Consider it Stolen! —the curious case of "Singin' in the Rain"

Donald O'Connor: "Make 'em Laugh"

[post 433]

Way back in the day, 1980 to be precise, when I was working with Joe Killian and Michael Zerphy, whenever we saw other performers do a bit we really liked, we'd say "consider it stolen!" I think the phrase originated with Joe, but he may have stolen it.

You know what they say, there's nothing new under the sun, and that mostly holds true for physical comedy. I'm always amused, for example, when the Marx Brothers (or even Lucille Ball) are given credit for originating the broken mirror routine (Duck Soup), when in fact it not only appears in many early silent film comedies, but is referenced in even earlier reviews of vaudeville acts. Sure, there's originality, but there's a whole lot of borrowing going on and —if we're lucky— creative reshaping of traditional materials.

Keaton as The Cameraman

The historian-detective in me has enjoyed tracing this kind of thing, for example in this post on what I call the oblivious gag. My return to this theme is inspired by some excellent detective work done by silent film pianist and historian Ben Model, showing how Singin' in the Rain (1952) borrowed from Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928). But we'll get to that juicy discovery a bit later...

You all know Singin' in the Rain, right? If not, you're in for a treat! It's a corny but delightful MGM musical from1952 starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor, all about the rough transition from silent film to sound. The remarkable thing about Singin' in the Rain is that it began not as a story idea but as a musical woven around old songs, but also a musical partially woven around old physical comedy material.

The big musical link was Arthur Freed. As Cecil Adams points out in this Straight Dope article, "Freed, the producer responsible for most of the MGM musicals of the 40s and 50s, began his career as a songwriter. "Singin' in the Rain" was part of Brown and Freed's score for MGM's first "all talking, all singing, all dancing" musical, The Hollywood Revue of 1929. In 1952, Freed decided to use his own songbook as the basis for an original musical, as he had done with Jerome Kern's songs in 1946 (Till the Clouds Roll By) and George Gershwin's in 1951 (An American in Paris)."

They had Freed's songs, might as well shape a show around them!

So the song Singin' in the Rain goes all the way back to one of the two first big MGM musicals of the sound era, which featured "30 MGM stars! More Stars Than There Are in Heaven!" Here it is, the show's big finale:



Not only did the songs come first, but the fact that they all came from the late 1920s gave screenwriters Comden & Green the idea for the story. According to this piece on the Cafe Songbook site, "Betty Comden and Adolph Green returned to M-G-M in May of 1950 to begin work on the screenplay for the movie they had been contracted to write, believing they were also contracted to write the lyrics for its songs. M-G-M clarified the terms of the contract to them. It was the studio's option regarding the lyrics and M-G-M's choice was that all the songs would be by the songwriting team of Arthur Freed (the film's producer) and Nacio Herb Brown, his songwriting partner. Furthermore, they would be almost exclusively songs from their existing catalog. While looking at these songs, Comden and Green noticed that Freed-Brown songs such as "Should I?," "All I Do Is Dream of You," "Good Morning," You Were Meant for me," "You Are My Lucky Star," "Singin' in the Rain," etc. were written in the late twenties which gave them the idea to create a story that came from that period; and the lynch pin of the plot they created was based on the disastrous results that sometimes occurred when silent screen actors and actresses were forced to talk on screen, to be heard no matter how awful they might sound."

All these songs made it into the film, or should I say "made the film"?

Donald O'Connor

A Tale of Two Tunes
The film was coming together, but co-director Stanley Donen still wanted a solo number for Donald O'Connor, who played Gene Kelly's comic sidekick and was a talented and very physical comedian. In fact, O'Connor's parents were vaudevillians, his father an Irish-born circus strongman, dancer, and comedian, and his mother a circus acrobat, bareback rider, tightrope walker, and dancer. There was nothing in the Arthur Freed oeuvre that fit, but that didn't stop MGM from doing some more borrowing. They just went back to an earlier MGM movie starring Gene Kelly, The Pirate (1948), and "borrowed" from Cole Porter instead.

Again according to Cecil Adams, "Donen suggested that Brown and Freed write a new song, pointing to Porter’s “Be a Clown” as the sort of thing he thought would fit in at that point in the script. Brown and Freed obliged —maybe too well— with “Make ‘Em Laugh.” Donen called it “100 percent plagiarism,” but Freed was the boss and the song went into the film. Cole Porter never sued, although he obviously had grounds enough. Apparently he was still grateful to Freed for giving him the assignment for The Pirate at a time when Porter’s career was suffering from two consecutive Broadway flops."

Grateful, or simply too afraid of MGM's power?

So that's the background. Ironically, Kelly sang the original "Be a Clown" song, and in Make 'em Laugh, it is O'Connor singing to cheer up Kelly's character. Here's a short comparison, brief excerpts from each so you can see the similarity between the two tunes and the message.



But it's not just the tune that was lifted.  The Make 'en Laugh lyrics directly paraphrase those of Be a Clown. Clever but barely disguised plagiarism:

In The Pirate, Kelly is about to be hung by his neck in the town square. O'Connor quotes what that immortal bard, Samuel J. Snodgrass, said "as he was about to be led to the guillotine."

While O'Connor's dad advised him to "be an actor my son, but be a comical one," Kelly was only three when his "clever" mom told him "I’ve got your future sewn up if you take this advice: be a clown, be a clown."

And why go into the funny business? Because you'll get rich, unlike in those other more effete professions. Kelly's mom asks him "Why be a great composer with your rent in arrears? Why be a major poet and you’ll owe it for years? A college education I should never propose. A bachelor’s degree won’t even keep you in clothes." Likewise, O'Connor's dad warns him that "you could study Shakespeare and be quite elite, and you could charm the critics and have nothing to eat."

But if you're funny, what happens?  Kelly is promised  a bright future where he'll "only stop with top folks" and "he'll never lack" and "millions you will win." O'Connor likewise will have "the world at your feet."

Okay, sounds good. But what does it take to be funny? Kelly's clown is instructed to...
• show ‘em tricks, tell ‘em jokes
• wear the cap and the bells
• be a crack Jackanapes
• give 'em quips, give 'em fun
• act the fool, play the calf
• stand on your head
• wiggle your ears
• wear a painted mustache
• spin on your nose
• quack like a duck

O'Connor's comical actor must...

