as producer, player, principal scene planner, chief gag writer, and director in collaboration with Eddie Cline, who lacked the eye and temperament to really excel at the job. “Eddie was too kind-hearted to be a great man,” said Sennett actor A. Edward “Eddie” Sutherland, who worked for Cline and would become a director himself. “He wouldn’t fight with people, he’d agree with them, and you can’t be a comedy director, or really be a director, without a little ferocity. Aggressiveness—whatever the word may be—at least you have to get your own way once in a while. And you have to have a conception of the whole thing, because an actor’s point of view is certainly biased. The writer only sees what he wrote. But a director has to see the whole picture as a completed entity.”
Keaton, with all the energy of an athletic man in his twenties, had a zeal for the job that Cline seemed to lack. When shooting, it fell to him to visualize a shot and rehearse the players, while relying on Cline to watch and make suggestions. “He’d be out there looking through the camera, and I’d ask him what he thought. He would maybe say, ‘That scene looks a little slow.’ And then I’d do it again and speed it up.” And Keaton knew that in comedy, clarity was important: if the audience was busy trying to figure out what was happening, they weren’t going to laugh. “I like long takes, in long shot,” he said. “Close-ups hurt comedy. I like to work full figure. All comedians want their feet in.”
Keaton was also superior to Cline in directing his actors. “We used to say one of the hardest things to do in pictures is to unrehearse a scene. In other words, you get so mechanical that nothing seems to flow in a natural way. Cues are picked up too sharp and people’s actions are just mechanical. Well now, to get that feeling out of it is to unrehearse the scene, and we generally did that by going out and playing a coupla innings of baseball or somethin’. Come back in and someone’d say, ‘Now what did I do then?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know. Do what you think best and then go ahead and shoot.’ That’s unrehearsing a scene. Coffee break or somethin’.”
It was Keaton who selected the takes and did the editing, having learned the art of cutting comedy at Roscoe Arbuckle’s elbow. He moved rapidly, working with an assistant he referred to as his cutter. “He’s the fellow that broke your film down and put it all in the racks there and had them all there. I’d say, ‘Give me that long shot of the ballroom.’ Or whatever, and he’d hand it to you…you’d start off with this. ‘Give me the close-up now of the butler announcing the arrival of his lordship.’ All right…As I cut them, he splices them together, running them onto the reel as fast as I hand them to him.” It was, Keaton contended, more complicated to make a good two-reel comedy than a five- or six-reel drama. “We used to study frames of pictures, for the love of Mike.”
Keaton was now working at such a breakneck pace that he finished The Haunted House on Friday, November 26, and began shooting Hard Luck, his sixth picture for Metro, the following Monday. That same week, his baseball team, the Keaton Komics, found time to defeat the Brunton Studio 19–12 and claim the Southern California championship, a point of pride nearly equal in importance to the business their movies did. (Buster himself was responsible for five hits in as many trips to the plate.) The rest of the year was something of a blur, with Keaton working seven days a week, determined to finish Hard Luck by Christmas.
In early December, Metro Pictures president Richard A. Rowland issued a lengthy statement lauding the company’s progress during the year 1920. It had started with Marcus Loew’s acquisition, which led to a $250,000 expansion to seventeen acres, with five new buildings and additional stages. Then Alice Lake was signed to a Metro contract, as were America’s “big three” dramatists, Bayard Veiller, Eugene Walter, and Winchell Smith. Veiller went on to become Metro’s executive in charge of production and was instrumental in bringing other noted writers into the fold, most prominently Irvin S. Cobb, Hulbert Footner, and George Kibbe Turner. More stars were added: Ina Claire, Emma Dunn, the celebrated dancer Doraldina. Alice had a breakout hit with William Hurlbut’s Body and Soul and was elevated to full stardom late in the year. Metro also had Rex Ingram’s production of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which would be released in early 1921 as an “extra special deluxe” and make a star of Rudolph Valentino, but the most attention-grabbing passages in Rowland’s statement were reserved for Buster Keaton—remarkable in that Keaton was not even one of the company’s contract players.
“Buster Keaton in the not far distant future will wear undisputed the crown of comedy king of the season,” he wrote. “Even now he is the greatest comedy sensation since the heyday of Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle in two-reelers. Buster Keaton is equipped by nature and his long experience in the theatre with everything that a comedian needs. He has a sense of comedy values that is extraordinary, and knows every ‘gag’ or device that can be relied upon to provoke laughter.”
Bookings for the Keaton comedies, Rowland continued, had surpassed the company’s greatest expectations. Grauman’s Rialto and the Alhambra theater in Los Angeles, for example, broke long-standing policies by holding Keaton shorts for three weeks and longer. “We have the highest opinion of Buster Keaton as a drawing card,” he concluded. “In our belief he is the comedy sensation of the screen world.”
On the heels of Rowland’s endorsement came the Los Angeles premiere of The Saphead, an event heralded by Grace Kingsley in the Times with the headline “BUSTER KEATON WINS.” “Let’s end the suspense right now,” she wrote. “As Bertie the Lamb in Winchell Smith’s delicious comedy at Tally’s Broadway, Buster Keaton makes the most of his fine opportunities. In fact, he realizes a really high standard of mimetic art by investing the role of Bertie with scores of really fine touches of kindly satire and pathos, as well as of nicely balanced comedy. What is more, perhaps, he keeps the characterization always in the realm of the thoroughbred, even as the author conceived it. Even in the scenes in the stock exchange, when he tumbles about on the floor in the pursuit of everybody who is yelling ‘Henrietta!’ responding thereto, ‘I take it!’ he’s the man of gentle birth, merely overtaken by unhappy circumstances….In short, Buster Keaton is about five-sixths of the picture, with [a] fine and masterly characterization, that of William H. Crane, as the testy old dad of the family. By all means don’t miss The Saphead. It’s the best thing Broadway has seen in a long, long time.”
