Buster Keaton

[SomethingElse]

A lot of his incredible silent movies have come into the public domain. Such treasures of a bygone era...

Buster Keaton's Vaudeville Childhood

By the time he was 4 years old, Buster Keaton was already a regular part of his family's vaudeville act.

My mother's father, named Cutler, had a medicine show, and my mother was part of it. My mother was playing in this show. She played piano, bass fiddle and a cornet, from the time she was around 12 years old. So when she grew up she played old-maid parts in shows. She was liable to play anything, from "Rags to Riches" to "Way Down East."

My father came from an Indiana family on the outskirts of Terre Haute, in a town called Dog Walk. He first heard about the gold rush in California, so he rode freight cars and bummed his way out to get into that. Not much luck. He got back home.

About that time, Oklahoma opened up the Cherokee strip, so he went into that, and he got himself 160 acres near Perry, Oklahoma. He became great friends with the man going alongside of him at the same time; that man was Will Rogers. Couple of years later, they opened up Oklahoma proper, and he went back into that one--another land rush. This time he headed for Perry itself and got two city lots. On the first land rush, to the Cherokee strip, he left home with $8, and on the border, before he entered the Cherokee strip, he bought $1 worth of bacon and beans and $7 worth of ammunition, because you had to stay up day and night to protect your claimstake. If you tried to catch some sleep, they'd just knock you in the head, take your name off it and put their own up. This was the day of the "Sooners."

Buster Keaton talks about his early years.

He established this second claim in the Oklahoma rush, and was waiting in line to clear his claim when this medicine show of Cutler's came through. He went in and saw the show, and fell for the soubrette, then 17. Soon as he got his claim filed, he joined the show as a stagehand and worked his way up to playing bits in the show, and it was just automatically a natural thing for him. He was a natural dancer, a great pair of legs for eccentric work and high kicking, and a natural clown. After he was with the show about six months, he and my mother were married. I was born on a one-night stand in Kansas, in a little town called Pickway. They left my mother there for two weeks, and then she rejoined the show with me and I've never seen the show since.

My father by then had left her father's show, so the show I was born with was called the "Harry Houdini and Keaton Medicine Show Company." That was the great Harry Houdini, the handcuff king. That's how he started out. And he gave me the name of Buster. I was 6 months old, in a little hotel we were living at in some town. I crawled out of the room, crawled to the head of the stairs, and fell down the whole flight of stairs. When I alit at the bottom and they saw that I was all right, I wasn't hurt badly, they said, "It sure was a buster," and the old man said, "That's a good name for him." I never lost the name.

So that's their background and their start--my parents.

Before I was a year old, they quit medicine shows and started into the smallest of the small-time vaudeville, trying to work their way up. They had some very tough times. Of course, they had makeup on me and were walking me out just as soon as I could walk in front of an audience. By the time I was 4 years old, I was a regular member of the act, wearing grotesque clothes with a bald-headed wig and Irish beard on, and slap shows. It started when a manager in Wilmington, Delaware, said, "Keep him in the act and I'll raise your salary $10 a week." That's what started me.

It wasn't Sarah Bernhardt who said, "How can you do this to this poor boy?" when they were throwing me around madly. Everybody said that. From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week--that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can't do acrobatics, can't walk a wire, can't juggle--a lot of those things--but there was nothing said in the law that you can't kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we'd get called into court every other week, see.

Once they took me to the mayor of New York City, into his private office, with the city physicians here in New York, and they stripped me to examine me for broken bones and bruises. Finding none, the mayor gave me permission to work. The next time it happened, the following year, they sent me to Albany, to the governor of the state. Then in his office, same thing: state physicians examined me, and they gave me permission to work in New York state.

Massachusetts thought I was a midget.

"The Three Keatons" was one of the standard big laughing acts of vaudeville, what you'd call a second headliner. We seldom headlined, because you always had Lillian Russell, Nazimova, Weber and Fields--there were so many. We were generally at the bottom of the bill. Jolson wasn't at that time; he came later. I'm ahead of Jolson by about fifteen years. Jolson came out of minstrels into vaudeville, from vaudeville into the Winter Garden.

My first appearance in New York was in 1900, at Tony Pastor's Theater. I can remember Tony Pastor. It was supposed to be the theater of the United States at the time. It was on 14th Street, near Third Avenue. Right up the block was the Academy of Music, and the Keithspur Theater, the Fourteenth Street Theater. That was when I was 5 years old. I played there about three times for Pastor. He died around 1902. Then of course the theater went into burlesque after that, and dropped out.

We'd had trouble with the United Booking Office, and it forced us to go with Pantages, which was three shows a day. We tried it for a few weeks, and we couldn't stand it. We'd get bruised or strain something, and you couldn't heal up. That odd show just seemed to cripple you. We had been doing two. So we quit. I sent the folks home to our summer home in Muskegon, Michigan, and I came down to New York to see what I could do. The first thing they did was slap me into the Winter Garden, with the Shuberts.

fathom.com "The Reminiscences of Buster Keaton" in the collection of the Columbia Univeristy Oral History Research Office. Interview from November 1958. Copyright 2000 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

 

[SomethingElse]

"Fatty" Arbuckle Puts Buster Keaton in the Movies

Buster Keaton sits on the ship used in filming The Navigator, made in 1924.