• slip on a banana peel
• [perform] old honky-tonk monkeyshines
• tell ‘em a joke, but give it plenty of hoke.
• take a fall, butt a wall, split a seam.
• start off by pretending you’re a dancer with grace, wiggle till they’re giggling all over the place, then get a great big custard pie in the face

The actual acts differ more than the lyrics because they are structured around the individual talents of the performers. "Be a Clown" actually is done twice in The Pirate, first with Kelly and the fabulous Nicklaus Brothers, and is later reprised by Kelly and Judy Garland. In both cases, it's a partner number with more of a dance base to it. O'Connor, on the other hand, is both a better comedian and a far more skilled acrobat. The result, one of the greatest physical comedy acts ever, became his signature piece.

Here are the complete versions. Enjoy!


Be a Clown #1 (Kelly & the Nicklaus Brothers)


Be a Clown #2 (Kelly & Judy Garland)


Make 'em Laugh



The Plot Thickens

Keaton & Josephine the
monkey in The Cameraman

But that's just the beginning! As I said at the top, this blog post got jump-started by Ben Model unearthing a less obvious and even more fascinating Singin' in the Rain borrow. And this one is all the juicier because it involves our hero, Buster Keaton.

Take it away, Ben...



Wow! Like I said, great detective work. And as if that wasn't amazing enough, think back to the original version of the song from The Hollywood Revue of 1929.  In that cavalcade of stars, did you notice the one luminary who couldn't / wouldn't have "a smile on his face"?  Yep, that's "the great stoneface" himself at the 39-second mark.

The one thing I would add to Ben's chronology is that in the years before Singin' in the Rain (1952), Keaton was an uncredited gag writer for a bunch of MGM movies, including the Marx. Brothers, but especially a slew of Red Skelton vehicles, right up to his 1950 Watch the Birdie, which was partially a remake of The Cameraman, and two more 1951 Skelton films.  So if Keaton wasn't directly consulted on Singin' in the Rain, he was certainly still a presence at the studio. It was also in 1950 that his appearance on the Ed Wynn Show led to a lot of work on early television and made him less dependent on the Hollywood film industry.

Kelly & Skelton in Du Barry Was a Lady

And speaking of Red Skelton...
A talented pantomimist, Red Skelton, like Keaton, had grown up in show business, performing in medicine shows at the age of ten, and later burlesque and vaudeville. Keaton's work with him in the 1940s would be enough to fill another blog post (don't get me started!), but there are a couple of possible links between Skelton and Singin' in the Rain. Gene Kelly's "Broadway Ballet" fantasy sequence was apparently based on an idea that was used for MGM's Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), starring Skelton as a nightclub worker who dreams that he's King Louis XV. And who was his romantic rival for Lucille Ball's affections in that one? Gene Kelly, natch. (And before the film, it was a Broadway musical starring Bert Lahr chasing Ethel Merman.)

But even more interesting than that is the similarity between some of Skelton's pratfall moves from Du Barry and those of O'Connor, as seen in this comparison video. In the first part, Skelton and friend think they have tricked Gene Kelly into downing the drink with the Mickey Finn, but (of course!) the glasses have been switched, which leads to Skelton's wonderful drunk pratfall sequence. Skeleton is drunk, O'Conner is giddy, but the writhing around and the circular movements when on their side on the floor are strikingly similar.



Did O'Connor borrow this? Who knows? —but not necessarily. It's just as likely that these moves were standard fare. After all, the 108 pratfall was also common property (if you could do it!). Still, you need someone to preserve the vocabulary, and in the yakkety-yak-yak 1940s, that someone may well have been Red Skelton.

Of course, once you start making these connections, it's endless —ancestry.com run amok— so I'll stop the narrative here and just leave you with a few tidbits for dessert...

• When they made the biopic The Buster Keaton Story in 1957, can you guess who played Keaton? Dramatic pause. Are you really guessing? Space filler. Space filler Space filler. More space filler. Even more space filler. Yep, Donald O'Connor. This stuff's downright incestuous.

• Trav SD points out that Singin' in the Rain producer/songwriter Arthur Freed wrote material for the Marx Brothers’ act and performed in their sketches way back in their vaudeville days.

• As for the Nicklaus Brothers, according to Wikipedia "this dance sequence was omitted when shown in some cities in the South, such as Memphis, because it featured black performers the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, dancing with Kelly. It was the first time they had danced onscreen with a Caucasian, and while it was Kelly's insistence that they perform with him, they were the ones who were punished. Essentially blackballed, they moved to Europe and did not return until the mid-60s."

• Kevin Kline does his own version of "Be a Clown" in the 2004 Cole Porter biopic, De-Lovely. Interesting enough and a much bigger production number.

• In 2006 or so, Volkswagon did this commercial where they remade Gene Kelly's dance in the rain, using his face and choreography but a break dancer's body and moves. Very interesting!

• Anthony Balducci, whose Journal blog I highly recommend, has an excellent piece about gag borrowing/ stealing, with some interesting comparisons between the tv work of Ernie Kovacs and the sketches of the British comedy duo Morecambe & Wise.

• For a list of Keaton's uncredited gag writing, see Buster Keaton: Cut To The Chase by Marion Meade.

• Keaton's downward spiral as a star at MGM is chronicled in Kevin Brownlow's 2004 documentary, So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton and MGM. It is included as part of the DVD set, Buster Keaton Collection: (The Cameraman / Spite Marriage / Free & Easy).

