As if by
destiny, Buster Keaton came into the world in 1895, the same year the Lumière
brothers screened the first publicly shown motion pictures. After a childhood
spent as the juvenile star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most
violent in vaudeville, he moved with remarkable seamlessness to even greater
success in the still-new medium of film as a director, star, stuntman, and
editor.
Ahead of his time in myriad ways, Keaton was unfortunately very much a product of the ambient racism of the Jim Crow era, as discussed in an entire chapter of Camera Man on the use of blackface, redface, and other ethnic “humor” in his films; indeed film historian Daniel Moews counted 18 instances of jokes in Keaton’s oeuvre related to skin color or ethnicity. That said, Keaton spent the 1920s as the all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The Cameraman, and The General.
In the 1930s, the coming of sound to motion pictures, combined with Keaton’s disastrous drinking problem and crumbling first marriage, put his career and life on the skids for a few years. But by midcentury, after a decade and a half as a behind-the-scenes gag writer at MGM, he was reinventing himself as an innovator in yet another new medium just beginning to discover what it could do: television.
The year was 1951. The setting was a meeting for a forthcoming film, Limelight, to be directed by Charlie Chaplin. And when Keaton sat down with Chaplin for the first time in decades, the first thing the film comedy giants talked about was…. TV.
As they exchanged pleasantries, the 62-year-old Englishman marveled at how fit the 55-year-old American was looking. “Charlie, do you look at television?” came the unexpected reply. “Good heavens, no,” said Chaplin, explaining that, like many a high-minded parent in the decades to follow, he did not permit his children to so much as look at the “lousy, stinking little screen.” Chaplin then again observed what fine form Keaton was in and asked what he did to stay in shape.
“Television,” answered Keaton, his career then in the midst of a revival thanks to the rise of the new medium. This teasing exchange, recounted in a tone of playful malice in Keaton’s memoir, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, neatly sums up the differences between the two: the populist and the aesthete, the mechanically minded futurist and the nostalgic technophobe, the pragmatic craftsman and the idealistic artist.
Keaton liked everything about television: appearing on it, watching it, describing it, talking about advances in TV technology to whomever would listen. In 1948, his son Jim, by then a 26-year-old Coast Guard veteran with young children of his own, got a TV set as a gift from his aunt, silent-era superstar Norma Talmadge. It was the first set anyone in his neighborhood had owned, a GE with a ten-inch screen that, as Jim remembered it, “weighed a ton. My dad came over the first weekend we had it. All afternoon he sat mesmerized in front of this thing. At dinner I remember him saying, ‘This is the coming thing in entertainment.’ ”
A question put to Keaton in one interview—about the cost of TV production—set him off on an unrelated tangent comparing the picture quality of American and European TVs: “Their sets are beautiful, and the French have the number one, the best television. I believe we have, what is it, five hundred lines in our picture? There’s 750 in the French. They got a much finer grain on their picture than we do.” In another interview, he even seemed to foresee the coming world of cable TV and on-demand streaming services, though he imagined an economic benefit to the consumer that has failed to materialize in our age of proliferating subscriptions:
“I’m anxious to see the day when television and the motion picture industry marry and set out a system, because it can’t continue the way it is. I see only one solution to it: There should be paid television, and they could keep the costs so low that the poorest man in the world could have a television, they can keep the entertainment that low-priced. And in that way you’d make pictures exactly the way you used to make them before television.”
Soon after encountering TV for the first time, Keaton bought a set for the home he and his wife Eleanor then still shared with his mother and siblings. Thereafter, to visit the Keatons was to hear the TV in the background, always at high volume to compensate for the hearing loss he had suffered since an ear infection during his service in World War I. In between film jobs, he would sit in front of it for hours, playing solitaire, smoking, and offering a running critique of whatever was on to whoever passed through. Actor James Karen recalled Keaton watching a show while shouting instructions at the screen as if he were directing it: “Cut! Now move that camera!” Visitors to the San Fernando Valley house he bought with Eleanor in 1956 remembered him in the converted garage he called his “den,” keeping one eye on a tiny black-and-white screen while he held up his typically laconic end of the conversation. “The man never left his den,” one of his grandsons stated in an interview. “He loved television. And he watched everything.”
Though Keaton never mentioned it by name, among his favorite shows during the 1950s must surely have been the pioneering sitcom I Love Lucy, starring his old friend and onetime MGM protégée Lucille Ball. When asked to name the best comedians of the up-and-coming generation he would often cite Ball as one of his “pets,” calling her timing “impeccable.” In fact, Keaton had had a behind-the-scenes role in getting I Love Lucy on the air. In 1950, when CBS was trying to convince Ball to star in a sitcom based on her successful radio series My Favorite Husband, she agreed to sign on only if the show could costar her real-life husband, the Cuban-American bandleader Desi Arnaz—a narrative reenacted in the new feature film, Being the Ricardos. The network balked at the idea of a domestic comedy centered around a couple of mixed race, so the two worked up a live vaudeville routine to be filmed as an experimental pilot. Keaton coached Ball in the big physical comedy scene, an act borrowed from the Spanish clown Pepito that involved Ball as a dimwitted but resourceful cellist auditioning for a spot in Arnaz’s orchestra. This pilot never aired at the time (and was lost until 1989, when it was finally discovered and aired on CBS as part of a Lucille Ball tribute special). But it was funny enough to convince CBS to give Ball and Arnaz their own prime-time series, which would run for 180 episodes and become perhaps the most influential of all early situation comedies. A pared-down version of the cello sketch found its way into a first-season episode, so although Keaton never guest-starred on I Love Lucy, he is nonetheless there as an influential presence.
Ahead of his time in myriad ways, Keaton was unfortunately very much a product of the ambient racism of the Jim Crow era, as discussed in an entire chapter of Camera Man on the use of blackface, redface, and other ethnic “humor” in his films; indeed film historian Daniel Moews counted 18 instances of jokes in Keaton’s oeuvre related to skin color or ethnicity. That said, Keaton spent the 1920s as the all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The Cameraman, and The General.
In the 1930s, the coming of sound to motion pictures, combined with Keaton’s disastrous drinking problem and crumbling first marriage, put his career and life on the skids for a few years. But by midcentury, after a decade and a half as a behind-the-scenes gag writer at MGM, he was reinventing himself as an innovator in yet another new medium just beginning to discover what it could do: television.
The year was 1951. The setting was a meeting for a forthcoming film, Limelight, to be directed by Charlie Chaplin. And when Keaton sat down with Chaplin for the first time in decades, the first thing the film comedy giants talked about was…. TV.
As they exchanged pleasantries, the 62-year-old Englishman marveled at how fit the 55-year-old American was looking. “Charlie, do you look at television?” came the unexpected reply. “Good heavens, no,” said Chaplin, explaining that, like many a high-minded parent in the decades to follow, he did not permit his children to so much as look at the “lousy, stinking little screen.” Chaplin then again observed what fine form Keaton was in and asked what he did to stay in shape.
“Television,” answered Keaton, his career then in the midst of a revival thanks to the rise of the new medium. This teasing exchange, recounted in a tone of playful malice in Keaton’s memoir, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, neatly sums up the differences between the two: the populist and the aesthete, the mechanically minded futurist and the nostalgic technophobe, the pragmatic craftsman and the idealistic artist.
Keaton liked everything about television: appearing on it, watching it, describing it, talking about advances in TV technology to whomever would listen. In 1948, his son Jim, by then a 26-year-old Coast Guard veteran with young children of his own, got a TV set as a gift from his aunt, silent-era superstar Norma Talmadge. It was the first set anyone in his neighborhood had owned, a GE with a ten-inch screen that, as Jim remembered it, “weighed a ton. My dad came over the first weekend we had it. All afternoon he sat mesmerized in front of this thing. At dinner I remember him saying, ‘This is the coming thing in entertainment.’ ”
A question put to Keaton in one interview—about the cost of TV production—set him off on an unrelated tangent comparing the picture quality of American and European TVs: “Their sets are beautiful, and the French have the number one, the best television. I believe we have, what is it, five hundred lines in our picture? There’s 750 in the French. They got a much finer grain on their picture than we do.” In another interview, he even seemed to foresee the coming world of cable TV and on-demand streaming services, though he imagined an economic benefit to the consumer that has failed to materialize in our age of proliferating subscriptions:
“I’m anxious to see the day when television and the motion picture industry marry and set out a system, because it can’t continue the way it is. I see only one solution to it: There should be paid television, and they could keep the costs so low that the poorest man in the world could have a television, they can keep the entertainment that low-priced. And in that way you’d make pictures exactly the way you used to make them before television.”
Soon after encountering TV for the first time, Keaton bought a set for the home he and his wife Eleanor then still shared with his mother and siblings. Thereafter, to visit the Keatons was to hear the TV in the background, always at high volume to compensate for the hearing loss he had suffered since an ear infection during his service in World War I. In between film jobs, he would sit in front of it for hours, playing solitaire, smoking, and offering a running critique of whatever was on to whoever passed through. Actor James Karen recalled Keaton watching a show while shouting instructions at the screen as if he were directing it: “Cut! Now move that camera!” Visitors to the San Fernando Valley house he bought with Eleanor in 1956 remembered him in the converted garage he called his “den,” keeping one eye on a tiny black-and-white screen while he held up his typically laconic end of the conversation. “The man never left his den,” one of his grandsons stated in an interview. “He loved television. And he watched everything.”
Though Keaton never mentioned it by name, among his favorite shows during the 1950s must surely have been the pioneering sitcom I Love Lucy, starring his old friend and onetime MGM protégée Lucille Ball. When asked to name the best comedians of the up-and-coming generation he would often cite Ball as one of his “pets,” calling her timing “impeccable.” In fact, Keaton had had a behind-the-scenes role in getting I Love Lucy on the air. In 1950, when CBS was trying to convince Ball to star in a sitcom based on her successful radio series My Favorite Husband, she agreed to sign on only if the show could costar her real-life husband, the Cuban-American bandleader Desi Arnaz—a narrative reenacted in the new feature film, Being the Ricardos. The network balked at the idea of a domestic comedy centered around a couple of mixed race, so the two worked up a live vaudeville routine to be filmed as an experimental pilot. Keaton coached Ball in the big physical comedy scene, an act borrowed from the Spanish clown Pepito that involved Ball as a dimwitted but resourceful cellist auditioning for a spot in Arnaz’s orchestra. This pilot never aired at the time (and was lost until 1989, when it was finally discovered and aired on CBS as part of a Lucille Ball tribute special). But it was funny enough to convince CBS to give Ball and Arnaz their own prime-time series, which would run for 180 episodes and become perhaps the most influential of all early situation comedies. A pared-down version of the cello sketch found its way into a first-season episode, so although Keaton never guest-starred on I Love Lucy, he is nonetheless there as an influential presence.
As had happened before with both vaudeville and silent film, Keaton’s career on the small screen happened to coincide with the medium’s golden age. His long association with MGM ended around 1949, when he found that he was getting enough work as a performer for hire not to need the advisory day job he had held at the studio for 13 years. A short promotional film made for the studio’s 25th anniversary that year, easily viewable on YouTube, offers a glimpse into Keaton’s relationship to the institution where he had worked in some capacity for most of the previous two decades. Just before a typically fulsome speech from Louis B. Mayer, the camera pans across table after table of stars seated for a formal luncheon, some still in costume from whatever movie they were shooting. At the end of one long table sits Keaton, between the juvenile actor Claude Jarman Jr. and—at a small separate booth with her own dish—Lassie. These deliberately comic seating arrangements reinforced the notion that the comedian’s place at the studio had always been akin to that of a mascot.
Most of the celebrities on view in this ten-minute short seem engrossed in eating or conversation; they are either unaware of the moment the camera passes by them or acknowledge it with a quick fourth-wall-breaking smile. Ava Gardner and Clark Gable share a laugh with Keaton’s old screen partner Jimmy Durante, while Judy Garland, seated next to Fred Astaire, leans over the back of her chair to chat with someone at the table behind her. But the moment the camera comes to a stop at Keaton’s end of the table, he is not only “on,” his face professionally blank as it always was when he knew he was being filmed, but already engaged in an improvised bit of prop comedy. He takes a bite of celery, appears to dislike the taste, makes a move as if to spit it out in his hand, and then—playing on his and our awareness of the camera’s presence—reconsiders the rude gesture, his eyes darting away from the all-seeing lens in mock shame. It’s over in seconds, a micro-performance in a context that didn’t require one. Is he doing the bit for his own amusement, or fulfilling his longtime MGM mandate to supply bits of comedy business wherever he can? Either way, the subtext of the celery gag is clear: he is out of place at this stuffy studio function, he knows it, and he knows we know it, too.
By the early 1950s Keaton had started to get small but highly visible roles in big-budget films like In the Good Old Summertime and Sunset Boulevard. But as he had foreseen in his son’s living room, appearances on the big screen no longer represented the pinnacle, much less the cutting edge, of recorded entertainment. In fact, by the time Keaton began starring in his own weekly TV series in late 1949 the motion-picture business was in a full-blown panic. The following year, alongside a review of that show’s second incarnation, The Buster Keaton Comedy Hour, Variety ran a story with this typically alarmist headline: “MUST REVIVE WANT-TO-SEE HABIT.” The unnamed author goes on to fret that “with the national B.O. suffering another sinking spell, industry execs are concerned that ‘going to the movies’ has become increasingly less routine to the American family and is rapidly moving into the category of ‘something special.’ How to combat that tendency—and whether it can be successfully combated at all—is seen as the problem facing the industry.”
In 1949, the year the first television set appeared for sale in the Sears, Roebuck catalog, 14 states in the union were still without television service. As the century passed its midpoint, only nine percent of American households owned a TV; the primary home entertainment device remained, as it had since the 1930s, the family radio. In many places people intrigued by the new technology gathered to watch in whatever local saloon had splurged for a set.