So Arbuckle, who had met me on the street, said, "Have you ever been in pictures?"
"No."

"Come down and do a bit with me before rehearsals start."

"All right."

I went down there and not only did the bit but stayed and worked through his whole picture, for about a week, and by that time I went up to our agent and said, "I want to stay in pictures. I don't want to go in no 'Passing Show.'" He said, "All right, we'll tear up the contract."

"What'll the Shuberts say about that?"

He said, "They can't say nothing. We'll just tear up the contract." The Butcher Boy, with Arbuckle, was my first film.

The first time I ever walked in front of a camera was the scene when I came in to buy a bucket full of molasses. They've made me do that half a dozen times on television, since.

The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

Buster Keaton talks about first making movies.

Fatty Arbuckle was one of the greatest friends I ever had. I was only with Arbuckle about three pictures when I became his assistant director. He came up and said, "From now on, you're assistant director." You fell into those jobs. He never referred to me as the assistant director, but I was the guy who sat alongside of the camera and watched the scenes that he was in. I ended up just practically co-directing with him. He was considered one of the best comedy directors in pictures at the time. The public made him.

Later, the complaints were so piling up--every state in the union had half a dozen boards, and it created a censorship problem. The first thing they did was to go down to Washington--all the brass of the picture industry went down there, and got the best man they could get out of Washington, D.C., which was William H. Hays. They made him head of the censorship of the motion picture industry. That was to offset and stop local censorship boards, because if they hadn't stopped them, the censorship rules in Kansas would have eliminated things from a picture that Massachusetts didn't worry about, and vice versa. By the time you tried to please all the censorship boards, you couldn't have made a motion picture. It wouldn't have been possible.

Certainly Fatty Arbuckle was wronged. He was no more guilty of that charge than I was. Everybody had their pictures in the paper for days and weeks, and it was headline news. W.R. Hearst told Joe Schenck in front of me, "This is hard to believe, but we sold more papers on the Arbuckle trial than we did on the sinking of the Lusitania.

After The Butcher Boy, there was The Rough-house, His Wedding Night, Coney Island. That was done at Coney--we used Coney Island for location. I remember making it very well, but it's nothing to write about. We just went down there, went on the concessions at Luna Park, and got in trouble--that's all there was to that.

During the First World War, I was in the infantry, at Camp Kearney, California. I was in France about four months when the war ended. Our division, the same as the other divisions, did a lot of entertaining. Headquarters troop sent out to find what talents there were throughout the division, and said, "Assemble them all at headquarters. We'll put them under the command of a chaplain, and give them a regimental band to travel with them in trucks, and try to produce a show, just to entertain the different places around your section." This is while we were all waiting for boats to go home. There was no money donated, no scenery, no props, no nothing.

In a division in the First World War--which ran around 38,000, almost double what it was in the Second--they could manage to find, out of that many, around 22 men that could sing or dance or do something. We organized a minstrel show. We'd play about three camps a week, then get back to our own base.

I did a couple of screwy things in the show.

Coming back, they took me off the boat, for having trouble with my ears, and sent me to the hospital in Baltimore, the big one. Then they sent me to Michigan to be discharged. From there I went right back to California and back to work.

While I was in the Army, they had moved the Arbuckle Company out of New York, back to California. When I got to California, I made two pictures with Arbuckle. Paramount had just bought the famous Broadway show called "The Round-Up," and they wanted Arbuckle to play the sheriff in it--which is a straight part, not comedy. They made the deal with Joe Schenck. Also, they would like to keep Arbuckle and make features with him, and use big stories like Brewster's Millions. So Schenck sold Arbuckle's contract to Zukor, and immediately turned Arbuckle's company over to me, and bought Chaplin's old studio in Hollywood and named it the Keaton Studio. That was Chaplin's studio before Charlie built the one that he's had for all these years. There were only Keaton films made there. A couple of times we rented space to some friends of ours to come in and shoot. I had 25 percent of that company.

Now, this was a very poor outfit, this Arbuckle Company that I fell heir to. These were my stockholders: Joe Schenck was president, and his brother Nicholas Schenck vice-president. David Bernstein was secretary-treasurer; he was also secretary-treasurer of Loewe's, Inc. Marcus Loewe, Doc Giannini--the original president of the Bank of Italy, which later became the Bank of America--Irving Berlin, those were my stockholders.