• Braggedy-brag-brag, but my personal show-biz DNA intersects with several of the performers mentioned here:
—My first acting job was just days past my 7th birthday, a skit with Skelton and Jackie Gleason on the Red Skelton Show. Skelton had worked extensively with Keaton, and Keaton had done a version of clown Sliver Oakley's classic one-man baseball pantomime in The Cameraman. The skit I did with Gleason & Skelton was —yep!— about a baseball game. Also, around this time, Skelton did some research for creating his Freddie the Freeloader tramp clown. He visited Coney Island and studied the clown Freddy the Tramp, later "borrowing" some of his bits for his new character. Freddy the Tramp was the father of my long-time clown partner, Fred Yockers. When Fred, Jan Greenfield, and I started the First NY International Clown-Theatre Festival in 1983, Skelton agreed to be honorary chairperson, though we never actually got to speak with him.
—Keaton was on the Ed Wynn Show in 1950, and I was on a tv show with Wynn about nine years later. (There's no way telling which of us Wynn preferred working with.)
— In The Pirate, the great character actor Walter Slezak played the town mayor who (spoiler alert!) is really the pirate Macoco. In 1958 I acted with Slezak on "Beaver Patrol," a comic drama on the U.S. Steel Hour about an eccentric New York uncle who visits relatives in Beverly Hills, takes over a scout troupe, and teaches the spoiled rich kids gritty New York City stuff. Yes, I'm the one looking at the camera. I do remember Slezak as being very affable and a pleasure to work with.

Learning from Keaton

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I'm always amazed to find young physical comedians who study and work hard at their craft and yet have only minimal familiarity with the silent films of Buster Keaton.

WTF?!?!

When I was in my early 20s —the pre VCR days— the only way to see his films was to go to Manhattan's Elgin Cinema (now the Joyce Theatre) for the annual Keaton festival and try to take in the enormous breadth of his work —without a rewind button. In the audience were half of the city's clowns, all muttering "how did he do that?" Nowadays, with DVD and the internet, there's no obstacle to appreciating and learning from the master.

So buy the DVD set and keep the remote handy. Meanwhile, here are several excellent video pieces analyzing his work. The first is from the noteworthy video series by Tony Zhou, Every Frame a Painting, which reminds us that Keaton was also a damn good film director, one who firmly believed that physical comedy should not be faked. (Thanks to Skye Leith and Mark Mitton for the link on this one!)

__________________________________

"One reason Sennet did not hire trained acrobats for his Keystone force was because a trained acrobat seldom can get laughs in pictures when taking a comedy fall.  He looks what he is, a trained acrobat doing his stuff, instead of a character in the picture taking a stumble accidentally...  Though I have been called an acrobat, I would say I am only a half-acrobat, at most.  What I do know about is body control."

—Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick

__________________________________

Sometimes Keaton is known too much for his stunts and not enough for his talents as a comic actor. Here's a sweet two-and-a-half minute compilation of reaction shots by the great stoneface. (Thanks to Larry Pisoni for the link!)

__________________________________

Interesting fact: Did you know that Buster Keaton couldn't do a back handspring? He learned his acrobatics in vaudeville, not in a gymnasium.

__________________________________

Okay: "half-acrobat," comic actor, writer, stuntman, film director. But did you know that Keaton was also an early pioneer of film special effects? Here's a thorough documentary on the making of one of my favorite Keaton movies, Sherlock, Jr.  This was put out by Kino in 2010 and the main credit reads: Written by David B. Pearson with Patricia Eliot Tobias.




If Keaton has a worthy successor in film, it's probably Jackie Chan. Here's Tony Zhou again with a spot-on analysis of how physical comedy works in Chan's films. Some really good insights.



In his notes to the YouTube video, Zhou summarized Chan's approach as follows:

The 9 Principles of Action Comedy
1. Start with a DISADVANTAGE
2. Use the ENVIRONMENT
3. Be CLEAR in your shots
4. Action & Reaction in the SAME frame
5. Do as many TAKES as necessary
6. Let the audience feel the RHYTHM
7. In editing, TWO good hits = ONE great hit
8. PAIN is humanizing
9. Earn your FINISH

If you haven't seen enough, here are two more related pieces from Zhou's Every Frame a Painting series:
• Edgar Wright: How to Do Visual Comedy

• Chuck Jones: The Evolution of an Artist

• You can support Every Frame a Painting here.

Lupino Lane's Pratfall Tutorial

[post 408]

Yes, the blog is back! I've pretty much been away from it for a year as I worked on a new book (see sidebar), but I've got plenty of new stuff to share. Well, this post's new stuff is actually quite old, but I'm sure new to most of you: a tutorial on pratfalls from silent film great Lupino Lane's out-of-print book, How to Become a Comedian.

If you don't know Lupino Lane (1892–1959), it's because a lot of his best work is still not available on DVD or YouTube. Growing up in London in the storied Lupino music hall family (dating back to 1612), it was no surprise that he made his stage debut at the age of 4 and was already a seasoned veteran when he made his first film at 23. Lane never developed a clown persona as memorable as that of Chaplin or Keaton (or even Lloyd or Langdon), but he was Keaton's equal as an acrobat, and Chaplin's as a dancer, and all three shared an encyclopedic knowledge of physical comedy vocabulary and gags.

Before we get to that tutorial, here's a clip from Hello, Sailors (1927), co-starring his brother Wallace Lupino, that shows off some of Lane's acrobatic prowess.




And here's a spoof of an Apache dance from Fandango (1928). Try to imagine this one with tango music instead!



Yes, Lane was partial to cheap special effects, especially using wires to fly.

Oh yeah, he could sing too. When sound films came in, Lane was better positioned than most for the transition, as he was in some ways more at home in musical comedy than in silent film. No wonder he shows up right away in Ernst Lubitsch's first talkie, The Love Parade (1929), which starred Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Here he is with Lillian Roth in a comic turn that showcases all of his talents. (Most of the physical comedy comes after the 2-minute mark.)



After his Hollywood phase in the 20s, Lane returned to England and enjoyed a prosperous film and stage career. In the late 30s he starred in the musical Me and My Girl (a revival made it to Broadway in 1986) for which he created the dance craze "The Lambeth Walk" and became famous all over again. And in 1946 he published How to Become a Comedian. Not necessarily a great book, but a very interesting one, and it does include the following chapter on ''funny falls."

A lot of standard stuff here, but there are some interesting moves and insights. (Small quibble: I've always spelled it "knap," which Merriam-Webster defines as "to break with a quick blow.") The instructions are rudimentary at best, so be careful. If you get hurt, I'm not legally liable!

The Silent Films of Billy Crystal's Father

[post 398]

Don't want to give away the joke, so just watch!



If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the source for this clip, Billy Crystal's one-man autobiographical show, 700 Sundays, available on HBO Go and on DVD. And if you like movies about comedians, I also recommend Crystal's Mr. Saturday Night (1992).