Owning a television in the late 1940s, as Jim Keaton and his father did, was akin to owning a personal computer in the early 1980s: it was a luxury product for early adopters, a technology recognizable to almost everyone yet affordable (or even useful) to relatively few. But with the increased availability of manufacturing materials, advances in function and design, and the ramping up of the consumer economy after World War II, the TV screen soon became the “electronic hearth” it would remain for the rest of the century and well into our own.
By the late 1950s something like 90 percent of American households owned a TV set, and the medium was becoming associated with consumerism and conformity—the “boob tube” image that would cling to it until the arrival of prestige television around the turn of the 21st century. But in that short span of time when its future was still uncertain, television had the chance to experiment with new forms, some avant-garde, some so retro they harked back to a time before the invention of motion pictures. And Buster Keaton wanted a piece of it all.
In 1949, he helmed his own program. He appeared as a guest star on The Ed Wynn Show, the first live-broadcast series to be taped on the West Coast (in the early days of television, most shows were produced in New York). He did “vaudeo” bits—programs reminiscent of vaudeville. He was featured with prominence and frequency on The Ed Sullivan variety show.
In 1954 he was cast in one of the television anthology dramas gaining prestige and popularity at the time. He played the lead in a half-hour teleplay that was a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Overcoat. Titled The Awakening, it was a vaguely Orwellian allegory about a timid clerk in a bureaucratic dystopia who scrimps and saves to replace his shabby coat with an expensive custom-made one. The Awakening, though ham-handed even for its era, gave Keaton a new platform: his performance is not only credible and sympathetic and serious, but startlingly modern. In watching the episode today, it’s remarkable how clearly Keaton seems to understand the genre he’s performing in, even though starkly symbolic two-act dramas written for the small screen were a new form that bore little relation to his stage or screen experience.
There was hardly a television trend of the 1950s or early ’60s that Keaton didn’t get in on at some point. Continuing his long run as a family-friendly entertainer, he appeared twice on the domestic sitcom The Donna Reed Show. He did a slapstick bit on the children’s program Circus Time. On Candid Camera, he pranked onlookers at a lunch counter with a routine involving an ill-fitting toupee and a bowl of soup. In a comic episode of The Twilight Zone, he played a time-traveling janitor from 1890 who, after some mishaps in the present day, decides to go back to his own era.
Between TV, commercials, and small movie roles and cameos in features from Beach Blanket Bingo to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Keaton wasn’t hurting for work when, in the spring of 1964, he was approached by a young theater director named Alan Schneider about starring in a short art-house film called, simply, Film, the first and, as it would turn out, last movie to be scripted by Samuel Beckett. The Irish modernist playwright had, as a boy, admired Keaton’s silent films; indeed, he had offered the comedian the role of Lucky in the first American production of Beckett’s ground-breaking Waiting for Godot, a role Keaton had turned down. This time around, Keaton would accept the job, showing that from the turn-of-the-century vaudeville stage, to the heyday of the silent screen, to the golden age of the TV sitcom, to midcentury absurdist drama, Buster Keaton would remain the coming thing in entertainment.
Adapted from Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens. Atria Books, 2022.
How Film-Comedy Pioneer Buster Keaton Shaped TV—And I Love Lucy. By Dana Stevens. Vanity Fair, January 20, 2022.
During
the 1910s, the same years that silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster
Keaton, and Harold Lloyd were establishing themselves as movie stars, another
phenomenon was taking place in the business that would not become visible—or,
at any rate, be considered worthy of notice—for about a hundred years. More
precisely, a trend that had characterized the medium’s first two decades was in
steep decline. Women, who until around 1916 had wielded a degree of power in
the film industry unmatched to the present day, were vanishing from the high
places they had occupied and being shunted into the narrow space they would be
allotted for the rest of the 20th century and into our own.
For that short span of time, though, what now seems like a shockingly high number of women held positions of real creative power in the world of film. Not to say that the gender balance of the industry even then was anywhere near equitable; as a cutting-edge technology with mass moneymaking potential, the new medium remained predominantly the province of men. But a higher percentage of American movies were directed by women in 1916 than has been true in any year since, a bracing reminder that gender discrimination in the film industry is about as old as the Ford Model T and, unlike that long-obsolete vehicle, still rolling.
A telling of the film history that might have been would start with Alice Guy, the French filmmaker who began as a secretary at Paris’ Gaumont studio in 1896. She was only 25 when she made her first film around two years later: a whimsical fantasy called The Cabbage Fairy that was one of the first-ever filmed narratives and also, at a running time of almost one minute, one of the longest yet made. Guy moved to Long Island to launch the Solax film company with her husband and collaborator Herbert Blaché, who would direct Keaton in The Saphead in 1920. By then she had directed hundreds of movies, including one of the world’s first features, a four-reel dramatization of the passion of Christ.
A few years later, Lois Weber became the most successful female filmmaker in early Hollywood and one of the first directors of any sex to receive billing above the title. Weber’s films, with titles like Too Wise Wives, Where Are My Children?, and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, were social-issue melodramas that lent middle-class respectability to such then-sensational topics as birth control, divorce, and “white slavery,” a genteelly racist euphemism for forced prostitution.
Then there was the “serial queen” craze. For a while in the mid-1910s every production company seemed to have its own fearlessly athletic female star: Pearl White at Pathé Frères, Kathlyn Williams at Selig Polyscope, Helen Holmes at Kalem. These prototypical New Women, often using their own first names as their characters’, chased would-be robbers on horseback or leapt from motorcycles onto the sides of moving trains. Holmes, the daughter of a railway engineer, played an indomitable railroad telegraph operator in the long-running serial The Hazards of Helen, also serving as producer, writer, stuntwoman, and animal trainer. In 1916 she told an interviewer for the Green Book that
“if a photoplay actress wants to achieve real thrills, she must write them into the scenario herself. And the reason is odd: nearly all scenario-writers and authors for the films are men; and men usually won’t provide for a girl things to do that they wouldn’t do themselves. So if I want real thrilly action, I ask permission to write it in myself.”
Holmes’ serials, primitively produced and clumsily paced though they are, remain “thrilly” to this day—not least because, in the few episodes that remain, Helen pursues her dual passions of railway telegraphy and bad guy–walloping with nary a romantic subplot in sight. Holmes may not match Keaton in acrobatic virtuosity, but she’s every bit his equal for sheer physical courage: Watch her ride a motorcycle at top speed off a high pier in The Wild Engine, or dangle over a railroad trestle to land on the roof of a moving train in The Escape on the Fast Freight.
The most powerful woman in Hollywood in the 1910s was unquestionably Mary Pickford, a one-woman media conglomerate who rose from a rough childhood spent touring the country in juvenile dramatic roles to become, by 1916, the highest-paid performer in all of show business. Barely 5 feet tall, with a round angelic face, a childlike frame, and a dense mass of pale-gold sausage curls, she was adored by audiences with a fervency that’s hard to comprehend in our celebrity-sated era. Photoplay critic Julian Johnson, whose long-lived Impressions column was a haikulike tribute to the charms of a different actress each month, compared Pickford to “dawn over a daisy-filled meadow; the spirit of spring imprisoned in a woman’s body; the first child in the world.” But Pickford’s appeal also lay in the implacable force of will she manifested both on screen and off: To quote the besotted Johnson, her “feminine fascination” and “luminous tenderness” were contained within “a steel band of gutter ferocity.” A colleague of Johnson’s at Photoplay, the splendidly named gossip columnist Delight Evans, answered his florid tribute with a simpler formulation: “But one does not understand Mary Pickford. One loves her.”
For that short span of time, though, what now seems like a shockingly high number of women held positions of real creative power in the world of film. Not to say that the gender balance of the industry even then was anywhere near equitable; as a cutting-edge technology with mass moneymaking potential, the new medium remained predominantly the province of men. But a higher percentage of American movies were directed by women in 1916 than has been true in any year since, a bracing reminder that gender discrimination in the film industry is about as old as the Ford Model T and, unlike that long-obsolete vehicle, still rolling.
A telling of the film history that might have been would start with Alice Guy, the French filmmaker who began as a secretary at Paris’ Gaumont studio in 1896. She was only 25 when she made her first film around two years later: a whimsical fantasy called The Cabbage Fairy that was one of the first-ever filmed narratives and also, at a running time of almost one minute, one of the longest yet made. Guy moved to Long Island to launch the Solax film company with her husband and collaborator Herbert Blaché, who would direct Keaton in The Saphead in 1920. By then she had directed hundreds of movies, including one of the world’s first features, a four-reel dramatization of the passion of Christ.
A few years later, Lois Weber became the most successful female filmmaker in early Hollywood and one of the first directors of any sex to receive billing above the title. Weber’s films, with titles like Too Wise Wives, Where Are My Children?, and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, were social-issue melodramas that lent middle-class respectability to such then-sensational topics as birth control, divorce, and “white slavery,” a genteelly racist euphemism for forced prostitution.
Then there was the “serial queen” craze. For a while in the mid-1910s every production company seemed to have its own fearlessly athletic female star: Pearl White at Pathé Frères, Kathlyn Williams at Selig Polyscope, Helen Holmes at Kalem. These prototypical New Women, often using their own first names as their characters’, chased would-be robbers on horseback or leapt from motorcycles onto the sides of moving trains. Holmes, the daughter of a railway engineer, played an indomitable railroad telegraph operator in the long-running serial The Hazards of Helen, also serving as producer, writer, stuntwoman, and animal trainer. In 1916 she told an interviewer for the Green Book that
“if a photoplay actress wants to achieve real thrills, she must write them into the scenario herself. And the reason is odd: nearly all scenario-writers and authors for the films are men; and men usually won’t provide for a girl things to do that they wouldn’t do themselves. So if I want real thrilly action, I ask permission to write it in myself.”
Holmes’ serials, primitively produced and clumsily paced though they are, remain “thrilly” to this day—not least because, in the few episodes that remain, Helen pursues her dual passions of railway telegraphy and bad guy–walloping with nary a romantic subplot in sight. Holmes may not match Keaton in acrobatic virtuosity, but she’s every bit his equal for sheer physical courage: Watch her ride a motorcycle at top speed off a high pier in The Wild Engine, or dangle over a railroad trestle to land on the roof of a moving train in The Escape on the Fast Freight.
The most powerful woman in Hollywood in the 1910s was unquestionably Mary Pickford, a one-woman media conglomerate who rose from a rough childhood spent touring the country in juvenile dramatic roles to become, by 1916, the highest-paid performer in all of show business. Barely 5 feet tall, with a round angelic face, a childlike frame, and a dense mass of pale-gold sausage curls, she was adored by audiences with a fervency that’s hard to comprehend in our celebrity-sated era. Photoplay critic Julian Johnson, whose long-lived Impressions column was a haikulike tribute to the charms of a different actress each month, compared Pickford to “dawn over a daisy-filled meadow; the spirit of spring imprisoned in a woman’s body; the first child in the world.” But Pickford’s appeal also lay in the implacable force of will she manifested both on screen and off: To quote the besotted Johnson, her “feminine fascination” and “luminous tenderness” were contained within “a steel band of gutter ferocity.” A colleague of Johnson’s at Photoplay, the splendidly named gossip columnist Delight Evans, answered his florid tribute with a simpler formulation: “But one does not understand Mary Pickford. One loves her.”
Pickford’s fame was so meteoric and her bargaining skill so legendary that she changed the balance of labor relations in the industry, helping to initiate the era of the movie star as free agent. In 1916, a few months after Chaplin signed a record-breaking contract with the Mutual Film Corporation for $670,000 a year, Pickford walked into Adolph Zukor’s office at Paramount and demanded the same salary, plus half the profits from her films, over which she was to have full creative control. Her total yearly take at Paramount was more than $1 million, or about $18 million in today’s money. Pickford’s massive popularity and formidable bargaining skill, as well as her close association with some of the industry’s most powerful men, allowed her to remain a formidable force in the film industry well after the careers of most of her 1910s colleagues had flamed out.
Any one of these women, and many others—the Russian theater legend turned avant-garde lesbian impresario Alla Nazimova! The writing-directing-acting-producing comedy powerhouse Fay Tincher, promisingly described in a 1918 press release as “a merciless autocrat when she directs men’s activities”!—would merit her own chapter in a fuller account. But when I think of the female talent that was draining from the film business just as Keaton was entering it, the face that comes to mind is Mabel Normand’s: that cameo-ready oval with huge dark eyes; a nervous, gummy smile; and the mobile features of a born comedienne who, if things had gone differently, might have had a life as long and a filmography as lasting as Keaton’s, Chaplin’s, or Lloyd’s.
Normand came as close as any woman in silent comedy to achieving that degree of success and creative freedom. To watch her films now—the majority have been lost, but dozens still survive and are widely available—is to ache for the future she might have had. But in the 38 years she had on earth, over half of them spent in the motion picture business, she got a fair bit done. She was the first star to have her name appear in the titles of her films, the first actress to serve as her own director, and among the first film performers, male and female, to start their own self-named production companies. In her own time, Normand was sometimes called “the female Chaplin”; her more popular nickname, “our Mabel,” gives a sense of the intimate connection she inspired in her fans. In a 1915 poll she was chosen as the top female comedy star, with Chaplin as her male counterpart and Pickford as the favored “leading actress.”
Back before movie actors were credited by name, the teenage Normand had become known as “Vitagraph Betty” for the character she played in a hit series of one-reelers for that company beginning around 1911: The Indiscretions of Betty, Betty Becomes a Maid, How Betty Won the School. The boy-crazy, practical joke–loving Betty delighted audiences, but some critics found her a tad earthy. Her cross-dressing antics in Troublesome Secretaries (1911) drew a comment from one reviewer that “attractive Mabel Normand as Betty is extremely funny,” though he wished she had not been “so free in her hugging and kissing, but had been more refined and dainty.”
