OCTOBER 2, 1964
AN IMPROMPTU STORY CONFERENCE in his private railcar, and Buster Keaton is in the process of improving on an idea.
“There’s only one thing that sells the gag,” he says, rising, his ever-present cigarette holder clenched between his teeth. “The duck hunter was lining up on a duck. He’s gonna shoot come hell or high water. So, that camera”—pointing off to his left—“just missing the tunnel by three feet. He’s just missing it. He pans maybe a little bit with me, but as I come into his shot, I bring my gun up to follow a flight”—miming a hunting rifle as he pivots—“and when I get here, I shoot—and my gun is only about five feet from the tunnel when I shoot. So I’ve shot right into it.”
Gerald Potterton conceived the idea when he first met Keaton in New York, intent upon selling him on The Railrodder. After listening to a bare-bones summary of the plot, Keaton was dubious.
“Well, it’s a crazy idea,” he concluded, “but if you write a wild duck [dinner] into my contract, I’ll do it.”
Now Potterton picks up on what Keaton is saying. “The whole gag is in panning,” he says, framing the shot with his hands as he turns. “Panning…panning…tunnel…bang. He goes in it—BOOM—like that.”
“All you can see probably is the top of my hat,” agrees Keaton, “and the gun barrel.” He indicates eight or nine inches with his fingers. “About that far.” He mimes the rifle again. “Slowly get that gun into position and get it just once. Now to this shot—” Swiftly, he rotates on his feet. “Bang. And we got it.” Capturing the exchange on film, documentarian John Spotton marveled at Keaton’s professionalism: “He’s got such vitality, such enthusiasm. And he’s game to try anything at all. Buster can see whole sequences in his head—and his memory for continuity is unbelievable.”
Said Potterton, “There were certain gags which I wanted to do, like he shoots into the tunnel, certain little things like that I’d done little storyboard drawings for, which Buster didn’t mind. I wasn’t trying to out-direct him or anything. We had a sort of rough idea of some of those things, and it was actually the duck blind—that was his thing, and it was gorgeous. It’s a fabulous bit. I was just going to have him hiding behind the little box, but no.” He laughs. “He thought he could definitely do better than that. He said, ‘No, it’s too simple what you’ve got there, too simple.’ And he went to a lot of trouble to prepare the little cart and go out and get an axe and chop down things, so that he made himself a duck blind, a place to hide.”
Decking out the speeder with chicken wire and tree branches, as Keaton envisioned, was going to take some time. “Of course, I was a bit impatient,” Potterton admitted. “We were on that single-line track through the Rockies at that point, and we were always worried about oncoming trains, so we’d have to get everything off the line quickly. I must say I thought: ‘Boy, that’s going to take forever.’ And the crew hung around and said, ‘Oh God, it’s just going to take us forever to go and cut all that stuff.’ But that made the gag, you know? That made the difference. It just made the whole thing work. Just before he goes in the tunnel you see those little baggy eyes looking around before he shoots the gun. That’s a great thing, and that was him. I mean, he was the film. The film wouldn’t have worked without him.”
The payoff to the gag is at the other end of the tunnel. There are workers inside, and when the gun goes off, they come racing out in all directions, Buster and the speeder hot on their tails. Making the first shot, the Italian work gang in their hard hats run quickly out of camera range. “But they’ve got to be there,” Potterton says, running into the scene and pointing. “We can’t see anybody.” He has trouble explaining to them that they’ve run too far. “Bueno, bueno,” he tells them, gesturing, “but you gotta run up to here, see? No further.”
Now Keaton the director steps in. “Boys, come down towards me,” he tells them, expertly bringing order to a measure of chaos. “You come to this spot,” he says to one of them, pointing. “You come down here,” he says to another, taking his arm, “to about…here.” Then he begins to take roll. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” he counts, assessing just how many will read in the shot. “One more,” he calls. “Right in here and…you on this side. Yes, you.” Now he steps back. “You see about where you are?”
He walks to where Potterton and the crew are standing by the camera. “I don’t think you should pose them like that,” Potterton says, but Keaton is ahead of him.
“I don’t mean to pose them,” Keaton says. “I’m just giving ’em a general spot to run to.”
“But they’ll all run there and stand there like soldiers.”
“Well, you’re never going to do it any other way with them,” returns Keaton, peering through the camera. “If they come runnin’ out there, they’ll bunch up on you if you just told them to run out. But if they hit approximately those spots…”
To the workers he calls, “Want to try it once?” And to Potterton he says, “I’ll be the scooter, on foot.” Keaton positions himself on the track inside the tunnel and hollers, “Go, everybody! Go!” Out come the workmen, all spread out, some poised to throw rocks, followed by Keaton, furiously racing after them. But some of them have stopped on the track in the path of the speeder, while others have again run too far. Keaton points out the places they should stop, and Potterton joins in, showing them how to run, stop, turn around, and throw. “What’d you say they did?” Keaton asks.
“They should come out running like this. Fast.”
“Oh yes, as fast as you can run.”
“And no smiling.”
Keaton, always wary of over-rehearsing something, is ready. “Okay,” he says. “Start the scooter.”
Says Potterton, “We’re going to run it, okay?”
Keaton climbs into the speeder, still festooned with tree branches, and pilots it back into the tunnel. Potterton is still a bit unsure of how it will go. “Well, let’s try it once this way anyway,” he says with a certain resignation in his voice, and the workmen follow Keaton into the darkness of the tunnel. “Start rolling!” Potterton yells, running out of the shot as he hears Keaton gunning the engine. What follows comes off beautifully, the product of forty-four years of filmmaking experience, and Potterton’s face, apprehensive at first, blossoms into an expression of utter delight.
“There was a time when he really got into a sequence that we were doing,” he said of Keaton, “and [he was] looking through the camera and standing on the track and looking around. There were, for me, those fantastic flashes of the twenty-two-year-old Keaton way back there, his great face and the way he moved, and you’d just forget that he was getting on in years. He was really quite sick when we were doing that film, but occasionally there was that wonderful spirit of youth and fabulous vitality that was in his films.”