The Comedy Dance of ‪Jirí Kylián‬

[post 396]

Last night I made it out to Triskelion Arts in Williamsburg for a totally fun double-bill of comedy dance with a Valentine's Day theme, and it got me thinking how some of the best physical comedy is to be found in the world of dance. [The double-bill was the Red Gloves'  Flannery and the Valentine’s Day Ninja, created by Billy Schultz and Geneviève Leloup; and Tough Cookie Dance's Love Letters, by Josselyn Levinson. If you happen to be reading this on Valentine's Day in NYC, don't miss the last performance tonight.]

All of which leads me to the subject of today's post, the very funny comedy dance of legendary Czech choreographer Jirí Kylián‬, whose main body of work was created with the Nederlands Dans Theater. While most of his work is more "serious," he has choreographed a few video pieces that I find hysterically funny.

The first two I think are actually excerpts from a 35-minute piece Birth-Day (2001) set to the music of Mozart. Clearly this hyper-kinetic work is made for video. The speeding up of the action is an exaggeration of silent film undercranking, and I'm assuming they were shot with slowed-down Mozart in the background to keep them on the beat. The first high-octane excerpt is this very funny bedroom romp:



And the companion piece, a richly detailed kitchen sketch with slaps, juggling, and percussion layered onto the comic movement and caricatures:



And if you're thinking I'm going to tell you not to try this at home, well, it's too late, because the Tel Aviv School of the Arts already did. Here's a video of their students reprising the piece, but with sevens pair of students each getting their 15 seconds of fame. If nothing else, an interesting classroom project:



Kylian's love of silent film is even more obvious in a movie he made with director Boris

Paval Conen that combines footage of silent film car chases with modern dancers and actors, filmed in and around an abandoned coal mine in the Czech Republic. It is set to the music of Georges Bizet, and the title of course is Car Men.

I haven't seen the whole film yet but I have just ordered the DVD. Not sure how all this mayhem translates into a half-hour film, but the descriptions says that the film characters are based on the original Carmen opera. Watch for an update to this post, but meanwhile, here's a short excerpt that gives some idea of what he's playing with.



AND MORE:
• Though not comedy, the piece Stamping Ground has a lot of eccentric movement.
• Here's a 7-minute video where Kylián‬ discusses his study of animal movement in creating characters for his dancers.
• Kylián‬'s web site has a thorough listing of his creations, with video.

Clyde Bruckman: The Gag Man

[post 383]

Today is the 120th birthday of Clyde Bruckman.

Clyde who?

You've probably never heard of him because, even in his heyday, he was never actually famous. He was for many years a gag writer for Buster Keaton who also directed for Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, and W.C. Fields, and wrote for Abbot & Costello and the Three Stooges. In the silent film era and beyond, when the gags often came first in the creative process and the story second, "gag writer" was a recognizable job description.

____________________________

One joke of the time was that Keaton's employment application consisted of two questions: “Are you a good actor?” and “Are you a good baseball player?” and a passing grade was 50 percent. Brand ran into Bruckman, realized he was a natural fit for Keaton’s studio, arranged a lunch, and Bruckman started the next Monday, in a dual role as “outfielder and writer.”  — Matthew Dessem

____________________________

Being a gag writer also got him into trouble, because when a decade later he recycled Harold Lloyd gags for Three Stooges movies — certainly a common practice at the time — Lloyd sued Columbia Pictures for $1.7 million and "won." Well, won, but only won $40,000, perhaps enough to pay his lawyers. As somewhat of a physical comedy historian, I'd have to take Bruckman's side on this one. So many of the gags of that era were lifted from earlier movies, films that it was assumed would never be seen again. And in any case, you can find references to many of these same gags being performed on the variety stage long before the advent of film. Nothing new under the sun. T'ain't what ya do, it's the way hows ya do it.

I mention Bruckman today not only because it's his birthday but as an excuse to encourage you to check out an excellent article on him which sheds some light on how gag writers worked in the 20s and 30s. And all you have to do is click here to read The Gag Man by Matthew Dessem.

Book Report: Chain of Fools

[post 376]

Chain of Fools
Silent Comedy and Its Legacies
from Nickelodeons to YouTube
by Trav S.D.

Trav S.D. —oddly enough named after his gritty home town in the middle of South Dakota's Badlands — is a so-good-he's-bad vaudevillian: a performer, producer, historian, popularizer, and blogger whose popular blog Travalanche is a must for the variety arts fan.

I remember when I first came across his book, No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book that Made Vaudeville Famous. I couldn't help but think "do we really need another history of vaudeville?" Then I read the book and discovered that the author was a really good writer, a prodigious researcher, and had a fresh slant on his subject matter. When I heard he was publishing a book on silent film comedy, I couldn't help but think "do we really need another history of silent film comedy?" Then I read the book and... yep, you guessed it.

Trav S.D.

A lot of people read book reviews but don't read books, but if you're just the opposite and are already zoning out then let me cut to the chase and simply say that if you're reading this blog (on purpose) then you'll probably find Chain of Fools highly entertaining and informative.


Here's just a few of the things you will like about it:

• I highlighted something on almost every page. It's just chock full of info that was new to me and very interesting.
• He writes very lively and conversational prose, the kind I like to write but don't always succeed at. Nothing pedantic here. He searches for and almost always finds an interesting way to say what he has to say.

• He's very good at context. You really get the feeling what the work and artistic environment must have been for those creating this new medium.

• He makes a convincing case for silent film comedy as a unique art form and not just as a collection of funny performers.

• He doesn't pretend that every silent film comedy was wonderful.

• He's strong on the relationship between story and character.

• He appreciates what Paris and French culture meant to the arts and the growth of cinema.
• He makes Mack Sennett very interesting.
• He has fresh insights on many of the comedians; Harry Langdon and Lupino Lane, to name just two.


Any weaknesses, quibbles, reservations?

• It's sparsely illustrated, and the discussion of individual films will have much more value if you have them on DVD or can find them online. Since he can't assume you do, a lot of space has to be devoted to plot summaries. He handles them well, but exposition is exposition.
• His pre-cinema comedy history is sketchy and is missing some pretty clear links between the two eras.
• Physical techniques aren't discussed in any detail.
• Max Linder's feature films are given short shrift, and some of the comedians of the 40s and 50s (e.g., 3 Stooges; Abbott & Costello; Ritz Brothers; Jerry Lewis) are a little too summarily dismissed for my taste.
• There are a few errors I caught. For example, Keaton's pole vault in College is lauded, but this was actually performed by gold medalist Lee Barnes, and it was apparently the only time (at least in the silent era) when Keaton used a stunt double. That being said, there's no reason to doubt the overall accuracy of the work.