After her time at Vitagraph, Normand spent a couple of years working for D.W. Griffith at Biograph, where Mack Sennett was then running the studio’s comedy arm. In addition to starring in a series of action-packed and mildly racy one-reelers for Sennett (The Diving Girl, The Fatal Chocolate, The Fickle Spaniard, Dashing Through the Clouds, Hot Stuff, Oh Those Eyes!), Normand appeared in five melodramas under Griffith’s direction. Often she was cast as the sultry brunette antithesis of the more ethereal blond heroines the director preferred. But Griffith, never a filmmaker known for his sense of humor, disliked the impetuous and impertinent Normand. She had been known to mock the director behind his back on set and to spur other actresses, among them Lillian Gish’s unsaintly sister, Dorothy, into rowdy behavior like going drinking after hours.
In 1912, Normand and Sennett, by then involved in real life as well as the movie business, had left Biograph to launch Keystone, an independent all-comedy studio in the thinly settled Los Angeles suburb of Edendale. During the next five years they churned out hundreds of rough-and-tumble two-reel comedies with a revolving stock company of actors. Performers who launched their careers at Keystone included not just slapstick greats like Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon but also cartoon-faced character comedians with durable audience appeal: Fred Mace with his perpetually exasperated eyebrows, Ford Sterling with his square beard and sputtering rage-takes. Other silent stars who got their start at Keystone were the future sex symbol Gloria Swanson and the popular eccentric comedienne Louise Fazenda, whose pigtailed, gingham-clad rube character was forever getting played by a succession of slick city cads.
All these talents passed through Keystone’s spacious studio on their way to other things. But Normand, the only female member of the company present at its founding along with Sennett, Sterling, and Mace, was the public face of Keystone. She was also, crucially for the studio’s early success, its public body. Her athletic curves caused a sensation when she appeared in The Water Nymph (1912) sheathed in one of the skintight full-body bathing suits known as Kellerman suits after the vaudeville swimming sensation Annette Kellerman. Normand could swim and dive like a seal, and performed her own stunts in countless water-based pratfalls. Her early aquatic feats made her the first in the venerable tradition of Sennett’s “bathing beauties,” who could be relied upon to periodically interrupt the movies’ action with their narratively unmotivated ball games played in racy-for-the-day beach getups.
Sennett, who sometimes appeared in his own films in the part of an ungainly oaf, was a colorful and eccentric figure, an Irish Catholic immigrant from rural Quebec known for conducting studio business from the e8-foot marble bathtub he had installed in his studio office. Sennett was a masterful public relations mythmaker and a keen spotter of new talent, even if he was too cheap to hold on to his strongest performers for long. But it was Normand’s mischievous, incandescent persona, which translated instantly to the screen, that served as both Keystone’s chief artistic asset and its main marketing draw. In 1915, Julian Johnson—the same Photoplay critic who rapturously praised business whiz Mary Pickford’s childlike freshness—described Normand as “a kiss that explodes in a laugh; cherry bonbons in a clown’s cap; sharing a cream puff from your best girl; a slap from a perfumed hand; the sugar on the Keystone grapefruit.” But behind the camera as well as in front of it, Normand’s role went beyond mere sweetening.
Director as a job title meant something less defined on a 1910s movie set than it does in our auteur-focused age. During Keaton’s years in the late teens at Arbuckle’s studio, the two more or less traded off directorial responsibilities depending on who was in front of the camera. Slapstick comedy “direction” also overlapped with what would now be called screenwriting, given that shooting scripts weren’t used at all for most early two-reelers. Sennett sometimes wrote up rough prose treatments of the storylines of upcoming films, but for the most part, comedies in the teens were something you made by taking a camera to a free outdoor location, working out ideas for gags and chases, then building a plot around them and shooting until you lost the light. Recalling his apprenticeship at Keystone, Chaplin wrote, “All we needed was a park bench, a bucket of whitewash, and Mabel Normand.”
Even at the Buster Keaton Studio a few years later, written scripts would be essentially nonexistent, though Keaton meticulously planned out the set design, action sequences, and general storyline with his production crew and gag-writing team. But at Keystone, two-reelers were churned out in a hurtling rush, often incorporating real-life events like car races or World’s fairs, with Sennett cutting every budgetary corner. Keystone casts and crews were not above sneaking onto the sets of other films in production to steal a scene or two. Normand remembered Thomas Ince, the celebrated producer of grand-scale Westerns, yelling at Sennett through a bullhorn to “get those infernal clowns off my set!” Actors had to hustle and improvise to set their performances apart from the mayhem that swirled around them, as first Arbuckle and then Chaplin managed to do.
By the mid-1910s, dramatic narrative film, now accepted as a “respectable” art form that drew increasingly middle-class audiences, was beginning to be seen as an author’s medium. This shift corresponded with the rise of the feature-length film, which in turn was tied to the emergence of name-brand dramatic directors like D.W. Griffith, Lois Weber, and Cecil B. DeMille. But the de facto “director” of an early two-reel comedy was often the star, the performer whose rhythms set the film’s pace and who had the best sense of how to use the camera to capture his or her comic choices.
Normand came not from vaudeville or the dramatic stage but from the world of modeling and advertisement. As a young teenager she had posed for influential fashion illustrators like Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg, embodying the “Gibson Girl” type in all her bicycle-riding, taboo-breaking, suffrage-demanding glory. Normand’s image had sold Coca-Cola, dress patterns, luggage, and lingerie. By the time she made an impression as Vitagraph Betty, she was already a master at deploying the power of her pretty, protean face. But Normand had higher artistic aspirations as well: Born into a working-class French Irish family on Staten Island, she had grown up with dreams of becoming an illustrator and had begun modeling to pay for art classes. Later, when she was rich enough to order frocks from Paris by the dozens and drive a car with a custom makeup table that folded down from the dashboard, she would travel with a full-time French tutor in her entourage and stock her home library with volumes by fashionable thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud.
In late 1913, the trade papers announced that “Mabel Normand, leading woman with Keystone, will hereafter direct every picture in which she appears. Madame Blaché has been the only woman director for some time, but she now has a rival in Normand who will both act and direct.” There’s a healthy dose of Sennett braggadocio in that statement. As we’ve seen, Alice Guy-Blaché was not the only woman holding the reins behind the camera in this era; in fact one of Lois Weber’s most innovative early one-reelers, Suspense, was released that same year, and both Pearl White and Helen Holmes had begun assembling the companies that would launch them as producers of their own action serials the following year. But there was still considerable novelty in the fact of a 21-year-old movie star—famous for her fearless diving stunts and the dark, expressive eyes one columnist described as “luminous orbs”—directing herself on screen. Given how loose the division of labor on a film set was at the time, it’s hard to know exactly how much authorial power Normand had in the hundreds of films in which she appears. She’s credited as sole director on about 16 titles and gets co-directing credit on a dozen more. But knowing how free a hand Sennett gave Normand in the studio’s day-to-day operations, it’s likely she had extensive input on any film she appeared in and many she didn’t.
Arbuckle told a Photoplay reporter visiting the set of one of his productions in 1916 that “Mabel alone is good for a dozen new suggestions in every picture.” Later in the same profile, Normand drove the reporter to the ferry, volunteering the information that she had directed any number of Keystone films (including some of Chaplin’s first on-screen appearances) and adding that she needed to hurry back to the studio to go over that day’s rushes with Arbuckle. This evidence of Normand’s creative clout at the studio notwithstanding, the article concludes on the image of the smitten writer bidding a reluctant goodbye to the “pretty little star,” still hoping to convince her to accompany him back on the ferryboat.
A story about one of Normand’s early collaborations with Chaplin at Keystone offers a telling snapshot of how and why women’s power in the industry waned after the mid-1910s. The title of the two-reeler in question was, appropriately enough, Mabel at the Wheel (1914). In it, Normand’s character, the girlfriend of a race car driver, winds up commandeering his car to win a race in his stead when he’s kidnapped by a gang of villains led by Chaplin.
As the project began, Normand was set to be the film’s sole director. Chaplin, new to films and only two months into what would turn out to be a yearlong stay at Keystone, had not yet committed to the “tramp” persona that would make his fortune, though he had played a similarly costumed character in two of his earlier outings, Mabel’s Strange Predicament (also directed by Normand) and Kid Auto Races at Venice. In Mabel at the Wheel he plays a blustering bad guy plainly copied from the stock character of Keystone co-founder Ford Sterling, who had recently left the company and whom Chaplin had been hired in part to replace.
Normand and Sennett had lured the 24-year-old stage comic into the movies after seeing him perform with Fred Karno’s touring pantomime troupe. By the time of Mabel at the Wheel, he had already worked under several male directors at Keystone and clashed with at least two of them. Only weeks into his time at Keystone, Chaplin was already gaining a reputation for his slowness on set and his perfectionist hardheadedness about doing things his way. These were qualities that would only intensify once Chaplin began making movies for himself. Chaplin’s reputation for foot-dragging was something that Keaton, chained for life to the two-shows-a-day vaudeville work ethic of his youth, would speak of in interviews with dry irony. Asked about his early impressions of Chaplin in 1958, he replied, “I was in love with him, same as everybody else.” But “following The [Great] Dictator,” Keaton continued, “was when he got good and lazy. By the time he’d decide on a subject and make it, it was three years later or something like that.”
On the set of Mabel at the Wheel in 1914, Chaplin came up against an obstacle he could not surmount: the humiliation of being directed by a woman, and a young, attractive and unusually powerful one at that. For a scene in which his character sprayed the racetrack with water to slow down Normand’s speeding car, Chaplin suggested a bit of business with the hose: What if he were to step on it by mistake, examine the nozzle to see what the problem was, and then spray himself full in the face?
As any half-competent film historian will recognize—and as Normand, who had by then made dozens of comedies, surely understood—this was quite literally the oldest joke in the business, having been used by the Lumière brothers in 1895 in one of the first moving pictures ever projected to an audience. (The brothers themselves copied the idea of the hose prank from a French newspaper comic.) When Normand rejected Chaplin’s idea—“We have no time! We have no time! Do as you’re told!” she cried, according to a lengthy and unwittingly self-incriminating anecdote in Chaplin’s autobiography—the studio’s new hire sat down on the curb and refused to work, shutting down production for the rest of the day.
Telling the story 50 years later, Chaplin recalls with unabated resentment that taking orders from his more experienced co-star “nettled me, for, charming as Mabel was, I doubted her competence as a director.” To be rushed by a male authority figure was one thing; only a page earlier, Chaplin had described veteran Keystone director George Nichols rejecting his gag ideas with the identical phrase: “We have no time, no time!” But to hear those words from the mouth of a 21-year-old girl playing opposite him as a spunky ingénue—and one who in the end defeats and spurns his own unsympathetic character? “That was enough,” writes Chaplin simply. He told her as much in so many words: “I’m sorry, Miss Normand, I will not do what I’m told. I don’t think you are competent to tell me what to do.” After the day’s shoot wrapped early, the crew, loyal to Normand, was furious: “One or two extras, Mabel told me afterwards, wanted to slug me, but she stopped them from doing so,” remembers Chaplin, providing evidence of her fair treatment of him even as he looks for an opportunity to pout. Back at the studio that night, while the comedian was removing his greasepaint, Sennett burst in and read him the riot act, taking Normand’s side: “You’ll do what you’re told or get out.”
Chaplin rode the streetcar home that night with a fellow Keystoner, speculating fretfully about the firing they both assumed was imminent. But the next day when he arrived at the studio, Sennett was conciliatory, encouraging him to “swallow his pride and help out,” including doing his best to get along with Normand. To add insult to injury their conversation was conducted in Normand’s dressing room, which was empty at the time because, writes Chaplin, “she was in the projection-room looking at the rushes”—as directors will do. Though Chaplin professed “the greatest respect and admiration for Miss Normand,” he did not apologize for his treatment of her the previous day, nor did he hesitate to reiterate to his new boss (and Normand’s then-fiancé!) his doubts about her basic competence—based only, he assured Sennett, on her extreme youth. (Normand was three years younger than Chaplin, and had about five years’ experience in filmmaking to his none.)
Chaplin’s telling of this story implies that the reins of the film in production were handed over to him by Sennett then and there, and also that he negotiated the right to direct himself in his next picture on the spot. In fact, Sennett himself seems to have taken over the direction of Mabel at the Wheel, sharing on-screen credit with Normand, and for the next several films she made with Chaplin, she continued to be credited as either the director or co-director. But though Chaplin’s framing of the story, like much of his autobiography, may err on the side of self-aggrandizement, his larger point stands: By the time Sennett took over Mabel at the Wheel, Normand’s real turn in the driver’s seat was almost up, while Chaplin’s was just beginning. After a number of successful directorial outings, some on her own and some in collaboration with Sennett, Chaplin, Arbuckle, or Nichols, Normand would receive her final behind-the-camera credit around a year later, on the also-appropriately-titled Mabel Lost and Won. By 1916, she was telling a Photoplay reporter—the same one who clung to the hope she’d skip out on work to join him on the ferry—that she had once been a Keystone director herself, but now preferred to focus on acting.
Whether or not the conversation between Chaplin and Sennett in Normand’s dressing room really happened as Chaplin describes it, his recollection of the Mabel at the Wheel incident—which takes up three solid pages of his autobiography!—shows clearly how and why the film industry began closing its top ranks off to women just as it became clear this new business was shaping up to be big business. In a pithier example of the same phenomenon, Sennett’s memoir erases the incident completely. Speaking of Mabel at the Wheel, he recalls simply, “I directed that one, and Mabel Normand acted in it.”