When they first made the deal to take my pictures, which would have been two-reelers, Loewe had bought the Metro studios in Hollywood. They bought a show from John Golden called "The Henrietta." It was done twice on Broadway. It was done in the Gay Nineties first. The second show starred William H. Crane and Douglas Fairbanks. That was one of his Broadway hits, before he went into pictures. The character in the show was called Berty the Lamb. His father was a Wall Street tycoon, and he was the Bear of Wall Street and they called his son Berty the Lamb. So in one of Fairbanks's early pictures, the second or third, he used that character. He didn't use the original show, just the character.

fathom.com . "The Reminiscences of Buster Keaton" in the collection of the Columbia Univeristy Oral History Research Office. Interview from November 1958. Copyright 2000 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

 

[SomethingElse]

Director, actor, writer, and producer... here is his filmography at IMDb. A few films in the public domain... just click on the title to watch the movie.

The Scarecrow c. 1920

One Week c. 1920

Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, c. 1931

 

[SomethingElse]

Speak Easily, c. 1932

The Boat c. 1921

Steamboat Bill, Jr., c. 1928

Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton's work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time.

Born in 1895 to Joe and Myra Keaton, Joseph Francis Keaton got his name when, at six months, he fell down a flight of stairs. Reaching the bottom unhurt and relatively undisturbed, he was picked up by Harry Houdini who said the kid could really take a "buster," or fall. From then on, his parents and the world knew him as Buster Keaton. By the age of three, Keaton joined the family's vaudeville act, which was renamed The Three Keatons. For years he was knocked over, thrown through windows, dropped down stairs, and essentially used as a living prop. It was this training in vaudeville that prepared him for the fast-paced slapstick comedy of the silent movies.

When, in 1917, his father's drinking broke up the act, Keaton moved to Hollywood, where a chance meeting brought him contact with another former vaudevillian. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, one of the most famous of the comic actors of the time, took Keaton on and showed him the ropes of the movie industry. For the rest of his life, Keaton would acknowledge Arbuckle as one of his closest friends and his greatest influence. With his deadpan humor and exceptional acrobatic technique, the lanky Keaton was a perfect partner for Arbuckle's clumsy antics. The audience agreed, and within a few years, Keaton had acquired the notoriety to move out on his own.

The bulk of Keaton's major work was done during the 1920s. Writing, directing, and staring in these films, Keaton created a world unlike the other comic stars of the times. Where Harold Lloyd battled physical adversity trying to make it to the top, and Charlie Chaplin avoided catastrophe through luck and good will, Keaton was an observer, a traveler caught up in his surroundings. He often found himself in the same compromising circumstances as Chaplin and Lloyd (chased by an angry crowd, left behind by a train), but he maintained a sense of even composure throughout. No matter how lost or downtrodden Keaton seemed to be, he was never one to be pitied. The NEW YORK TIMES said of him, "In a film world that exaggerated everything, and in which every emotion was dramatized and elaborated, he remained impassive and solemn, his poker-faced inscrutability suppressing all emotion." It was this "stone face," however, that came to represent a sense of optimism and everlasting inquisitiveness.

In films such as THE NAVIGATOR (1924), THE GENERAL (1926), AND THE CAMERAMAN (1928), Keaton portrayed characters whose physical abilities seemed completely contingent on their surroundings. Considered one of the greatest acrobatic actors, Keaton could step on or off a moving train with the smoothness of getting out of bed. Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films. The subtlety of the work, however, left Keaton behind the more popular Chaplin and Lloyd. By the 1930s, the studio felt it was in their best interest to take control of his films. No longer writing or directing, Keaton continued to work at a grueling pace. Not understanding the complexity of his genius, they wrote for him simple characters that only took advantage of the most basic of his skills. For Keaton, as for many of the silent movie stars, the final straw was the advent of the talkies.

Though he acted in a number of films in the '30s (often alongside Jimmy Durante), Keaton no longer possessed the stoic charm many had grown to love. He worked as an uncredited writer for the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton, eking out a living at a fraction of his former salary. He began drinking and through the '40s did very little work of serious interest. It was not until 1953, and his appearance in Chaplin's LIMELIGHT that the public revival of Keaton's work began. More than simply a nostalgia for the old days, this new interest encouraged Keaton to revive his career with frequent appearances on television. The sheer ability of his acrobatics astounded audiences who had become used to less sophisticated physical comedy, and by the 1960s, his films were returning to the theaters and he was being hailed as the greatest actor of the silent era.

In 1966, after finishing work on Richard Lester's A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, Buster Keaton died at the age of sixty-nine. His career spanned six decades and touched the lives of millions of people. He had worked with everyone from Marlene Dietrich to Samuel Beckett, Cecil B. DeMille to Tony Randall, and had maintained a seemingly selfless composure throughout. For many, this deadpan style was a poignant reminder of the fragility of life in the age of complex and overwhelming machines. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Buster Keaton's films seem as funny, touching, and relevant as ever.

pbs.org

 

[StereoTypeA]

I love him to pieces. His movies were incredible.
The General would stand up to any film today
and it is more entertaining than 99% of action
flicks in theatres today. As far as style goes, he
is known for the "pork-pie" hat and quiet stare.

[geocities.com][mark schiff.com][busterstuff.com][busterkeaton.com]

 

[keroppi]

He had a very melancholic look which I just adore. He sometimes reminded me of my late grandpa.

mptv

 

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