W.C. Fields in Sally of the Sawdust

Here are a few samples of his excellent writing:

I tend to think of Keaton as a verb; Chaplin as a noun.

This principle of ultimate action, of perpetual motion, was not discovered overnight, but came gradually, experimentally, in the same way Jackson Pollock arrived at drip painting or Charlie Parker came to bebop. It was a process of taking matters a little further, a little further, a little further over dozens of films until Sennett hit a new comedy dimension that looked like universal chaos.

There was very little precedent for what Sennett would now attempt. This would be the first time in history a studio head would endeavor to staff an entire company with absurd types. Sennett's comedians resembled human cartoons: fat men, bean poles, vamps, men with funny mustaches, matronly wives and mothers-in-law wielding rolling pins and umbrellas; geezers with canes and long beards, bratty children with enormous lollipops. Diminutive heroes; terrifyingly large villains.

Keaton's character may have a place in society, but he realizes that this is no guarantee of security or even tranquiity. What about the safe that may fall on your head? Or conversely, the wallet full of money that may miraculously fall into your hands. Rich or poor makes no difference. Fate makes playthings of us all. Man plans. God laughs. Keaton seems to feel no need to comfort us about this. No one emerges to make things better. The world is  cruel, capricious, barren of any special benevolence. It is this lack of faith or optimism perhaps that causes Keaton's comedies to speak more to our time than to his own, and made him a big hit with European audiences even as many Americans were scratching their heads.

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You can buy Chain of Fools here.

Cut to the Chase: The Police vs. Rémi Gaillard

[post 351]

Just over 100 years ago ago, Mack Sennett hit cinema pay dirt and spawned American silent film comedy when he introduced audiences to the hapless Keystone Cops, forever the butt of the joke. Chaplin and Keaton and their fellow silent film comedians likewise mocked police incompetence and, more politically, condemned at least implicitly their treatment of the underdog. Nowadays such attitudes are rarer in film comedy, but certainly not in the work of French prankster and provocateur Rémi Gaillard, whose YouTube videos have had over a billion hits.

Here's one of his most popular compilations, showing his joy at taunting the police in segments reminiscent of those early chase scenes where the cops were doing all the chasing. "I do it for France!" Gaillard is fond of shouting. Ha!



You can see many, many more videos at his web site, and of course buy tons of anarchistic merchandise.

A New Orson Welles Silent Film Comedy!

Orson Welles directing Too Much Johnson in lower Manhattan around 1938.

[post 333]

Huh? Orson Welles? The guy whose "first film" Citizen Kane made movie history in 1941?

Yep.

It was reported today that an early effort by Welles, Too Much Johnson, has been recovered in Italy and is currently being restored. The 40 minutes of footage shot in 1938 was to be shown as part of a live theatrical performance, an early mixed-media event. The show closed out of town, the editing of the film was never quite completed, and what was thought to be the only copy was lost in a fire. But here's the intriguing part, at least for this blog. According to the NY Times...

Each act of the play... was to begin with a film segment. The first (and most nearly completed in the rediscovered print) was a chase across Lower Manhattan shot in the style of a silent comedy, complete with Keystone Kop-like pursuers, a suffragist parade to barrel through and Cotten tottering on the edge of a skyscraper like Harold Lloyd in “Safety Last.”

We'll have to wait until October for the first screening, but you can read the whole article here.

"Arrested Development" Channels Buster Keaton

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One of Buster Keaton's most famous (and dangerous) gags was standing obliviously in the path of a falling side of a house in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).



Yes, the stunt was real and was based on precise measurements. The wall could have killed him.

Fast forward to season 2, episode 2 of the tv show Arrested Development, where a character named Buster tries to have a house fall on him to get out of going into the army, but again a (larger) window saves him.

Buster's one of the regular characters on the show, so the name wasn't created for this episode. In fact, maybe the character's name gave them the idea.

Thanks to Riley Kellogg for the link!

UPDATE (Nov. 29, 2012): Click here for a new post on more revivals of this classic Keaton stunt!

"The Artist" Sparks Hollywood Nostalgia Boom for Silent Era

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I know, I know, yet another post on The Artist — but this article from London's Guardian newspaper is actually about some new film and stage projects that now have a better chance of success thanks to all this new interest in silent movies.

The surprise success of the silent film The Artist, tipped to make a clean sweep at the Academy awards, has inspired a series of stage and screen projects celebrating the early years of Hollywood.


This wave of nostalgia has prompted not only more silent movies, but plays and films paying homage to the stars of the time. One of the biggest projects is a musical based on the life of Charlie Chaplin, which will open on Broadway this year. It was first staged in California and had mixed reviews, but is being reworked and recast for New York. The script, by Thomas Meehan, who wrote the hit stage productions Hairspray and The Producers, delves into Chaplin's controversial private life while tracing his journey from modest beginnings in London to the heights of Hollywood.


The producers of a film based on the silent era's smouldering romantic lead Rudolph Valentino, star of The Sheik and The Eagle, also hope their movie will make it to the screen soon. Silent Life, an American film made by and starring Vlad Kozlov, a first-time director who has been successfully treated for a speech disorder so debilitating he could barely talk for almost 20 years, is being prepared for release after four years in production. Co-starring Isabella Rossellini as Valentino's wife, it centres on the Italian actor's untimely death at 31 after he slipped into a coma while being treated for peritonitis. Unaware of his fate, he understands his life through a dreamlike silent sequence in which he has fame and glory but the dearest things in his life have been taken from him.


Tim Gray, editor-in-chief of Variety, said it hardly came as a surprise that these silent-era-inspired stage and screen projects were now emerging. "When a surprise success story like The Artist comes along, you are always going to get imitators – it's natural. Having said that, I do think The Artist is a one-off. The reason The Artist is a hit is not because it's silent, it's because it's so clever and unusual. I'd be stunned if a large number of silent films popped up."