Sennett’s newfound patience with Chaplin, it turned out, had an economic motive. The morning after Chaplin’s and Normand’s on-set row, Sennett had received a telegram from the money men in the studio’s New York office, pressuring him to keep the Chaplin product coming, as the studio’s new acquisition was fast becoming a box-office draw. Other companies would soon come sniffing for Chaplin, and by the end of that year he would sign the first in a series of evermore-lucrative independent film contracts.
In a long serial interview given to Liberty magazine in 1928, two years after Normand had retired from pictures, and published after she died in 1930, she describes working with Chaplin in terms almost identical to those Keaton would use in recalling his process with Arbuckle: “We reciprocated. I would direct Charlie in his scenes, and he would direct me in mine.” But if Arbuckle and Keaton had a relationship in which the pupil quickly became his mentor’s equal, Normand and Chaplin had one in which the student effectively usurped the teacher’s place in the middle of an early lesson and got her demoted, while the principal (Sennett) nodded tacit approval. You could argue that Chaplin’s innate gifts were so ready to flower at that moment that further apprenticeship was unnecessary. But you might also maintain that in 1914 Normand’s gifts were at an equally crucial place in their development, and that undermining this young female director’s authority on set and in private with her producer-boyfriend was one of the most damaging things a rising star of the company could do. The reciprocity of relationship taken for granted in a partnership between two men was simply not guaranteed in the same professional relationship across genders.
In justifying his kneecapping of Normand to his reader and himself, Chaplin’s memoir strikes a half-apologetic if gratingly condescending note: “I also was susceptible to her charm and beauty and secretly had a soft spot in my heart for her, but this was my work.” Fifty-plus years after those words were written and more than 100 since Normand was subordinated on her own set, the obvious comeback still presents itself: What about her work? How might film history have been different if, after an apprenticeship with D.W. Griffith and a long collaborative relationship with both Sennett and Arbuckle, Mabel Normand had gotten the chance to direct and star in exactly the films she wanted to make, with the cast, crew, and stories she chose, the way every male comedian of her stature in her generation got to do?
That this never happened is not solely the fault of an increasingly patriarchal system of power transmission within the film industry. There was also Normand’s own chronically ill body, presented in the press as continually beset by vaguely defined maladies, while behind the scenes she struggled with the chronic tuberculosis that would kill her at age 37, and with an addiction to both alcohol and the opium-laced cough syrup she referred to as “my goop.” There may have been other drugs in the mix as well; it’s impossible now to conclude whether years of persistent tabloid innuendo about the “inside dope” on Normand’s fragile physical condition had any basis in fact. But there’s no doubt that in her later roles she seems altered, her face thin and drawn, her movements stiffer and more cautious.
Something else may have happened to shake Normand’s power at Keystone between 1914 and 1916, when her name dropped off the directing roster and became associated with leading ladyhood alone. According to a much-retold and possibly apocryphal story—albeit one recounted in credible detail 70 years later by Normand’s co-star and close friend Minta Durfee, the first Mrs. Roscoe Arbuckle—one afternoon in mid-1915, only weeks before her long-scheduled wedding to Sennett was set to take place, Normand walked in on Sennett in flagrante delicto with the newly hired bathing beauty Mae Busch. In the melee that ensued, Normand sustained a serious blow to the head, allegedly after Busch flung a vase in her direction.
Sennett’s blustering as-told-to autobiography offers a heavily sanitized version of this tale, in which he and an unnamed actress were simply having dinner to discuss her upcoming role and Normand, misunderstanding, stormed out and faked an injury afterward, going so far as to come to set the next day with her arm in a sling. The gossip columnist Adela Rogers St. Johns, who was as given to fabrication as she was fixated on her subjects’ suffering, claimed in her own memoir that she and Normand were having dinner at a seaside restaurant when the actress, distraught over Sennett’s cheating, attempted suicide by throwing herself off the Santa Monica Pier.
Whoever’s story, if anyone’s, is true, Normand did suffer a head injury that year serious enough to put her in the hospital for several weeks, while the press hyperventilated as if in training for the decade of Mabel Normand scandals still ahead. “MABEL NORMAND FIGHTING DEATH” blared a story in the Los Angeles Herald that attributed the wound to an unspecified on-set accident. (To contextualize the drama of that headline, it’s worth noting that earlier that year Photoplayers Weekly had run a story headlined “MABEL NORMAND SEIZED BY OCTOPUS” as well as an item that had the star single-handedly killing a 5-foot rattlesnake while picking flowers in a Los Angeles canyon.) Other trade papers gave the details of the supposed accident: While filming a wedding scene with Arbuckle, Normand had been hit in the head with a thrown boot. To add to the confusion, in an interview the year after the mysterious incident, Normand appeared to make light of the whole affair, explaining that her hospitalization had been the result of an on-set accident in which “Roscoe sat on [her] head by mistake.”
The proliferation of contradictory stories combined with Normand’s coy deflection make it seem likely that whatever took place late that summer was something both she and the studio wanted to keep under wraps. At any rate, this period seems to mark the end of Normand and Sennett’s romantic involvement, which, as both acknowledged, was rocky to begin with. Though Sennett continued as her producer until 1918 and returned to making films with her in the early ’20s, the severing of that connection may also have handicapped Normand in her rise in the film world (just as earlier female creators, including Lois Weber and Alice Guy, had at first found their professional fortunes tied to those of their producer husbands or partners).
Then came Normand’s peripheral involvement with a series of film industry scandals in the early 1920s. Though she had nothing to do with the 1921 hotel party that led to the death of actress Virginia Rappe and the three trials and eventual acquittal of Roscoe Arbuckle, her longtime partnership with the beloved comic at Keystone associated her in the public’s mind with the unwholesome off-camera doings of Hollywood funmakers. Less than a year later came the killing of the director William Desmond Taylor, a friend of Normand’s whom, by pure chance, she had visited at home on the evening of his still-unsolved murder, leaving only minutes before a neighbor overheard the shot that killed him. In 1924, with the Taylor murder still being periodically combed over by a sensation-hungry press, she was back in the tabloids when her chauffeur shot the oil-tycoon heir Courtland Dines after a long day of partying at which Normand, Dines, and Chaplin’s leading lady Edna Purviance were all present. Though the second shooting was nonfatal and Normand was cleared of all wrongdoing in both cases, the Taylor and Dines stories dominated headlines for months and permanently stained Normand’s reputation.
Just like Keaton, Normand was in many ways her own worst enemy, as self-destructive and impractical as she was gifted and driven. But unlike him, she was not protected by the system that began to emerge in the mid-1910s, which allowed stars like Arbuckle and Chaplin (and, in a rare feminine exception, Pickford) to act as free agents determining their own projects and salaries. Normand’s self-named company would produce only a single film, Mickey. That feature sat on the shelf for nearly two years because of financing problems and production delays. But when Mickey finally did come out it, it was a surprise hit. In a wave of popularity reminiscent of the “Chaplinitis” craze of 191516, Mickey hats, dresses, and dolls flew off the shelves as young female audiences flocked to identify with Normand’s rags-to-riches tomboy heroine. This being the days before licensing or organized product tie-in campaigns, the studio saw no profit from these self-started ventures; even as Mickey played to packed houses and inspired a hit song of the same name, the Mabel Normand Film Company was going bankrupt.
Sennett never quite got the hang of structuring a full-length feature, and Mickey plays like a series of two-reel comedies placed end to end, some more effective and original than others. But Normand’s presence—rambunctious, goofy, mercurial, uncontainable—runs through the indifferent action and tepid romance like a silvery thread. As with a surprising number of Normand’s films—or maybe not so surprising, given the time she was working in—the story is built around other characters’ attempts to limit and constrain her character’s freedom. In one of several climactic scenes, the dauntless Mickey poses as a male jockey to ride a racehorse to a near-spectacular finish—until, tellingly, she falls off her horse just short of the finish line, necessitating a rescue from a huge crowd of onlookers that includes her father and her most ardent (and ultimately victorious) suitor. Watching this scene, it struck me that the crowd rushing to care for the helpless Mickey also serves as a stand-in for the audience. Normand was the Marilyn Monroe of the early silent era, one of those tragic, funny, evanescent women a whole generation of viewers wanted to step through the screen and save. In the last two years of her life, spent in and out of a TB sanitarium, a nightly radio show signed off every night by wishing her good health, wherever she was.
Normand’s career was far from over when she stopped taking a credited role behind the scenes. But from the mid-1910s onward, she fashioned herself a movie star, an object of the camera’s gaze rather than a guider of it. After Mickey, she signed with an up-and-coming producer named Samuel Goldfish (soon to change his name to Goldwyn, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) to make a string of forgettable light comedies in between posing for studio glamour shots. According to more unverifiable rumors, she also may also have gotten pregnant by Goldwyn, resulting in either an abortion or a late-term miscarriage; at any rate, the fact that her new producer was in constant pursuit of Normand is documented in several sources.
Normand’s last feature film was The Extra Girl, directed by Sennett in a late-career attempt to remake himself as a director of sensitive romantic comedies. Its story, perhaps more than in any film Normand made, stands as an ironic commentary on the actress’s short-circuited career and life, even though the trajectory of the main character is very different from her own. In what was essentially a remake of the 1913 Keystone one-reeler Mabel’s Dramatic Career—Sennett loved nothing if not recycling old material—she played an ordinary girl who longed to go to Hollywood and get her start in the movies. In Mabel’s Dramatic Career, the fictional Mabel, a lowly scullery maid, had been successful at turning herself into a version of the real-life star, much to the chagrin of her spurned country-boy suitor (played by Sennett). The Extra Girl ends on a less triumphant note: After struggling behind the scenes as a wardrobe assistant, Normand’s character, Sue Graham, eventually gives up her dreams in order to marry her childhood sweetheart (Ralph Graves). The last scene jumps ahead by several years to show Sue as a contented young mother, watching an old screen test of herself on a home projector with her husband and child. In the film’s last line, she cradles her toddler in her arms, saying, “Darling, hearing him call me ‘mother’ makes me happier than any career ever could.”
Normand continued working into the ’20s, ending her career making two-reelers at the Hal Roach Studios, soon to be the home of Laurel and Hardy and the Little Rascals. Of the few films that survive from this period, at least one, Should Men Walk Home?, is quite good, even if her deteriorated physical state is detectable under the clown-white makeup she adopted in this period. But as Normand’s sporty Gibson Girl persona was replaced in popular taste by the sleeker, more jaded flapper type, demand for her particular brand of impish charm decreased. Her last released film, the now-lost short One Hour Married, came in 1927. The previous year, increasingly impaired by both tuberculosis and dependence on alcohol, she impulsively married the comedian Lew Cody, a good friend of Buster Keaton’s, her former Mickey co-star, and a fellow full-time drinker. The pallbearers at her funeral in early 1930, including Cody, Sennett, Griffith, Chaplin, and Arbuckle, were a lineup of fellow luminaries from the silent era that had just passed. All of them—even the disgraced Arbuckle, whose career had been cut short by scandal when he was just 34, and who would die of heart failure at 46—got longer lives and more chances at self-reinvention than she did.
In that long 1928 interview for Liberty magazine—a conversation that was as candid as it was, in all likelihood, because Normand knew she was running out of time—she described her first memory of Sennett at Biograph in far less romantic terms than those he would use in speaking of her for the remainder of his long life. The second sentence of his autobiography, written almost 40 years after their breakup, reads, “Once upon a time I was bewitched by an actress who ate ice cream for breakfast”; in the book to follow, he returns again and again to his regrets about never having set up housekeeping with the elusive Normand, at one point observing that “maybe I wanted to marry a wife and not an actress.” For her part, Normand, opening up to the film journalist and future Warner Bros. animator Sidney Sutherland, seems less focused on romantic than professional regrets. She recalls how on her first day on a Griffith film set, she found herself in costume as a page, “holding up the train of a noblewoman.” “My silk-clad legs embarrassed me, and while I was rehearsing I noticed a stocky, red-faced Irishman leaning against the wall, looking at me and grinning.” When she looked back after shooting the scene, Sennett was gone. “I remembered his face, though, and years later I made a tremendous fortune for that Irishman.”
From Camera Man by Dana Stevens. Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2022.
Why Women in Hollywood Had More Power in 1916 Than They Do Now. By Dana Stevens. Slate, January 29, 2022.
Slate
film critic and author Dana Stevens and I share something in common. We adore
Buster Keaton. I discovered him as a teenager at New York’s Olympia Theater
when silent film maven Raymond Rohauer released his “Rohauer Collection,”
including eight Keaton classic 20s features, from “The General” and “The
Navigator” to “Sherlock, Jr.,” that had been out of theatrical release for
decades. All at once, a generation of film critics wrote about the Keaton
oeuvre, as if discovering him for the first time.
And I fell in love, both as a cinephile admiring Keaton’s transformation of the language of cinema, and a girl with a crush on a handsome movie star. But it wasn’t just Keaton’s balletic fearless athleticism; something sad behind his eyes drew me in. I read the Rudi Blesh biography, and learned about Keaton’s rough and tumble youth on the Vaudeville circuit, where his father Joe started throwing him around the stage as a toddler — for laughs.
Buster grew into a sober adult child entertainer who carried his entire family. And when he ditched the family business at 22 and connected with Fatty Arbuckle in Hollywood, he learned how to make movies.
Stevens writes about all this in her engaging new book “Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century,” which takes a genre-bending approach to describing Keaton and his place in Hollywood history. The ways Stevens, a co-host of Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast, breaks with convention is probably why the book is capturing attention and readers: you don’t know where it’s going to go, it takes unexpected turns. It’s not exactly what everyone else would do. It’s what Stevens would do.
