![]() No such whimsies were permitted at Metro, where directors were directors, and writers and comedians just expected to show up and be funny. Working with close-knit, likeminded collaborators who were always on call-not on the studio clock. … Anytime something unexpected happened and we liked it, we were liable to spend days shooting in and around that.” Thus had developed some of cinema’s greatest sight gags. “We just got to talking about a story and laying out all the material that we could think of, and then got it all put together. Keaton had never even had a proper script before. Immediately he was beset by dozens of staff writers-not his cozy old brainstorming gang of two or three-jostling to get something into the script. That “only way,” however, was not MGM’s way. Somehow some of the frenzy and hysteria of our breathless, impromptu comedy-building got into our movies and made them exciting.” Our way of operating would have seemed hopelessly mad to him. “His mind was too orderly for our harum-scarum, catch-as-catch-can, gag-grabbing method. “Brilliant though he was, Irving Thalberg could not accept the way a comedian like me built his stories,” Keaton wrote later. Mayer was no fan of what he considered low comedy, “boy wonder” Irving Thalberg was a personal friend and a reassuring advocate-to a point. The Metro terms were lucrative, and, while Louis B. … In the end I gave in.” Insert ominous drumroll here. I do not think he meant to that time, either. ![]() But he was loyal to Schenck who had “never steered me wrong in his life until then. Friendly colleagues Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, who guarded their independence even more vehemently than Keaton had, strongly advised him against the move. ![]() He was worried about becoming “lost” in a much bigger studio environ. When Schenck moved to MGM, he urged Buster to come along, promising highly favorable terms.īut the comedian was reluctant. Not because it was such a personal favorite, but because it represented the last time he was allowed to work with the freedom he’d enjoyed to date, first as part of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s company (by which he entered the movies in 1917), then as independent maker of his own starring vehicles in his own production unit under brother-in-law Joseph Schenck. He recounts its creation and aftermath in greater detail than any other film in his 1960 autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick. (They also had to re-shoot some of the climactic chase amid a Chinatown “Tong war” upon realizing that test audiences couldn’t accept that Buster’s protagonist abandoned his camera even for a neck-saving moment.) The Cameraman was a hit, too, getting Keaton’s MGM tenure off to a fine start. Production was relatively hitch-less, although the decision to shoot on location meant having to clear excited Manhattanites every time the “Great Stone Face” was recognized. “I had no objection, because the idea also presented wonderful opportunities for good gags,” Keaton later said. Someone at the studio figured the story hook was a sure way to get even more coverage in Hearst’s newspapers than usual. ![]() Keaton and his writers usually dreamed up their own ideas, but this one came about because he’d just signed on to MGM, one of whose biggest stockholders was William Randolph Hearst. Not that you could tell anything was going wrong from The Cameraman (1928), which Buster considered “one of my pet pictures.” In it, he plays a tintype photographer who yearns to be a newsreel lensman, if only because the girl he likes (Marceline Day) is a secretary in MGM’s NewYork City newsreel office. It heralded a shift so detrimental to his art and career that when Keaton wrote his autobiography several decades later, he titled the relevant chapter “The Worst Mistake of My Life.” It was another successful Keaton comedy, made in the informal yet efficient manner he’d grown accustomed to yet unaware he’d never be allowed to work that way again. The Cameraman signaled the end of an era for Buster Keaton, the launch of a promising new one, and the dawn of a painful decline. ![]() You can read the program essay for our 2019 screening of The Cameraman here ![]()
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