He argues that while The Artist has spawned nostalgia for the period, if these projects are successful it will be because they tell a more personal story. "Perhaps the biggest trend in film-making now is biographies. People always want to make them and audiences always want to see them. Over the last few years we've seen people competing to make stories based on famous people's lives – there were two Truman Capote movies in competition and three Janis Joplin films that never got made over the last few years.


"Right now, there's a film being shot about a 1970s porn star nobody really knew anything about, Linda Lovelace. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of film-makers now have an interest in making a Chaplin biopic."


To date, there has only been one film based on Chaplin's life, the 1992 drama Chaplin, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Robert Downey Jr. It received great acclaim, with Downey picking up a Bafta award and an Oscar nomination for best actor, but critics deemed Chaplin's life too vast to be immortalised in film. Enjoying a career as an actor, producer, director and composer that spanned more than 75 years, Chaplin lived until the age of 88 and had a colourful personal life that saw him dating actresses as young as 15, embarking on several marriages and affairs and producing 12 children.


Other stars from the era whose lives could be retold in film include Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. But Gray argues that the moment will be fleeting.


"I don't think you're ever going to see a complete resurgence in silent movies," he says. "The Artist's greatest influence on Hollywood is in liberating film-makers to try something completely original, to push the envelope at a time when the investment is largely in 'safe bets' like comic book franchises and sequels."

Brooklyn's Rube Goldberg

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Rube Goldberg was an inventor and cartoonist born the same year as Max Linder (1883), which is to say a few years after Mack Sennett and a few years before Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. He drew popular cartoons of elaborate gadgets that performed simple tasks in the most convoluted way imaginable.

Goldberg's eccentric approach to tackling life's everyday obstacles makes him a spiritual cousin to many of the silent film comedians, especially Buster Keaton. "Rube Goldberg machines" have continued to capture our imagination a century later, but I for one have never seen anything nearly as fantastic as the work of kinetic artist Joseph Herscher, as profiled in this cool video from the NY Times:



Although Herscher only makes himself a minor player in this machine drama, physical comedians do not hesitate to throw themselves into the action. Buster Keaton's movies are full of oddball inventions, such as these from The Electric House (1922):

But this is a comedy, so every invention of Keaton's must of course backfire in the second half of the movie. You can see for yourself by watching the whole movie online here, though I of course recommend treating yourself to a high-quality DVD. You deserve it!

Raging Debate on "The Artist"

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I first previewed the new silent movie, The Artist, when it surfaced at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and then reviewed it when it opened in New York on Thanksgiving weekend, but now folks who know about these things are saying it might actually snatch the best-picture Oscar. We'll have to wait until January 24th for the nominations, but meanwhile The Artist has won best picture in Boston and San Francisco, copped six Golden Globe nominations, garnered four nominations from the Vancouver Film Critics Circle, and was named by the Producers Guild of America and the Houston Film Critics Society as one of the year's top 10 movies. As we get closer to the February 26th Academy Awards, money, reputations, and artistic correctness will all be at stake, so of course the opinions are flying!

The main criticism of The Artist is that it's sentimental fluff, a lot of fun if you like that sort of thing, but not a film of any significance. And of course the question then arises — and it is a fair question — can a silent movie ever really plumb the depths of our complex world without the use of words? Isn't Tree of Life profound and The Artist superficial?

Here's an exchange from the Movie Club section of the online magazine, Slate, which I found interesting enough to pass on to you. First up is a criticism by Dan Kois, talking about movies (see chart, below) that are difficult to watch but that you later find meaningful vs. enjoyable but forgettable flics:

Are there films that work in the reverse? Films that offer enjoyable viewing experiences, but then afterward provoke disdain? Of course! How about apparent Oscar front-runner The Artist, a charming piece of work that never tires, never bores, never in its 100 minutes stops tap-dancing for your smiles? As soon as it was over I was angry at myself for each chuckle I’d given the movie, and now, weeks later, it only provokes a shrug. This is what everyone is so crazy about? I don’t even mind that it’s a trifle—I like trifles! —but did it always have to go for the easiest joke, the simplest twist, the most obvious turn?

Coming right back at him is another Slate critic, Stephanie Zacharek, who said it better than I could have:

I think, as just the first round of Movie Club proves—as every full year of moviegoing proves—there are an infinite number of ways for movies to reach us, to sneak in through cracks we didn’t even know existed. If you have a house with cracks, you’ve got to seal them up. But for moviegoing, don’t seal the cracks! It’s how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen said. Which leads me to something you said, Michael, about how both Melancholia and The Tree of Life were both made by directors who think cinematically, and my lack of warmth for TOL notwithstanding, you’re right. As you said, “Directors who don’t think cinematically sadly account for most of the movies we see all year.”


Which is why I really need to talk about The Artist, allegedly the Philistine’s choice for movie of the year. Because it’s not nearly as good as the great silents—it’s not Keaton, it’s not Murnau, it’s not Griffith. Because it’s a crowd-pleaser, a trifle, a soufflé of a movie with no overarching theme or purpose. Because it’s not as great as the buildup from Cannes led us to believe. Because Harvey Weinstein saw it and immediately thought, “I can make money off this.”


I’m afraid there are lots of reasons for not liking The Artist that actually have little or nothing to do with The Artist, and though that happens with lots of movies, I still find it troublesome. I love The Artist, as Dana said, “without disclaimers or shame.” I think shame is a useless construct when it comes to movies. (Disclaimers—well, we all need those once in a while.) In terms of cinematic thinking in 2011, Michel Hazanavicius trumps Terrence Malick. For one thing, he doesn’t need any “Oh, mother! Oh, father!” voice-overs, no shots of the sun peeping through tree branches, to make sure we’re feeling what we’re supposed to be feeling. And he’s relying on the grace of his actors, their way of moving, their subtle shifts in expression, to tell a story in purely visual terms. Not only is there no dialogue; there’s no expository dialogue, no overt explanation of why the lead character, Jean Dujardin’s George Valentin, is so resistant to talking pictures, which some of the movie’s detractors see as a flaw. For me, George Valentin lives in a mirror-universe where he foresees an actor in another universe (the real one), John Gilbert, drinking himself to death in 1936: The problem wasn’t that Gilbert’s voice wasn’t good enough for talkies (it was), but that filmmakers’ awkwardness in the new medium ended up reflecting badly on him, through little or no fault of his own. In other words, the fictional George Valentin had a premonition of something that happened in real life. Why wouldn’t he be afraid?


I love the economy and discipline of The Artist. Hazanavicius finds all he needs in the faces of his actors, Dujardin and Berenice Bejo. And I’m astonished by the effect the movie has had on audiences. I’ve seen it three times now, twice with a “real” audience (the first time, at Cannes, doesn’t count), and both times I’ve been amazed at how restless the audience is at the beginning—there’s that point where you expect the talking to kick in, and it just doesn’t—and how wrapped up they are by the end. I know, I know—just because lots of people love a movie doesn’t make it good. (The Dark Knight, anyone?) But I do think Hazanavicius and his actors have helped unlock the code of silent-film acting for many people, people who have always thought it was overdone or, at least, just too weird to understand. Film critics know all about silent film and silent-film acting, but who cares about us? As the writer Eileen Whitfield observed in her wonderful biography of Mary Pickford, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, modern audiences often view silent movies as if they're trying to be talkies and failing, whereas they're really much closer to dance, a symbolic re-enactment. The Artist is all about faces and movement and the emotion that can be drawn out of those things together. To me, it’s elemental.

Here, here!

And two more morsels for you. That cool web site, Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd Film Locations, has an excellent new post up about the shooting of The Artist. Check it out here. And here's wonderdog Uggie visiting the offices of the London Guardian newspaper:



And you can even read all about Uggie in this Daily Beast profile.

Guest Post: "Keaton the Conjuror" by Ben Robinson

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Ben Robinson is both a master magician and an historian of magic, author of Twelve Have Died: Bullet Catching, The Story & Secrets and of The MagiCIAn: John Mulholland's Secret Life, as well as numerous articles for major magic publications. Just last month, Ben's decades-long research into the use of magic in silent films came to fruition with publication of his latest book, Magic and the Silent Clowns — a subject that had received scant attention until Ben's work. Concurrent with that, Ben helped curate a fascinating show at New York's Museum of the Moving Image entitled Magicians on Screen, including both a magic performance by Ben and a lecture-demo on the subject of magic and the silent clowns. In fact, Ben had first proposed the idea to the museum back in the 80s. Patience is indeed a virtue — though persistence sure helps! This blogopedia is very pleased to be able to share the first chapter from Magic & the Silent Clowns, and to be able to match Ben's enthusiastic prose with a few video clips.

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Keaton the Conjuror

Buster Keaton’s education and use of the conjurer’s illusionary techniques. 

by Ben Robinson

“Once Pop accidentally wrecked another act by tossing me into the backdrop curtain. This was the turn of Madame Herrmann, the widow of Herrmann the Great, one of the most popular magicians. She was working some of his simpler tricks. At the finish of her act she had dozens of white doves flying to her from every corner of the stage.” (My Wonderful World of Slapstick, p27)

Buster Keaton was an illusionist.

It is said that the world’s greatest illusionist, or magician, would never be truly known by the public at large. Why?  Because so great a “talent” wouldn’t need the adulation, as the prowess by which the work was deployed would be best praised by not even being seen. In the shadows of show business and art, there would lie success. In the French this is referred to as eminence grise. While Buster is certainly known, his use of illusion is at best appreciated as an auxiliary component to the gag. 

However, a deeper look into Buster’s upbringing and eventual use of his fantastic vaudeville education clearly expresses itself in his movies, some of his TV appearances and, more notably, when meeting the media. It might be assumed that the Keaton we see is an image he is in total control of. That being said, the controlled image we always saw was one of a surreal world where “magic” was part of the landscape, like air. In the famous Sid Avery photograph of Keaton, titled “What Elephant?” while Keaton looks forward, with his hand on his brow, the elephant’s trunk winds through his other arm, the pachyderm quietly standing behind the comedian.  This is a vanishing elephant only to the person closest to the king of the forest, a good metaphor for Keaton’s “magic.”

While the examples of Keaton’s legerdemain are too numerous for inclusion here, this notion may bear some examination in the following examples. 

Clearly, legend has it that Buster received his nickname from Houdini. While this may be a matter of conjecture, the legend sticks (and most vaudevillians would tell you that when it comes down to printing the myth or the truth, they yowl, “the myth, print that!”). 

That Joe Keaton and Harry Houdini (1874-1926) once appeared before the audiences of the Midwest in a tent show is certainly a fact. It is also a fact that this show, The Keaton-Houdini Medicine Show, was not a great success, and occurred years before Houdini’s triumphant success in Europe in 1900. Of his father Keaton remarks that “he was an eccentric dancer, not an acrobat, but damn near.” The same might be said of Keaton: he wasn’t a magician in the classic sense, but damn near. Like a classic magician, everything that he saw, particularly of the mechanical variety, was always filed away in his memory for future use. His summer home amidst the actor’s colony in Muskegon, Michigan was not far from a little town named Marshall, among its distinctions being the home of the very first electrified house in the US. Called Honolulu House, it doesn’t have the electric staircase (escalator) Buster later used in his movie The Electric House, but it does have many other mechanical wonders, including the sliding bathtub that switches between rooms that Buster used on celluloid. 

Backstage, Buster saw it all. He refers to utilizing some of Houdini’s tricks in his movie Sherlock Junior, and even opens Cops with a line credited to Houdini: “Love laughs at Locksmiths.” He also acknowledges a relatively little-remembered genuine Chinese vaudeville illusionist, Ching Ling Foo — whose grand feats included turning a somersault in mid-air and when he returned to a standing position, he held a bowl of goldfish that 

appeared from nowhere! 

Young Buster grew up learning that magic had to be “justified” or plausible for the introduction of an illusion. He realized in his movie-making career that “cartoon or impossible” gags (and illusions) had to be justified, like his jumping and impossibly disappearing into the briefcase held by a man (dressed as a woman) accomplice on the street (Sherlock Jr.)....

....or appearing as nine individual dancers on stage at the same time (The Playhouse)....

 ....or avoiding the tornado winds by hiding in a magician’s prop (Steamboat Bill Jr.)....