She fell for the silent movie star too, at the age of 29, as a literature grad student in Strasbourg in 1996. “I had been a hardcore movie nut since adolescence,” she told IndieWire during a recent Zoom interview. “I wrote Roger Ebert a letter when I was in middle school asking him how I could become a film critic. So that had been an interest for a long time. But if you think about the time that I was growing up, it was the pre-VCR days, much less streaming. So in suburban San Antonio, Texas, there was just not much chance that I was going to see a silent film on the big screen or on the TV or anywhere else. So that was just really not part of my language of film at all.”
But that year in France happened to be the centenary of Keaton’s birth, and Stevens went to a Keaton festival at a cinematheque. Like me, she was obsessed and went to see every movie, “some of them several times, and then just immediately went down this kind of pre-internet rabbit hole, where this little cinematheque also had a little basement library. Because the French love Buster Keaton, they had quite a few books on him; I read a Tom Dardis biography. I had a feeling of wonderment or passionate curiosity where I had to understand how these these works of art came to be, there was something so otherworldly about them.”
As she learned more about him, Stevens said, “Your eyes just pop like, wait, what? He was a child star before he ever even became a film star. And just the huge role that he had an early 20th century history. So that was the seed of it, starting there.” It was another 20 years before Stevens turned her lifelong obsession into a book.
IndieWire: Why does Keaton endure, and last?
Dana Stevens: To us now he has this special resonance that he didn’t necessarily have at the time. Obviously, he was popular. He was a movie star, and before that a stage star, and people loved him and his name on the marquee got people into the theater. But he was ahead of his time in a way: his time is arriving now, or it’s always arriving, continuously in the future. And that’s why I end up talking about digital Keaton and how GIF-able he is. Not all Chaplin films, but a lot of them now play more as antiquities, or as as messages from the past. And they teach us a lot about the past, because he was an incredibly important historical figure.
But I don’t think that they have that sense of being from the future from outside of time in the way that Keaton’s films do. This ends up becoming the premise of the book: his lifespan became this fascination for me, the idea of someone who was born in 1895, and died in 1966, which is the year I was born, so that I felt linked to him in this way. My life began just a few months after his life ended.
He is one of the greatest artists who doesn’t know that he’s an artist or doesn’t set out to be an artist. He’s anti-pretentious, and there’s something pure about his artistry. He did what he did because he needed to do it. From a biographical point of view, there’s a sadness to that, because why did he need to entertain people? Why did he need to make people laugh? That need and that drive in him came from some dark things in his past, and from the fact that he had never known anything else or done anything else. He didn’t try to become a comedian, he was born into being one, and then got onto this trajectory of stage stardom, and then film stardom, because of the physical abilities that he had.
But in a way, he doesn’t seem quite like someone who belongs in that world. His mind seems to be doing something else. He did famously say, in an interview late in life, that if he’d had the education for it, he would have wanted to be a civil engineer, which you can imagine.
IndieWire : And Keaton had a huge impact on who you became.
Dana Stevens : I was already on a path toward being some sort of writer when I went to that festival, but I wasn’t looking to go into a career writing on film. But I started to veer off this on this other path: “I want to learn about this other thing. I want to understand this.” A great thing for young intellectuals, critics, or writers to keep in mind, is that you can have a passion, and do nothing with it for years and years and years, and have it be a hobby, or have it be on the shelf. I’m expanding my Keaton bookshelf slowly over the course of 20 years, and then that ends up becoming a project or a book that you maybe hadn’t foreseen.
And I fell in love, both as a cinephile admiring Keaton’s transformation of the language of cinema, and a girl with a crush on a handsome movie star. But it wasn’t just Keaton’s balletic fearless athleticism; something sad behind his eyes drew me in. I read the Rudi Blesh biography, and learned about Keaton’s rough and tumble youth on the Vaudeville circuit, where his father Joe started throwing him around the stage as a toddler — for laughs.
Buster grew into a sober adult child entertainer who carried his entire family. And when he ditched the family business at 22 and connected with Fatty Arbuckle in Hollywood, he learned how to make movies.
Stevens writes about all this in her engaging new book “Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century,” which takes a genre-bending approach to describing Keaton and his place in Hollywood history. The ways Stevens, a co-host of Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast, breaks with convention is probably why the book is capturing attention and readers: you don’t know where it’s going to go, it takes unexpected turns. It’s not exactly what everyone else would do. It’s what Stevens would do.
She fell for the silent movie star too, at the age of 29, as a literature grad student in Strasbourg in 1996. “I had been a hardcore movie nut since adolescence,” she told IndieWire during a recent Zoom interview. “I wrote Roger Ebert a letter when I was in middle school asking him how I could become a film critic. So that had been an interest for a long time. But if you think about the time that I was growing up, it was the pre-VCR days, much less streaming. So in suburban San Antonio, Texas, there was just not much chance that I was going to see a silent film on the big screen or on the TV or anywhere else. So that was just really not part of my language of film at all.”
But that year in France happened to be the centenary of Keaton’s birth, and Stevens went to a Keaton festival at a cinematheque. Like me, she was obsessed and went to see every movie, “some of them several times, and then just immediately went down this kind of pre-internet rabbit hole, where this little cinematheque also had a little basement library. Because the French love Buster Keaton, they had quite a few books on him; I read a Tom Dardis biography. I had a feeling of wonderment or passionate curiosity where I had to understand how these these works of art came to be, there was something so otherworldly about them.”
As she learned more about him, Stevens said, “Your eyes just pop like, wait, what? He was a child star before he ever even became a film star. And just the huge role that he had an early 20th century history. So that was the seed of it, starting there.” It was another 20 years before Stevens turned her lifelong obsession into a book.
IndieWire: Why does Keaton endure, and last?
Dana Stevens: To us now he has this special resonance that he didn’t necessarily have at the time. Obviously, he was popular. He was a movie star, and before that a stage star, and people loved him and his name on the marquee got people into the theater. But he was ahead of his time in a way: his time is arriving now, or it’s always arriving, continuously in the future. And that’s why I end up talking about digital Keaton and how GIF-able he is. Not all Chaplin films, but a lot of them now play more as antiquities, or as as messages from the past. And they teach us a lot about the past, because he was an incredibly important historical figure.
But I don’t think that they have that sense of being from the future from outside of time in the way that Keaton’s films do. This ends up becoming the premise of the book: his lifespan became this fascination for me, the idea of someone who was born in 1895, and died in 1966, which is the year I was born, so that I felt linked to him in this way. My life began just a few months after his life ended.
He is one of the greatest artists who doesn’t know that he’s an artist or doesn’t set out to be an artist. He’s anti-pretentious, and there’s something pure about his artistry. He did what he did because he needed to do it. From a biographical point of view, there’s a sadness to that, because why did he need to entertain people? Why did he need to make people laugh? That need and that drive in him came from some dark things in his past, and from the fact that he had never known anything else or done anything else. He didn’t try to become a comedian, he was born into being one, and then got onto this trajectory of stage stardom, and then film stardom, because of the physical abilities that he had.
But in a way, he doesn’t seem quite like someone who belongs in that world. His mind seems to be doing something else. He did famously say, in an interview late in life, that if he’d had the education for it, he would have wanted to be a civil engineer, which you can imagine.
IndieWire : And Keaton had a huge impact on who you became.
Dana Stevens : I was already on a path toward being some sort of writer when I went to that festival, but I wasn’t looking to go into a career writing on film. But I started to veer off this on this other path: “I want to learn about this other thing. I want to understand this.” A great thing for young intellectuals, critics, or writers to keep in mind, is that you can have a passion, and do nothing with it for years and years and years, and have it be a hobby, or have it be on the shelf. I’m expanding my Keaton bookshelf slowly over the course of 20 years, and then that ends up becoming a project or a book that you maybe hadn’t foreseen.
IndieWire : You put him into a context that made sense. You see him from a different angle. You go off on a tangent about Mabel Normand, for example.
Dana Stevens : I didn’t set out to write a biography at all. I don’t mind it being shelved with biographies, if that helps to sell it. A book that inspired me in terms of the structure was called “River of Shadows,” by Rebecca Solnit, a book about Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer who took the 40 photographs of the running horse, but who also had this long and fascinating life where he changed his identity and was involved in a murder trial and photographed the expansion of the railroad and photographed the last Native American reservation in California. This guy was all about the history of the West, which Rebecca Solnit is obsessed with. And there were so many stories about the American West and identity and photography and technology that all wove through the life of Muybridge. Reading that book gave me a sense of how you could write about a life.
IndieWire : You were less interested in how he strategized the stunts in the movies, or how “The General” got made, than in how he intersected with the history of Hollywood.
Dana Stevens : I tried to think of it as each chapter would be a freestanding essay about some part of film history, or American history, that criss-crossed in some way with Keaton’s life, sometimes indirectly. It makes complete sense why there’s a chapter about Mabel Normand, because that’s a piece of history of the filmmakers of the 1910s that doesn’t get told, this wave of powerful female filmmakers and producers and stars with their own production companies. At the moment that Keaton was getting into the business — and it was becoming big business — was when it shifted over to the men.
Every single chapter, I learned something that was new. I learned about child abuse law and child labor law and children’s rights in the early 20th century. And then when I’m looking at his film career, the golden age of his silent filmmaking career, the frame becomes meta, it becomes film itself. What was happening in the film industry and in Hollywood, the move from New York to Hollywood in the years between 1917 and 1929. And when we get into the dark years of his life, the frame became what did it mean to be an alcoholic in 1935? That was the year AA was founded. I knew nothing at all about the history of addiction treatment. And trying to imagine how awful it was to be an addict in 1935. It was lonely and he was such a celebrity that he couldn’t have attended meetings even if he had wanted to. It’s incredible that he got even as sober as he did, even if he fell off the wagon sometimes. Bill Wilson the founder of AA was born in 1895, the magical year that kept providing different connections in this book.
IndieWire : The danger he put himself into is compelling. With his last independent film “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” you figured out that at that moment, as the house is crashing around his head, so his whole career.
Dana
Stevens : Yeah, he found that out right before the house stunt. But, it’s a
little bit like the fact that he was born the same year as cinema, right?
Almost every biography makes that observation that he was born in 1895. And
that’s when the Lumiere brothers first screened their films. Well, if he was
born alongside it, that means he grew up alongside it. And that means that in a
way his movement, from the stage to the screen, reflected the movement of the
country from looking at stages to looking at screens. The ideas and currents of
the historical moment that he was living in are displayed in his life, the
story is right there.
IndieWire :
Also, there was something extraordinary about him inventing an art form. He had the creative freedom and support to do that, for that prolific seven-year stretch. When Joseph M. Schenck pulled the plug it was one of the great tragedies.
Dana Stevens :
Right, and it becomes not just his personal tragedy, but something about cinema itself. As I was researching this book, I resented the coming of sound in the early ’30s — all the incredible artistic careers that were cut short by that, and how amazing silent film was just right at that moment when it ended, in 1927. They’re still just some of the greatest works of cinema, and then that whole way of filmmaking was about to come to this absolutely abrupt halt.
IndieWire :
Also, there was something extraordinary about him inventing an art form. He had the creative freedom and support to do that, for that prolific seven-year stretch. When Joseph M. Schenck pulled the plug it was one of the great tragedies.
Dana Stevens :
Right, and it becomes not just his personal tragedy, but something about cinema itself. As I was researching this book, I resented the coming of sound in the early ’30s — all the incredible artistic careers that were cut short by that, and how amazing silent film was just right at that moment when it ended, in 1927. They’re still just some of the greatest works of cinema, and then that whole way of filmmaking was about to come to this absolutely abrupt halt.
IndieWire : It’s true. I get angry at the people who deprived us of what he could have done. And you also write about the enduring impact he had on other artists, people like Jackie Chan, and even recently, Johnny Knoxville.
Dana Stevens :
Initially, there was a final chapter plan for the book that was going to be interviewing contemporary creators who were influenced by Keaton. And it was the pandemic that cut that short. I was going to try to interview Jackie Chan, Bill Irwin the clown, anybody I could get my hands on.
IndieWire : Why do you think the book has generated so much interest? Keaton still has power?
Dana Stevens : This is a person who’s touched people, an entertainer who basically is irresistible to anyone of any age. I am surprised and shocked that the book has gotten as much attention as it has. It’s so hard to get anyone to notice anything right now. And it’s a climate of chaos. And it seemed like a niche kind of book. I thought maybe I’ll sell some books to some Michigan film nerds, you know, because I have this Twitter following. But the idea that my Twitter following is 2,500 followers bigger than it was two weeks ago, is very strange to me. And of course, gratifying.
Dana Stevens’ “Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century” is now available wherever books are sold.
‘Camera Man’: How Author Dana Stevens Uses Buster Keaton’s Career to Track the History of Cinema Itself. By Anne Thompson. IndieWire, March 3, 2022.
Last week, on a cold night in Newport, Rhode Island, a group of bundled-up masked people gathered at the historic Jane Pickens Theater to attend a screening of Buster Keaton's 1926 epic "The General." The theatre is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, which means that most probably Keaton's films played there back in the 1920s, giving a pleasing sense of symmetry to the event, almost like the intervening years collapsed, allowing you to step back in time. The sensation of contemporaneous experience was intensified because the screening was accompanied by live music, a one-man-band at the synthesizer, Jeff Rapsis, an experienced silent film accompanist and film aficionado. It was an all-ages crowd, including a 10-year-old Buster Keaton fan who begged his parents to let him stay up past his bedtime so he could attend.
The guest of honor (complete with her name on the marquee) was Slate film critic Dana Stevens, whose book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century has been picking up steam since its publication on January 25. It's a biography, yes, but it's also an interdisciplinary research extravaganza, with forays into technology, labor laws, women in film (the silent era was peopled with female powerhouses), the development of AA, all things which had direct impact on not just Keaton's life, but everyone's lives. Stevens' engaged approach contextualizes Buster Keaton in his own time, while showing simultaneously Buster's impact on that time. It's a fascinating approach. She also brings her clear and sensitive critical eye to Buster Keaton's famous "stone face" persona, and what that signified, and how it operated.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Camera Man is Stevens' clear love for her subject. She is honest about his character flaws, and does not shy away from his difficulties (and the difficulties other people had in dealing with him at times), but her love for his art is what propels the book. You feel it on every page.