Buster, meanwhile, was focused on finishing Hard Luck, which he would come to regard as a personal favorite. “It was the biggest laughing two-reeler I ever made,” he said. It was also the film that veered closest to Chaplin in that he played a tramp, a character completely bereft of means. Yet he always deflected comparisons between his character and Chaplin’s, considering them irrelevant.
“Chaplin’s just an automatic bum,” he’d say. “He’d do anything in the world to keep from workin’. The only time when he’d wash somebody’s car was just to get some eatin’ money, where I used to try to work and try to earn a living. Just had a little trouble doin’ it.” Unlike Chaplin, he refused to sue for the audience’s sympathies, to “get sorry for himself,” as he put it. “In our early successes, we had to get sympathy to make any story stand up. But the one thing that I made sure—that I didn’t ask for it. If the audience wanted to feel sorry for me, that was up to them. I didn’t ask for it in action.”
Since Keaton grew up deflecting the audience’s sympathies, it seemed only natural for him to do the same on-screen. And by draining any hint of sentiment from the action, he gave Hard Luck an astringent quality rare among comedies of the day. “I started out in that picture—because I was down in spirit and heart and everything—to do away with myself. So I set out to commit suicide. There were about six gags in there that were pips. Number one is that I got a rope and got out on a sawed off log, which put me three or four feet above the ground, and I could throw a rope up over a limb of this tree, tied myself off to it, bid goodbye to the world, stepped off the stump, but the limb I’d tied off to was so limber that it just let me go down to the ground with just a light strain on the rope. I ended up lying flat on my back on the ground, trying to get up. Of course it didn’t work. By that time, somebody over there says, ‘Hey! Will you catch that dog or cat or something?’ And I got up to run, forgetting I was tied off, and nearly killed myself. I got that rope off my neck in a hurry then. Then the next thing I did was go to Westlake Park and dove off the bridge. I didn’t know there was only two feet of water there. I nearly broke my neck with that dive.”
Buster’s luck changes when he’s embraced by the members of a country club who think he’s a daring explorer on a hunt to collect armadillos for a museum. Virginia tells him to take a horse from the stable, and the middle of the story, with the fox trailing along behind him and Joe Roberts as a bandit called Lizard Lip Luke, took care of itself. The strong finish for Hard Luck, the brainchild of Eddie Cline, was also the most improbable one Keaton ever put on-screen, the sort of absurdist conceit he’d later shun as untenable in features. “I got out by a country club, in an open-air swimming pool, and there was a very high diving platform there for some professionals. So just to show off in front of the girls lounging around the pool, I climbed up to the top of it, and posed, and did a beautiful swan dive off the top of that thing. And I missed the pool. I made a hole in the ground, disappeared. People came up and looked down in the hole, shrugged their shoulders, and the scene faded out.”
Keaton’s fondness for Hard Luck (1921) was in no small part due to the surreal ending in which he plummets off a high dive, misses the pool, and emerges from the resulting hole with a Chinese family in tow. “That was a fade-out of a two-reeler,” he later stressed. “We wouldn’t have dared use that in a feature picture.”
Figuring out how to film such a scene without cheating it took time and ingenuity, while the actual shooting of it was, by Keaton’s reckoning, the greatest thrill of his life. “We constructed a tank so that a portion of the pool was covered with thin wax, the wax in turn being covered with a paper imitation of tiles, so that when my hands hit the wax it would give way and I would go into the water. It was a perfect imitation, so perfect in fact that from the top of that diving platform I couldn’t tell which was paper and wax and which was tile. I was so scared that if I hadn’t lost my balance due to a sudden wind, I would never have left that platform. Down I went and then bang! I broke through the wax, but it cut my head and shoulders. That got a laugh, but not as big a laugh as the last few feet of the picture. In that shot the pool was deserted and overgrown with trees and shrubs. The hole I made in the tiling was still there. The screen flashed one of those ‘Years Later’ captions, and I emerged from the hole with a Chinese wife and [two] half-breed children.”
All the time and trouble paid off when they put the picture in front of a preview audience. “There was something like four outstanding [laughs in the picture]—what we called ‘belly’ laughs,” Keaton said in a 1958 interview. “Today they call just a substantial, hearty laugh a belly laugh. We didn’t—that was just a laugh. [By belly laugh] I mean a rock-the-[building laugh]. I mean that the theater didn’t forget for a while….That [diving scene] was the fade out of the picture, and that audience would be laughing getting into their cars out in the parking lots. It was so darned ridiculous that there was no way to time the laugh, because if the audience stayed in there and watched the feature picture coming on now, they’d still be laughing at the middle of the next reel of the feature!”
Symbolically, Keaton ended the year 1920 with a full-page ad in the Christmas number of Motion Picture News. Under the headline “BUSTER KEATON AND HIS DIRECTOR” was a photo of Keaton and Eddie Cline, whom he had taken to calling “E. Francis.” Seated side by side, Buster has blankly removed his pork pie hat and is holding it in front of Cline’s face.