Whenever magic occurred, Keaton might have been justifying his conceit he explained as “I always want  the audience to out guess me, and then I double cross them.”

Keaton’s use of illusion was not always as a trick per se. When the house he moves across the train tracks in One Week narrowly escapes destruction by an oncoming train, another train enters the frame — and his on-screen drama — and demolishes what we only thought, seconds before, was safe. The revelation of the perceptual difference of the first train set the audience up for the wow appearance of the second train.

Similarly a magician will make a scarf appear, only to have the audience relax at that manifestation. When a dove flutters from the folds of that scarf, there comes the “topper.” Buster just played with much larger props. 

This type of drama, albeit small, is as much part of the conjurer’s lexicon as a rabbit and a hat. Magicians refer to this type of presentation as a “sucker gag.” Feigned failure, only to be consummated by winning success, or in the previous example, unexpected total destruction. 

I believe Buster was schooled in such thinking about surprise (both magic and comedy being dependent on surprise) by his vaudeville and mud show upbringing.  The magician’s technique he learned as a child pervaded his work on screen and elsewhere. On stage in France, in the late 1940s, he counseled the clowns in the Cirque Medrano how to get more out of the crowded clown car gag. Multiple large clowns (always ending with the largest of all) simply emerging from a small vehicle was impossible. Once Keaton showed them how the impossibility became surprising, then the illusion became magical, funny and even more surprising. How many times have we all seen this? And how many times have we seen the clowns emerge with beach chairs and finally a clown emerging with a full tray of food including a stuffed turkey?  These were Keaton’s touches he culled from the Hanlon Bros. performance of clowning, magic and illusion that took place in 

Europe and the US prior to 1900. 

And now for the magic that hits you as reality.  This may give you an example of Buster’s eminence grise. 

Remember the famous scene in Sherlock Junior where Buster is “shadowing” a man walking in front of him?  Now, watch as the man tosses a cigarette behind him which Buster catches, takes a drag of and then discards...or does he?  Given that Buster is the fellow who had a whole side of a building fall around him, missing him by mere inches, I think handling a lighted cigarette in flight was child’s play for him. But slow down the image and you will see a nifty piece of sleight of hand he no doubt executed on many occasions, being an inveterate cigarette smoker.

Other hand magic: in The Cameraman Buster tried to catch the fancy of the photo assignment secretary by making a quarter disappear in his hand, only to be revealed from behind his ear.

 In Steamboat Bill Jr., when attempting to have his father receive a loaf of bread in jail, Buster mimes the contents of the bread and involves another deception of the hands. Effortlessly. Gracefully. As if he yawned.

All magical illusions are understood by the student of the art, firstly through small, hand-held deceptions.  Given Buster’s consummate understanding of the nature of his medium (in this case, film) it is likely Buster combined this understanding with his familiarity with the scene backstage where magicians show each other tricks they carry with them, one time known as "vest pocket magic." 

The point: Buster understood close-up magic because he was schooled in close-up magic from day one. 

Whether it was dangling from a rope to save his wife from the pitfalls of a raging waterfall (a la Houdini) in Our Hospitality or making it appear as if he simply caught a lighted cigarette from the air, Keaton saw the meshing of illusion and  reality in every situation, and exploited it. While performing off stage for a visiting film crew, in his later years, he created the illusion of catching a train, and bringing a 10-ton locomotive to a halt.  One might say this was a developed version of catching the side of a moving car and being whisked from view, as in one of his short comedies.  

Jack Flosso, the late owner of the world’s oldest magic shop, knew Keaton remotely through his father, the great Al Flosso, veteran of thousands of vaudeville and Coney Island sideshow performances.  Flosso says, “When you do magic and don’t admit it, that’s great. Harpo did that, and where’d ya think he got that...Keaton! Buster had an eye for everything. Remember that.”  That Keaton’s silent, surreal illusions should find a home in the 1930s amidst Harpo’s arsenal of wonders is not surprising to any Keaton scholar. What is delightful is that Keaton’s use of illusion was an integral part of his day-to-day life.

Buster Keaton working as a gag writer for the Marx Brothers

He frequently polished a window near him only to surprise his viewers by putting his head through the glass he had just polished, revealing that his polishing was deft pantomime... the illusionary transparent glass was only perceived as solid by his impromptu audience.  Many remark what a great practical joker he was. Such visual jokes have their roots in illusion. In several newsreels depicting Buster at play one finds Keaton doing something short and sweet like sewing his fingers together (later adopted by Red Skelton) or making a baseball disappear for a dog (but not for the rest of the audience). Anything surprising, anything out of the ordinary from this apparently “ordinary” man made his magic more memorable and surprising. 

We always hear of the “magic of the movies.” Buster Keaton is a master of a special type of  movie magic that, often, you don’t even realize is right in front of you! 

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Sources: 

Beckett, Samuel., FILM, Grove Press, NY 1969. 

Bengtson, John., Silent Echoes  (Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton), Santa Monica Press, CA 2000. 

Blesh, Rudi., Keaton, The Macmillan Company, New York, NY 1966. 

Dardis, Tom., KEATON — The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down, Limelight Edition, 1996 

Kerr, Walter., The Silent Clowns, Da Capo Press, NY 1975. 

Keaton, Buster with Charles Samuels., My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Doubleday & Co., NY 1960. 

Kline, Jim., The Complete Films of Buster Keaton, Citadel Press, NY 1993. 

Knopf, Robert., The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton, Princeton University, Press, NJ 1999. 

Meade, Marion., Buster Keaton Cut to the Chase., Harper Collins, NY 1995. 

Tobias, Patricia Eliot, Ed., The Great Stone Face, The Magazine of the Damfinos, The International Buster Keaton Society, Volume 1, 1996. 

Interview with Jack Flosso in New York City, December, 1999. 

Kevin Brownlow, & David Gill (producers)., Keaton — A Hard Act to Follow, Thames TV production, 1987. 

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This article was originally published in The Keaton Chronicle, the magazine of the International Buster Keaton Society, The Damfino’s, in the Vol. 10 Issue 4, Autumn, 2002. Reprinted by permission. It is also part of Ben Robinson’s book Magic & The Silent Clowns (2011).

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Visit Ben's web site here, where you can also purchase his book directly via PayPal.