The Q & A following the screening, hosted by Professor Matt Ramsey, head of the film department at nearby Salve Regina University, was lively and engaged. Ramsey started off asking about the reception to "The General" in 1926. Although it's one of Keaton's most well-known films now, and it's the one most often screened, it was a fairly famous flop in its day. Stevens came armed with mocking derisive quotes from contemporary critics, and elaborated: "A lot of people thought 'The General' was an overreach, that he was trying to be too artistic and too ambitious. The expense of this movie was well-known. As one Keaton biographer called it, it was 'the "Heaven's Gate" of the 1920s'." Stevens also spoke about 1926, the year in which "The General" was released: "The way movies were being made was changing drastically. The studio system was consolidating. It became more of a top-down corporate culture, instead of the freedom of the Wild West. Joseph Schenck, Buster's producer and brother-in-law, took him aside and told him it was over, he had to become a contract player. Buster signed at MGM and his career went down very rapidly."
Ramsey asked about how those same years affected Charlie Chaplin. Stevens replied, "He was in a different realm because he was so incredibly wealthy. He was a good businessman, unlike Keaton. Chaplin built his own studio, had a dedicated crew throughout the 30s, and he made two silent movies well into the sound era. He could do quirky things like that. Keaton didn't have that kind of business sense or creative control."
There's another biography coming out about Buster Keaton, a biography of the "doorstop" variety, and Stevens takes a philosophical view about this coincidental timing. "I knew the entire time I was writing my book that James Curtis' biography was in the works, and in a way I was glad because it took a certain amount of responsibility off of me to be a 'biographer'. I'm a critic. I've been working as a critic for over 15 years. I'm pulling the camera back from biographical details about Keaton, although those are there, to look at circumstances surrounding his life. He was born in 1895 and he died in 1966. What a different world he was born into than the world he died in."
Ramsey mentioned that when he covers silent film in his film classes, his students fall in love with Keaton instantly, whereas the films of Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin don't have the same effect. Ramsey wondered if Stevens had any thoughts on this phenomenon. Stevens said, "More people know who Chaplin is worldwide than Keaton, but there's something timeless and modern about Keaton, and that's also what my book is about. Keaton was ahead of his time in a way that continues to feel modern to us now. It still feels like he's just about to happen."
The following morning, Dana and I met up at the Corner Cafe on Broadway. It was a cold beautiful day, with blazing sunshine and fierce ocean wind, and we sat and talked about all things Buster, as our Irish waitress kept the coffee refills coming.
Sheila O'Malley :
In the Q & A you quoted a friend who said about your book: “It’s not the story of one life, so much as it is the story of how history moves through a life." Could you talk about that a little bit?
Dana Stevens :
I thought it was such a beautiful way of putting it. The image of movement was always in my mind. It's the image of Buster as a projectile being thrown through history, and there is also this idea that he had been born ready to perform, had performed so steadily and so successfully all those years, you could almost see it as a graph, a visualization of history that would be this upward arc that would suddenly go into a downward slope at 1930. But after that, it became a different kind of arc, Buster zig-zagging his way back into being okay.
Sheila O'Malley :
What I really loved about your book were all the tangential and yet crucial explorations of the social-cultural events happening alongside his life, events he intersected with. You really got a sense of the outside world as he was living it. For example, how you dug into the Child's restaurant chain. How did you choose what to include?
Dana Stevens :
E.L. Doctorow said that writing a book is like driving a car at night, and you can only see as far as your headlights, but that's all you need to get all the way there. That's how researching the book felt. I would look at each phase of his life, and think, "What does that make me want to know more about?" I knew going in that for the section on his childhood I wanted to talk about child abuse law and child labor law. The question his childhood brought up was: "What did it mean to be a performing child at the turn of the century?" There was a fad for performing children, and there had been for almost 100 years since the Romantic period. How did the Keaton family act fit into that? In the middle part of the book, the framing became more meta: what was going on with film at the moment he entered into it? When it comes to the section on Child's, I honestly thought the editor would say, "This stuff on the pancake house is great, but it has to be one paragraph." But he loved that chapter! Along with the Mary Ellen Wilson chapter—the chapter about child abuse law in the 1870s—I felt, If I can get away with those two zig-zags this early in the book, then maybe I can keep doing this throughout.
Sheila O'Malley :
Right. You establish early that that's what you're doing. In some ways, your approach reminds me of Joan Schenkar's eccentric biography of Patricia Highsmith. She goes down rabbit holes into little thematic pockets, like the comic book industry in the 1940s, which places Highsmith in a larger context. She couldn't accomplish it in a paragraph. I appreciated your pancake house research.
Dana Stevens :
If you take Keaton's life and look at it prismatically, you're going to learn all these things about his time that feed into his films. The pancake house chapter is really about modernity and speed, and about how American culture right at that moment was changing.
Sheila O'Malley :
I was thinking about modernity and speed watching "The General" last night. Could you talk about Buster's fascination with technology?
Dana Stevens :
I don't think he was interested in the idea of technology, he was interested in actual technology. He loved machines. There are stories of him as a boy helping build a boat engine. I think he was excited about the possibilities of technology in a way that had nothing to do with "Let me push the envelope of my artform."
Sheila O'Malley :
"The General" is a work of art, obviously, but on the level of actually getting it done, it's basically a series of logistical problems. How do we make these trains chase each other around the countryside.
Dana Stevens : It's a mathematical movie. Plus, the camera is always where it needs to be with him.
Sheila O'Malley : He's also completely obliterated the proscenium.
Dana Stevens : When there is a proscenium, he jokes about it. Like when he goes through the screen in "Sherlock, Jr." It's something he thought about so profoundly, probably without knowing he was thinking about it: How do you make the transfer from stage to screen? He immediately understood the difference. From the moment he stepped behind a camera, he got it.
Sheila O'Malley :
Before I knew anything about him, I assumed that his cameo in the "waxworks" scene in "Sunset Boulevard" was representative of who he actually was, this sad ghostly guy. I loved your enthusiasm for what he was doing in his later years. The French circus. Television. Summer stock. It was very redemptive. Nobody should feel sad about him doing "Beach Blanket Bingo."
Dana Stevens :
Those were very happy years of his life, the '50s and '60s, in particular after TV came along. That period feels like a victory lap, especially after his movies started to get re-discovered, which just barely happened in time for him to know about it. I didn't spend a ton of time on the Raymond Rohauer relationship, but it's really fascinating. Rohauer helped re-discover Keaton's films, but he was also pretty predatory. People called him "the vulture of Hollywood." He did a lot of shady things, and Buster didn't like him as a person, but Buster was grateful that Rohauer was finding all these movies and getting them out there.
Sheila O'Malley :
Would you say that Buster had a strong sense of irony?
Dana Stevens :
His sense of humor was very dry, and assumed a certain pessimism about life, even though not every movie has an unhappy ending or assumes a bleak world. When you say irony, I think that with Keaton it's a slight sense of remove. Even his famous blank gaze has a kind of irony to it. There's these moments, very rarely, but once in a while he'll break the fourth wall and look at the camera. There's a great gag—it might be in "Three Ages"—where he's tied to another guy, and they're running tied together. He ends up on this little cliff-edge with the guy above him, and the guy goes falling in front of him, so of course he realizes that the rope is about to yank him down. And he glances at the camera with a completely blank face. It's the glance that makes the whole thing funny. He didn't often break that way, but when he did it was for a reason.
Sheila O'Malley :
His face is so perfect for the movies. The perfect projector screen.
Dana Stevens :
Someone in the audience asked about what he was like as a person. That's a mysterious question but I feel like the gaze tells us a lot about that. The way he looks at us, he only invites you in so far. Even when he glances at the screen, you don't feel like you're seeing his interiority. The glance at the audience is part of the joke, perfectly timed to fit in with the joke but it's not a moment of revelation about who he is. Think of Chaplin at the end of "City Lights." That closeup is nothing but an expression of his interiority. You don't get that with Keaton.
Sheila O'Malley :
He wasn't interested in it?
Dana Stevens :
This is me psychologizing, but it's almost like he's not emotionally capable of it. I'm sure with any artist their deepest traumas and character flaws get translated into the work. Buster was not a connected father, he was not a good husband for his first two marriages, he was completely absorbed with his work, and not that good at personal life. I think all of this comes out in his work. I feel like the inside of his brain is inaccessible, except on the screen. His brain must have been this Rube Goldberg machine, sorting things out, but not like "What do I want to express?" It was more like "What would happen if a car fell out of an airplane?"
Sheila O'Malley :
I was so interested in your thoughts about how he connected to what else was going on in art in the teens and 1920s. Surrealism, the Modernists, the Dadaists.
Dana Stevens :
I'm not the first one to observe this, but he really does fit into Modernism. Luis Buñuel wrote about him, and Federico García Lorca loved Keaton and wrote a weird little playlet about him. Keaton was so modern.
Sheila O'Malley :
Knowing what you know about Modernism, how does he fit into it? Did he himself feel connected to it?
Dana Stevens :
I would not say he was connected to any artistic movement, but obviously he was of his time, in that way. I think of it as a generational phenomenon. In modern discourse, I resist the generalizations about generations, even though I am a classic Gen-Xer. I resist the shallow media discourse people use to pit different belief systems against each other. But there are some generations—like the Lost Generation that Buster was a part of—and I would say the Baby Boomers, too—that are historically meaningful because they were formed by war, in both cases. Almost every great artist that we think of as a Modernist was born sometime between 1888 and 1902, Joyce and Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Surrealists—all of those people were part of a generation which I described in the 1895 section of the book. They experienced the upheaval between the Victorian era and the 20th century.
Sheila O'Malley :
It's the generation gap to end all generation gaps.
Dana Stevens :
It makes you see why the roaring '20s were what they were.
Sheila O'Malley :
What is the technological equivalent of what happened during those years? Maybe the internet?
Dana Stevens :
It seems like our world is moving fast right now, but if you really think about what the world was like a generation ago, there are lots of similarities to now. We are in the same built environment, we are moving around at the same speed in the same vehicles. Yes, we can communicate digitally a little faster than we could but there was digital communication since the 1990s or so. Our world much more resembles our parents world, and our kids' world much more resembles our world, than Keaton and Woolf's world in the '20s and '30s resembled their parents' world. And their art thematizes that. Woolf wasn't interested in technology, per se, but she was interested in capturing human existence in a fractal way, which feels very in touch with the stuff that Keaton was doing. I'm listening to Mrs. Dalloway on audiobook right now and I keep thinking about Keaton as I'm listening to it. It takes place in the years right after the war, and basically Mrs. Dalloway wanders through the city, and the book is about urban experience coming at you, which is what "Cops" and lots of other Keaton movies are about. If you put their art side by side, you really feel the connections.
Sheila O'Malley :
As I was watching "The General" last night, and listening to everyone around me howling with laughter, it almost felt like we went back in time. Like it was 1926. I thought of one of my favorite quotes from your book: "He was the coming thing in entertainment, always."
Dana Stevens:
Those were his words, not about himself but about television. And I think that's what the book is about, it's about that kind of temporality. The fact that he was existing on accelerated temporality, which means that he's still arriving to us now.
How History Moves Through a Life: Dana Stevens on Buster Keaton. By Sheila O'Malley. Roger Ebert, February 18, 2022.
The New Republic’s literary editor, Laura Marsh, spoke with author Dana Stevens, Slate’s movie critic and the author of the new book "Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century".
Keaton began his career as a child star in vaudeville and, in his twenties, enjoyed a decade-long stretch as a movie director, star, stuntman, and editor, masterminding some of the greatest silent comedies ever made. Keaton crossed paths with influential figures like Roscoe Arbuckle, Lucille Ball, and Samuel Beckett.
In "Camera Man", Stevens examines Keaton’s life in the context of developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, she brings us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking and sometimes life-threatening stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate the internet.
The New Republic, February 16, 2022.
In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton’s unique creative genius in the context of his time.
Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman.
Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton’s life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett.
In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton’s life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.
Camera Man: Buster Keaton and the Dawn of Cinema with Dana Stevens. PhilaAthenaeum, February 9, 2022.
The
splendid new book about Buster Keaton by Slate film critic Dana Stevens is more
than a biography and more than a critical assessment of the work of one of the
most significant and influential performing artists of the 20th century. Its
scope is evident in its title: Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema,
and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. To cover this ground, Stevens
deftly remixes the idea of the biography, which by definition focuses on a
single individual and almost unavoidably implies a disproportionate picture of
the subject’s significance. Her meticulous research and insightful depiction of
Keaton’s personal and professional lives is one strand of the historical and
cultural context she places him in. While some biographies claim a “life and
times” approach, Stevens actually delivers, with enthralling descriptions of
Keaton’s contemporaries, those he worked with and those who could be considered
his competition, and with discussions of the changes in culture, show business,
and technology as well as the fundamentals of cinematic storytelling he
inspired and was inspired by. Stevens is an expert storyteller herself, taking
on some of a writer’s biggest challenges, from vivid descriptions of the very
elements of silent filmmaking that can seem outside the reach of words to
finding just the right balance between admiration and sympathy for Keaton and
candor about his failures and failings. Look how elegantly she compares two of
his earliest works:
"'One
Week' and 'Cops,' made two years apart, can be seen as companion pieces with
opposing theories of the abyss. One proposes love as a potential, if fragile
bulwark against the universal principle of entropy, while the other more
bleakly posits Buster, and by extension all of us, as constitutionally and
irrevocably alone. It’s only Buster’s undaunted perseverance in the face of
chaos – matched, in 'One Week,' by Sybil’s – that lends the universe of these
films moral meaning."
Keaton’s
career extended from turn-of-the-century vaudeville to his classic silent
films, from the DIY of the earliest years of the movies to the rise and fall of
the studio system. He was a part of the early days of television (he helped “I
Love Lucy” get on the air and hosted a variety show). He was the focus of a
film by legendary playwright Samuel Beckett and performed in a French circus.
He appeared opposite Judy Garland and played “Bwana” in the 1969 Annette
Funicello movie “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”
He
wrote, directed, and starred in films that combined what he learned about
comedy from performing in vaudeville since he was barely out of toddlerhood
with his vision to push the new technology of moving pictures far beyond the
limits of the stage. Viewed a century later, his films are still inventive and
funny and his innovations are still reflected through all of the ways we watch
media, from movies to memes to TikTok and doubtless to whatever comes next. His
extraordinary contributions deserve to be described by someone who has the
academic foundation for research that is diligent enough to be thorough and
thorough enough to provide new information, the insights of someone grounded in
the history of film and the way it is analyzed by scholars and critics, and,
most of all, someone who is truly an exceptional writer, whose authorial voice
is graceful, accessible and inviting, now and then appearing on the page to
tell us how she connects to what she is describing. Stevens is superb in every
category, and this instantly indispensable volume should have a place on the
shelf of anyone who loves movies, comedy, history, critical analysis, or books
that are a pleasure to read.
Stevens
tells us that Keaton’s birth five years before the turn of the 20th century
“was one of those times in history when the era that was passing and the one
about to come seemed locked together like the teeth in a pair of gears,
readying for the transfer of energy between them ... [a time of]
almost-but-not-quite modernity.” Queen Victoria still reigned. Women were a
quarter century from having the vote. Entertainment was in vaudeville houses.
Most relevant to Keaton’s early years, the legal and cultural understanding of
child development was just beginning to shift from considering children to be
pre-adults subject to whatever their parents or employers wanted to inflict on
them to a category of human beings with exceptional vulnerabilities and
potential that made it a matter of public interest to protect and educate them.
Keaton’s father Joe, who made his tiny son the star of the family act by
treating him like something between a punching bag and a football, was
constantly evading the newly-established authorities.
Keaton
came of age as the movies were just getting started. While some of his
contemporaries transplanted their stage personas to the screen, Stevens shows
us how Keaton jettisoned his over time, literally piece by piece in giving up
the props that were part of his vaudeville routines. But he held on to the
themes of a man struggling with the failures of the material world. His most
famous moments involved gigantic props that could not fit on a stage like the
house that literally falls on him in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (which lives on
today as a popular gif) and the title train in “The General.” “For Keaton,
every potential home is a space of danger and transformation; no façade stays
standing for long ... Not only buildings but cars, trains, boats, whole railway
bridges show themselves to be as flimsy as theatrical scenery.” How much this
must have resonated with a man whose home was wherever his family was
performing, and how much the audiences were reassured by laughter in an era
when the unprecedented transformation of the mechanical and material world had
to be equally exciting and scary. Perhaps Keaton’s imaginative use of the
camera and effects stemmed from his life as a performer, examining props like a
table and a basketball to dream up ways they could be put to the most
entertaining use.
Stevens
gives us telling details—how a forgotten short film from the Ford Motor
Company(!) was the almost-certain inspiration for Keaton’s second-made,
first-released film as a director, “Home Made.” And she gives us the
context—how the careers of Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
intersected and paralleled Keaton’s. (She also makes it clear that Arbuckle’s
cancellation following allegations of rape was never supported by the facts
determined at legal proceedings.) Time telescoped before me as I read that
Joseph Schenck, who was Keaton’s brother-in-law and producer in the '20s, was
the same man who gave Marilyn Monroe her start in the '50s.
She
touches on issues of race and gender that foreshadowed central cultural,
political, and legal conflicts that persist today, with evocative descriptions
of major figures like Normand, Bert Williams, and F. Scott Fitzgerald,
important here as counterpoint rather than intersection. She describes the
shifting power centers in the entertainment industry as artists creating what
interested them ceded control to (white male) money people who created what
would sell and the ancillary enterprises that grew up around the movies,
especially the nascent precursors to today’s extensive coverage of media and
celebrity (including this site).
Today’s
audiences have an opportunity unprecedented in human experience. We can only
imagine what it would be like to watch the original productions of
Shakespeare’s plays or to be able to hear what it was about Jenny Lind’s voice
that made people willing to skip meals to buy tickets to her shows. But a
century after they were created, we can see exactly what Buster Keaton’s
audiences saw, though on screens Edison and Lumiere could barely dream of, and,
with Stevens’ guidance, with greater perspective. We cannot imagine the shock
of the audiences who saw the first moving pictures, who had to learn a new
language of story-telling. I love Stevens’ description of the “destabilizing
effect” of those early films on early audiences that today’s viewers seamlessly
decipher as though they were some Chomsky-esque innate language. “For us,”
Stevens writes, “the effect depends not on the shock of seeing everyday life
reproduced on a screen but on these first films dissimilarity from our daily
lives, the incredible expanse of time and change that separates then from now
and us from them ... moving most of all for its unpolished, unscripted
specificity.”
I would
have finished this book in two sittings but I could not resist stopping to
check YouTube to watch some of the films Stevens describes so invitingly. While
I was a Keaton fan already, I was grateful for her guidance in pointing out
details of note, either because they were indications of his innovations or of
his development as a director and performer. She shows us how his influence is
seen in the work of Jackie Chan, Edgar Wright, and dozens of people on TikTok.
Best of all she inspires us to return to the original, which we can enjoy just
as our great-grandparents did.
Camera
Man: Dana Stevens on the Life and Times of Buster Keaton. By Nell Minow. Roger Ebert, January 28, 2022.
A
century has passed since Buster Keaton entered the plum decade of his career.
Then in his twenties, he had outgrown his family vaudeville act, whose violent
acrobatics had relied on a size contrast between father and son, and learned
the art and science of making movies from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, in his
studio on 48th Street in Manhattan.
Thus
schooled, Keaton began a rampage of comic invention. First came a flurry of
now-legendary two-reelers—One Week (1920), Cops (1922)—then his full-length
silent picture era, with Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), et al. It’s
one of these, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1927), his last independently produced
feature, that contains the most famous of all Keaton’s many stunts.
The
young William Canfield Jr. (Keaton) has gotten blown all over town in a
thrilling action sequence set during a cyclone. During a brief moment of
respite, he wanders a few dazed paces, before stopping. Behind him, the two-ton
facade of a house tips, lurches, and then falls on top of him. An empty window
frame clears him with only inches to spare, rescuing him from certain death. In
one of Keaton’s trademark delayed-reaction routines, our hapless hero seems only
mildly astonished as dust clouds rise around him—about the same way he looked
when he wound up at a stable surrounded by horses 30 seconds earlier.
It’s a
terrifying scene, both to watch now and to film then, but awash in the same
kind of adrenaline-soaked magic you also get from watching vintage Jackie Chan
(himself a Keaton superfan), or the classic Vine of a honking four-wheeler
flying over a house, or the slapstick horror of the #milkcratechallenge on
TikTok. It’s a fast-paced, nihilistic kind of absurdity, a form of comedy
proudly whittled down for the attention span of a child, and as much reliant on
surprise and contrast as on jokes strictly conceived.
We might
call it conceptually unsophisticated, at least compared to the movie comedies
of someone like Mel Brooks or Woody Allen. But in the 1920s, Keaton’s work in
slapstick created a foundation that the whole ensuing business of film
entertainment would lean on. Now the Hollywood blockbuster era of film
entertainment is arguably over, subsumed into the infinite maw of internet
content, and we have entered another era in comedy, a clowning era—one casting
Keaton’s influence in a strange new, digital light. Whatever drew us to Buster
Keaton’s body a century ago is again at the center of popular entertainment,
whether or not we have a name for it.
This
spring sees the publication of two quite different biographies of Keaton, Dana
Stevens’s Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of
the Twentieth Century, and Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life, by James Curtis.
Stevens is a passionate Keaton fan, and opens her preface by explaining how she
fell for him while taking advantage of a steep student discount at the cinema
while studying in France. “Who was this solemn, beautiful, perpetually airborne
man?” she asked herself. “From what alternate universe, seemingly possessed of
its own post-Newtonian laws of physics, had he been flung?”
Stevens
is Slate’s longtime film critic, and a popular voice on that site’s “Culture
Gabfest” podcast (where, full disclosure, I once interned, and adored her).
Hers is a critical biography, less bound to the track of chronology and more
nimble, alert to parallels and crossed paths. She goes on long discourses
through the life of Keaton’s colleagues and contemporaries, like Roscoe
Arbuckle or F. Scott Fitzgerald, but her flair is for close reading.
For
example, Stevens explores the architectural symbolism of the dangerous Steamboat
Bill, Jr. stunt. Whenever the young Keaton approaches a potential home in his
movies, she writes, it transforms into “a space of danger and transformation.”
Sometimes the walls spin on invisible axes, as in his many revolving-door gags;
always they misbehave. “Structures that seem to offer shelter and physical
safety reveal themselves to be nothing but heaps of wood on their way to
becoming splinters.”
Only a
few years removed from the childhood he spent being flung around the stage by
his father, Stevens argues, Keaton was still playing the same vaudeville gag,
about “the boy who couldn’t be damaged,” only “projected on a cosmic scale.”
For her, the “ephemerality of the built world reveals the foundational
homelessness of Buster’s character, whose defining trait is his ability to move
through chaos”— violent fathers, weather, physics, the twentieth century—“while
remaining miraculously unperturbed.”
Curtis’s
book is much less essayistic, and more traditional. A longtime film historian and
biographer of Hollywood legends like W.C. Fields and Spencer Tracy, he has
produced a book almost 700 pages long and obviously slower, stodgier. If
Stevens’s is a work of criticism and context-building, Curtis’s is a narrative
history, working interviews and sources into a storyline. There are certain
factual parts of the story that Stevens skips over which Curtis clarifies, like
the way Keaton actually survived all those extreme stunts as a child. (He
claimed never to have broken a bone on stage: “I always avoided taking the
impact of a fall on the back of my head, the base of my spine, on my elbows or
knees. That’s how bones are broken.”)
Though
there are a few discrepancies between the two books—was silent actress
Constance Talmadge nicknamed “Dutch” by her mother, Peg, because of her haircut
or her “childhood chubbiness,” as Stevens and Curtis have it,
respectively?—they mostly make a beautiful pair. Curtis substantially updates
the previous “authoritative” life of Keaton, Tom Dardis’s 2002 Keaton: The Man
Who Wouldn’t Lie Down, with new source material. Stevens has the flair and
comparative approach that as a critic I’d naturally favor; historians might
prefer Curtis. Both do excellently in handling the sadder second half of
Keaton’s career, after he signed away creative control over his movies to MGM,
and gravity, mixed with alcohol, finally began to do its work.
Why
Buster Keaton, why now? There’s the centenary of all sorts of events in his
career coming up, but the connection to our own era feels deeper. Buster Keaton
made entertainment out of nothing, using his body, and the way he combined
traditions and invented new ones ended up codifying certain choreographies of
movement into something we just today call “comedy.”
For all
the business news churn around TikTok and the related turn to short video in
social media culture (see: Instagram reels, Facebook Live), there has been
little consideration in the critical press of what it all means for motion
picture culture more broadly. That’s partly because an influence so ubiquitous
is difficult to trace, and the line between social media entertainment and film
stardom has become more porous.
In other
words, modern entertainment celebrity has become a little more like it was for
Keaton, or Arbuckle, or Harold Lloyd, or Charlie Chaplin, people who were their
characters. Curiously, like many celebrities of viral comedy content now,
Keaton was also professionalized as a child—a much more common phenomenon in
the social video era than it has ever been before.
The idea
of the raw physical charm of a baby, or a dog, or a clown, is involuntarily
compelling to us inhabitants of the twenty-first century. There’s a sense that
we still don’t understand why we keep watching this kind of content, but cannot
stop. It’s there in the internet-popular, improvisatory comedy of John Wilson
or Eric André or Quinta Brunson, performers who carry their act with them. Like
Keaton, they might be existentially tortured or deadpan clowns, without a home
in entertainment; like a figure in Samuel Beckett, who dressed his lost and
confused characters just like Keaton, in battered hats and oversize coats, they
stay “miraculously unperturbed” amid chaos.
The
Century of Buster Keaton. By Jo Livingstone. The New Republic, January 21,
2022.
Buster
Keaton was something of an enigma to his own era. The silent-film star launched
himself between rooftops, battled storms and sand dunes, boarded moving
vehicles – and frequently trailed behind them, perfectly horizontal and as
suspended as our disbelief – all in the name of comedy, and all while seeming
unfazed. Film historian Peter Kramer, in his essay The Makings of a Comic Star,
contends that Keaton's "deadpan performance was seen as a highly
inappropriate response to the task of creating characters which were rounded
and believable". His unrelenting imperturbability was misinterpreted as a
lack of emotional expression, or perhaps acting skill.
Nowadays we applaud performances that exhibit this level of restraint, wowed by microscopic gestures that hint at subtext, but refuse to spell it out. As Slate's movie critic and author Dana Stevens points out in Camera Man, a new biography-meets-cultural-history about Buster Keaton and the birth of the 20th Century, "[Keaton] was ahead of his time in many ways". It is exactly this prescience and timelessness that makes Buster Keaton a figure ripe for reference in contemporary performance. His type of minimalism, stoicism and lyricism transcended the 20th Century, and can be seen on-screen now perhaps more than ever.
Stevens cites Keaton's "self-contained stillness" as his "secret weapon", and we can see its weaponisation in the opening sequence of The Cameraman (1928) in which Buster aspires to be a newsreel cameraman in order to impress a girl. As an excited crowd gathers, yelling and gesticulating, to celebrate and capture the marriage of two famous individuals, Buster is caught in the melee and squashed against the woman who will claim his heart. He is a picture of enraptured calm amid the clamour.
Nowadays we applaud performances that exhibit this level of restraint, wowed by microscopic gestures that hint at subtext, but refuse to spell it out. As Slate's movie critic and author Dana Stevens points out in Camera Man, a new biography-meets-cultural-history about Buster Keaton and the birth of the 20th Century, "[Keaton] was ahead of his time in many ways". It is exactly this prescience and timelessness that makes Buster Keaton a figure ripe for reference in contemporary performance. His type of minimalism, stoicism and lyricism transcended the 20th Century, and can be seen on-screen now perhaps more than ever.
Stevens cites Keaton's "self-contained stillness" as his "secret weapon", and we can see its weaponisation in the opening sequence of The Cameraman (1928) in which Buster aspires to be a newsreel cameraman in order to impress a girl. As an excited crowd gathers, yelling and gesticulating, to celebrate and capture the marriage of two famous individuals, Buster is caught in the melee and squashed against the woman who will claim his heart. He is a picture of enraptured calm amid the clamour.
That calmness or stoicism, despite deep inner turmoil, is something that can also be located in Oscar Isaac's critically-acclaimed performance in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Speaking to Scott Feinberg on the Awards Chatter podcast, Isaac reveals that the starting point for his singer-songwriter character Llewyn in The Coen Brothers' folk music odyssey was indeed Buster Keaton. "I thought that was a great inspiration for me", says Isaac, who wanted to tap into what he calls a "comedy of resilience" and to adopt a facial expression that "doesn't really change but has a melancholy to it". And so Isaac subtracted smiling from his arsenal of expressions to birth a character who is frustrated with the world and everyone in it.
But stillness isn't blankness. As both Keaton and Isaac convey, a limited palette can still paint many colours. There is one scene in Inside Llewyn Davis during which Isaac's sardonic melancholia feels particularly Keatonesque – although the entire sequence where he carries a cat onto the subway, his face glazed in faint irritation, before having to lurch after said feline on a crowded carriage, could be a silent comedy – and that's the car ride with John Goodman's Roland Turner. Llewyn rides up front with beat poet and valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) and Goodman's cocky, cane-toting jazz musician reclines in the backseat. Upon snoring himself awake he begins to prod Llewyn with both questions and cane. When he discovers that Llewyn is a Welsh name, and launches into a long and uninteresting story, Isaac's face remains placid. But there is a perceptible smirk, a lick of the lips and a glance out the window that says: "this guy is unbelievable". Down the road and more deeply exasperated, Llewyn reveals that he's a solo act "now" because his partner Mike "threw himself off the George Washington Bridge". There is barely a glimmer of grief, just a stony stare into the middle distance as Isaac's big brown eyes concentrate on the road ahead, but still betray the sadness within.
That stare undeniably shares heritage with Keaton. In the book The Look of Buster Keaton, French film critic Robert Benayoun offers a series of insightful essays alongside strikingly rendered images of Keaton's face, in which his solemnity is on full display. Benayoun posits that "the aim of every close-up" in a Keaton film was to "confront us with [his] gaze. When Buster stares at some unexpected obstacle, in the offscreen space overhead, his gaze makes that obstacle, surprise or danger, or marvel visible… Keaton was the comedian of deliberate attention, intense and dynamic reflection; we can see him thinking" – just as we can see Llewyn contemplating Mike in that car.
Isaac isn't alone in exhibiting this trend towards minimalist acting, or what Shonni Enelow, an academic and author called "recessive aesthetics" in a 2016 article for Film Comment. Compared to Method performances, which functioned within a framework of "tension and release" and generated performances that were "feverish, agitated [and] on the edge of eruption", a remote performance is marked by tiny expressions, contained intensity and "a refusal of big reactions or loud moments". Enelow points to Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, Rooney Mara in Carol and Michael B Jordan in Fruitvale Station, and offers up a reading of their "emotional withdrawal in these performances as a response to a violent or chaotic environment".
Keaton might have done it for laughs more than integrity, but he too saw the value in responding to unpredictable and dangerous events with a stoic shrug or exhalation. This minimalism is also surely part of the reason he's endured. Critic and film historian Imogen Sara Smith points out that "the coolness and subtlety of his style [is] very cinematic in terms of recognising that the camera can pick up very, very small effects". That contemporary acting has become much more internalised and naturalised could be "the reason why he translates more [than other stars of his era] in terms of style of performance", posits Smith.
This recessive melancholy is equally visible in Awkwafina's performance in Lulu Wang's 2019 tragicomedy The Farewell. As The New Yorker observed, "[Awkwafina] gives a master class in hangdoggery", as Chinese-born, US-raised Billi, who returns to Changchun after discovering that her grandma Nai-Nai has weeks to live. After Billi's family decide not to tell Nai-Nai she's dying, she is forced into a mode of repression. The contrivance of that composure can be seen in the fact that prior to and upon learning of Nai-Nai's fate she is humorous, sassy and indignant. The shock of this news is etched all over her face, which doesn't go unnoticed by her mother: "Look at you, you can't hide your emotions". For the sake of her grandma, she learns how. As such, it differs from Keaton and Isaac's mode of performance which is grounded in immutability.
However, Billi's alienation in a culture that is both hers and not hers chimes with the way Keaton is often seen to be performing social conventions. Billi's Uncle Haibin explains, "We're not telling Nai-Nai because it's our duty to carry this emotional burden for her", and he chastises Billi and her father's westernised desire to tell the truth. Billi finds herself having to adapt to eastern values, no matter how uncomfortable they make her. Likewise, Keaton frequently played into the "innocent abroad" archetype; naive in the ways of life and love. In Sherlock Jr (1924) he studies a manual How To Be a Detective, shadows a man and in doing so replicates his walk, and finally, when he gets a moment alone with his love interest in the projection room of a cinema, must look towards the actors on screen to figure out how to kiss her. There is an awareness of performance in Keaton's persona and Sherlock Jr is just one instance where you see him modifying it according to what might be expected of him.
Similarly, Awkwafina moves between performance styles according to what is required of Billi, and there are moments of emotional release where she pivots into Method acting, as when Billi admits to her mother that as a child she was often "confused and scared because [her parents] never told [her] what was going on". But then she recedes and gives herself over to "hangdoggery". Keaton too gave a masterclass in that.
A less disputed element of Keaton's performance style was his sheer athleticism or what Stevens describes as his "signature kineticism". Which brings me on to Adam Driver. I could point to his thoughtful repose in Paterson, his slapstick humour in Marriage Story or his deadpan delivery in The Dead Don't Die as indicative of a Keaton-ness. However it was in last year's macabre rock opera Annette, directed by Leos Carax, that Driver demonstrated a "full-bodied enthusiasm and physicality", as Little White Lies' Hannah Strong put it, that more forcefully summoned the spirit of Keaton.
That skittish, unpredictable physicality is first apparent in Driver's Henry McHenry, an aggressively macho comedian with a reputation for "mildly offensive" jokes, when he stalks on to stage (having just eaten a banana) to rapturous applause. Before long he has burst into song and is leaping and frolicking about with what IndieWire called "balletic precision", in a manner that resembles both Denis Lavant in Mauvais Sang (1986) and Keaton in Grand Slam Opera (a low-budget short he co-wrote and starred in for Educational Pictures in 1936).
Lucidity and precision
"The other thing that's really distinctive about [Keaton]," explains Smith, "is this lucidity and precision". Although he was not a formally trained dancer, his acrobatics are full of the kind of rigour, lyricism and rhythm that any dancer would kill for. "Every little movement that he makes with his face or his body is very clear, but in a way that doesn't feel mechanical," continues Smith. "He had incredible control over everything he did." It is unsurprising then, that there are several actor-dancers (including Lavant) who also simulate Keaton with their level of control.
The first person who comes to mind is Miranda July, who The New Yorker once described as having "the steely fragility of Buster Keaton", and who performs an abstract dance sequence in her 2011 sophomore feature The Future. The performance – made up of precise and sometimes melancholic bodily contortions – shares a lineage with the American dance company Pilobolus (I cannot claim to be the first to notice this) who take their name from a fungus that "propels itself with extraordinary strength, speed and accuracy".
The second person is Ariane Labed, a Greek-French actress for whom dance is a recurring feature: she was cast as a synchronised swimmer in the 2020 TV series Trigonometry, had the best moves in The Lobster's silent disco, and schools us in the art of synchronised gesture during Attenberg's semi-dance sequences. The director of the latter film, Athina Rachel Tsangari, unsurprisingly singled Keaton out, in an interview with Culture Whisper, as an inspiring "composer of human movement".
In Annette, there is a pivotal scene onboard a ship in which the narrative reaches an emotional crescendo. There is a storm brewing, and a drunken Henry (Driver) attempts to waltz with his wife Ann (played by Marion Cotillard) across the stern. Driver's body now mirrors Keaton's in its perpetual motion. Despite their difference in stature they are both industrious and powerful, and more than just the specificity of their movement, its effect is such that you are never quite sure what will happen next, or what they're capable of. Moreover, they exert their physicality in a way that displays a tendency towards possessiveness and machismo. In The Cameraman (1928), Keaton kicks another man into a swimming pool for talking to his date. This anticipates a scene in which Henry wrestles a man known only as The Accompanist into his pool, having had suspicions that he posed a threat to the titular baby Annette.
The other aspect of physicality that Keaton and Driver share is their sex appeal. Returning to the words of Benayoun, he observes a sense of "the sublime in Keaton… He's glamorous. He's gorgeous. [He has a] sculptural sexiness". Not to gush too freely, but Driver is another such sublime specimen; a figure of extreme masculinity and muscularity. And what could be more glamorous than Henry McHenry riding his motorcycle, before kissing Ann with his helmet still on? Keaton and Driver have a commanding presence in common, and when they are on screen, you simply cannot take your eyes off them.
Keaton's performance style is known for its deadpan execution. No matter the ridiculousness of the gag – he liked a banana skin as much as any comedian – his face remains a picture of steadfast seriousness. As Smith points out, it is this contrast between his "deadpan serenity [and] his body constantly [being] subjected to all these indignities [that is] the essence of him as a performer".
Filmmaker and comedian Richard Ayoade frequently channels Keatons deadpan-ness, and often cites him as a point of reference when working with actors. In a 2014 interview, Ayoade reveals that he had Jesse Eisenberg watch Buster Keaton's films before starring in his sophomore feature The Double, feeling that they could demonstrate a "sense of someone acknowledging that everything bad that happens to them shouldn't come as a surprise".
Deadpan delivery and that lack of surprise are also notable in Donald Glover's acting. In Atlanta, the Emmy-winning comedy TV series about two cousins trying to work their way up in Georgia's music industry, Glover (who created and co-writes the show) stars as Earn Marks, an aspiring talent manager who approaches life with a stone-cold sobriety. "Van's dating other people, she's going to kick me out of the house [and] I'm also broke," sighs Earn in the pilot episode, as he explains his current situation with his baby's mother to a colleague, with a subdued weariness.
Earn's expressionlessness doesn't mean that he's devoid of emotion; when he hears his cousin Paper Boi's new track on the radio – having got it into the hands of a producer – he breaks out into a genuine smile. Rather, it serves to underscore the absurdity of modern existence. He is no longer outraged or surprised when setbacks come his way. In the pilot, the biggest reaction he can muster when a white acquaintance drops "the n word" twice in conversation is mild offence. No matter what happens, be it a man on a bus feeding Earn a nutella sandwich or a pet alligator strolling out of his Uncle Willy's house, there is a level of apathy to Earn's deadpan response because on some level, he's seen it all before. And like Keaton, he's just trying to survive.
Keaton's films have likewise been considered a response to the absurdity of modern existence. His characters endlessly invite and contend with calamity, existing in a world where structures – both mechanical and architectural – are in a constant state of precarity, and where the elements themselves (he is perpetually battling wind and rain) have turned against him. In the 1920 two-reel comedy One Week, Keaton and his new wife attempt to build a DIY house. They fail miserably. As Dana Stevens notes in Camera Man, "the resulting structure makes the cabinet of Dr Caligari look Grecian in its symmetry". After a freight train crashes through the building, they stick a "For Sale" sign in the rubble, and head for new pastures. You could just as easily see Keaton describing this character as homeless but "not real homeless" as when Earn defends his peripatetic living situation.
That said, there are of course other authors of this deadpan mode of expression who may well have influenced performers such as Glover. As Tina Post – an assistant professor at the University of Chicago specialising in racial performativity and deadpan aesthetics – asserts "the term [deadpan] precedes Buster Keaton or is coterminous with his rise". Post also points out that "the way that Keaton couples a blank expression with a bodily endurability is very much in line with American constructions of blackness." Post is quick to point out that expanding the definition or lineage of deadpan isn't a condemnation of Keaton himself, but rather a consideration of "the ways performatives move through American culture". Much as in the way the 20th Century's benighted use of blackface has evolved to allow for its memorable subversion, or rather inversion, in the Teddy Perkins episode of Atlanta.
This chimes with the way Keaton himself has migrated through screen culture, ever accessible and influential, with aspects of his performance style being adopted, reacted to and modified in order to suit a range of bodies, genres and purposes. There is still no-one quite like Keaton: the tension and contradiction in his comedy is as unique now as it was in the 1920s. However, it feels safe to say that the restraint as well as the commitment present in these acclaimed, 21st-Century performances owe a debt to a filmmaker and performer who figured out not just how to take a camera apart and put it back together again, but what it was capable of capturing and expressing.
Why Buster Keaton is today's most influential actor. By Nicole Davis. BBC, January 24, 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment