Episode 1300 - Dana Stevens
Marc:Hey folks who bought tickets to my San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Napa, San Francisco run.
Marc:I've got new dates for you because I waited till the last minute so I could probably hopefully test negative for COVID.
Marc:But at nine days in, I tested positive yesterday morning.
Marc:So I had to change those dates.
Marc:Here are the new dates.
Marc:Your tickets will be honored for these dates.
Marc:Napa, Friday, February 18th.
Marc:San Francisco, Saturday, February 19th.
Marc:San Luis Obispo, Saturday, March 5th.
Marc:Santa Barbara, Sunday, March 6th.
Marc:Those are the new dates.
Marc:You should be getting emails from the venues.
Marc:I'm sorry, but it felt like the right thing to do as opposed to say, hey, I did my 10 days indoors.
Marc:Who cares if I'm still a little virus-y?
Marc:I want to spread laughter, not disease.
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:Well, you know, first off, I'll say it again in case you forwarded through it or whatever.
Marc:You know, I got this COVID.
Marc:I tested positive for COVID.
Marc:Let me look at the calendar.
Marc:What day would it have been?
Marc:It would have been the 18th.
Marc:I felt a little sick on the 17th.
Marc:And then the 18, I tested 17th, the morning negative, tested the 18th, the morning positive.
Marc:So that was a week ago, Tuesday.
Marc:And I didn't want to cancel the dates because, you know, I thought, well, you know, maybe I can get in under the wire.
Marc:Then I tested yesterday and it came back positive.
Marc:So I like, I had to do it.
Marc:I had to pull the trigger.
Marc:I don't know what other people do.
Marc:I don't know who other people are.
Marc:I guess theoretically at 10 days in with no symptoms per se, I mean, no fever, no,
Marc:You know, no aches, no pains, no.
Marc:But whatever.
Marc:I mean, my voice is still fucked up.
Marc:I'm still stuffy.
Marc:I'm a little tired.
Marc:But theoretically, at 10 days, given CDC rules, I could go out in the world.
Marc:But I don't think that means perform.
Marc:I mean, I could go out in the world with my N95 mask on, but I can't go out in the world and get on stage and spew my vitriolic comedy along with my spraying viral mist.
Marc:I imagine that I'm probably not contagious, but that's where it's at.
Marc:At nine days, which was yesterday, you know, I tested positive again, which I don't think is unusual.
Marc:Symptomatically, my energy is better.
Marc:I can taste and smell.
Marc:I've had no fever at all.
Marc:My chest is a little tight.
Marc:My voice is a little scratchy.
Marc:My head's a little stuffed up.
Marc:I'm a little tired.
Marc:That's what's happening.
Marc:You know, hopefully I'll move through it unless out of nowhere, like tomorrow, I just get overwhelmed with COVID.
Marc:But hopefully that won't happen.
Marc:I got boosted.
Marc:I feel that's probably what's keeping me level.
Marc:But I do apologize for the new dates.
Marc:And again, if you didn't get them, San Luis Obispo,
Marc:I rescheduled for Saturday, March 5th.
Marc:Santa Barbara for Sunday, March 6th.
Marc:Now your tickets will be honored.
Marc:You should have heard from the venue.
Marc:Napa I rescheduled for Friday, February 18th.
Marc:And San Francisco has been rescheduled for Saturday, February 19th.
Marc:Those are all go.
Marc:Hopefully you can make it.
Marc:Your tickets will be good for those shows.
Marc:The venue should have contacted you.
Marc:That's what I know.
Marc:I will not have COVID then.
Marc:If I cancel then, it'll be something for something awful, more awful, or something amazing.
Marc:I do not plan on canceling.
Marc:I can't stand canceling.
Marc:I feel guilty.
Marc:Took a lot for me to fucking accept it.
Marc:Accept that this is out of my fucking control.
Marc:Goddamn COVID.
Marc:And also just, you know, I feel more relieved that...
Marc:That I got these replacement dates.
Marc:Thank God.
Marc:I got a good agent.
Marc:Genius booking agent, Joe Schwartz.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:That's out of the way.
Marc:Sorry if I sound a little COVID-y.
Marc:Today on the show, Dana Stevens is here.
Marc:She's the film critic for Slate and the co-host of the Slate Culture Gab Fest.
Marc:When I had film historian Mark Harris on not too long ago, he said Dana was his favorite film critic.
Marc:She's written a new book.
Marc:That's what's up.
Marc:Cameraman, Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the 20th Century.
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Lofty business.
Marc:Great book.
Marc:Look, I don't know what's going to happen ultimately as we head into authoritarianism and just the sort of tsunami of the cultural victory of stupidity over already intellectualism has been marginalized.
Marc:And there's little cloisters of people, small groups here and there.
Marc:I'm not considering myself one of them necessarily, but you often wonder, or maybe I should say I often wonder what does happen.
Marc:to thoughtful film criticism.
Marc:What does happen to, you know, thoughtful poetry, thoughtful music, thoughtful films, art in general, when a culture is steamrolled by authoritarian stupidity?
Marc:Well, I imagine what happens is what always happens.
Marc:It sort of goes underline or it gets squished or it gets moved or it just plugs along on its own with its minimal marginalized audience.
Marc:Anyways, hard to say.
Marc:Maybe there'll be some, you know, pushback.
Marc:you know, on the momentum that is happening in this country through art.
Marc:I don't know if it'll be successful, but it would be nice for us to watch those of us who care.
Marc:But in talking to Dana about this book, which I read, which he's basically taking the story of Buster Keaton's career, even his childhood in vaudeville, you know, up through his introduction into motion pictures, which was near the beginning of commercial motion pictures and just sort of runs the entire history of film and culture through Buster Keaton.
Marc:coming out of vaudeville which he was in a family of vaudevillians and there's just great stuff in there it's a great book and it's it's very thoughtful and he was a genius he he was a film genius and remains a film genius and you go look at that stuff and it remains genius but you know what is the appreciation level of somebody like buster keaton obviously you know dana who i talked to about this was mildly obsessed and loved buster keaton and wrote this amazing book which i read most of
Marc:There's a reason I'm telling you that, that I read most of it.
Marc:And I thought it was... I learned a lot of things I did not know about vaudeville, about Keaton, about American history, about film criticism history, about film history in general, about the performers that were involved in silent films that went on to do talkies, about the politics of film, about child abuse laws in New York City at the turn of the century.
Marc:I mean, the book is full of...
Marc:Amazing historical information.
Marc:I learned about critics I'd never heard of.
Marc:I learned about, you know, the evolution and beginning of the studio system.
Marc:I learned about, you know, when film criticism actually started and took made a shift, you know, how the film industry in terms of the studio system was set up to to sort of grease the wheels of criticism and.
Marc:tabloids and magazines, how the fix was in and what happened to the great silent stars and how disposable the new talking industry felt the silent period was, how hard it was to preserve or even find copies of certain films, how much was destroyed of the genius of Chaplin, Arbuckle, Keaton, Mabel Norman, a lot of them.
Marc:And, you know, I've always sort of had a thing for some Hollywood history, but I'm no wonk for it.
Marc:I'm no intellectual for it.
Marc:I'm no trivia master.
Marc:So there was a lot in this book that kind of brings you through all of that, the relationships, how everything, you know, who was famous, who wasn't famous.
Marc:And then sort of like through Buster Keaton's rise and fall.
Marc:This guy was a genius.
Marc:He was the greatest silent movie star under, you know, next to Chaplin that there ever was, arguably maybe as good as Chaplin.
Marc:It's all sort of moves through him.
Marc:And then he hit the skids a bit.
Marc:He became he was a horrendous alcoholic.
Marc:His career went down the toilet.
Marc:He was actually had to suck it up and be a gag writer at MGM where he did his last couple of movies.
Marc:before it all went away.
Marc:It talked about his career, how he got kind of like shifted into the studio system and got lost and underappreciated and like I said, ended up a gag writer for years.
Marc:with nothing pay.
Marc:And by the time I got to, I got about three quarters of the way through the book and when I was talking to Dana, I'm like, God, it doesn't end well.
Marc:And she made it clear that it kind of did end well.
Marc:And I read the rest of the book and he does sort of kind of claw back and get sober here and there.
Marc:She actually talks about AA a bit at the beginning of AA, not assuming that Buster was in AA because there's no evidence of that, but it did happen around the time
Marc:that he was trying to get sober initially through institutions and whatnot, that AA came about.
Marc:And she was able to sort of talk about the beginning of that fellowship, which I'm part of.
Marc:And Keaton did find a lot of work on television and in commercials and became universally appreciated again as his films were sort of reengaged with and reassessed.
Marc:And he did some work in live performing and clowning in Europe.
Marc:So there is a bit of a happy ending that I didn't know about when I talked to Dana.
Marc:But this is me talking to Dana Stevens about her book, Cameraman, which is available now wherever you get books.
Marc:And it was an engaged, exciting conversation.
Marc:This book, like, I like the book.
Marc:I like Buster Keaton.
Marc:I like Hollywood history.
Marc:I'm almost done with it.
Marc:I was rushing to get through it.
Marc:I wasn't able to finish it all the way, but I know how it ends.
Marc:It's not a happy ending.
Guest:It's not, well, I don't know how far along you are, but his ending was happy and not happy.
Marc:I mean, I feel like- Was happy because of Eleanor?
Guest:Yeah, like he managed to get in, professionally, I think it's pretty hard to say whether his ending was happy or not.
Guest:And I feel like that's a question that haunts you when you start reading about Keaton was like, was he, how disappointed professionally was he in his later years, right?
Guest:Because of course to us, it must look like,
Guest:Holy cow.
Guest:You know, he went from having just one of the great directing, stunting acting careers of all time to, you know, this this horrible crash period in the mid 30s.
Marc:I think that's where you applied the critics.
Marc:I is that, you know, reading into what you were seeing as his reaction to his predicament professionally.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, a very tough thing when you're writing about him, too, is he never revealed anything about himself.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So like when he's in that clown outfit in that musical, like just the lobby card from that thing is horrendous.
Guest:So painful.
Guest:I mean, that was the most painful part of the book to research.
Guest:And to tell you the truth, I put it off.
Guest:I mean, it took me so long to get to watching those movies because I was afraid to watch them.
Guest:The ones that were really, you know, the MGM talkies that were really made in his dark period.
Guest:The late ones where you can sort of see his alcoholism and his deterioration on screen.
Guest:I knew that I was going to be very upset and almost turned off my path by them.
Marc:So you've been a film critic for how long?
Guest:At Slate for 15 years or so.
Marc:And is that when it started for you?
Marc:I mean, is that?
Guest:Yes, that's the only place I've been a film critic.
Guest:So I don't know why I say at Slate.
Marc:But was this something when you were like, did you go to school for it?
Guest:Oh, no, no, not at all.
Guest:I was a student in literature.
Guest:And in the beginning of the book, the intro chronicles that a little bit that I was studying literature and studying abroad when I got interested in Keaton because the French love him so much.
Guest:And there had been this incredible film festival.
Marc:So wait, so where'd you go to college?
Guest:At this point, I was at Berkeley, UC Berkeley.
Marc:Okay, so you go abroad just to study?
Guest:Yeah, I went abroad because the professor that was my thesis advisor was there, and because, yeah, I mean, at the time.
Marc:So this is graduate school?
Guest:It was grad school, yeah.
Marc:And what are you doing your thesis on?
Guest:I was writing my thesis on Fernando Pessoa, this Portuguese poet.
Guest:who would be very up your alley, actually, I think, because he had a wild life story himself and was someone who published basically nothing during his life.
Guest:And after he died, this huge trunk was found with 27,000 pieces of paper in it that were the fragments of everything he'd written in his life.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Oh, here's a whole other story.
Guest:You should do a whole podcast.
Guest:When's that book?
Guest:And he wrote under various personas, and they all critiqued each other and wrote letters to each other.
Guest:He had over 70 pseudonyms.
Guest:He was an incredible figure.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:How long was your thesis?
Guest:It was about the same length as this book.
Guest:400 pages?
Guest:A little bit less, maybe 350, 375.
Marc:Where's that book?
Guest:I don't think anybody wants to read that book.
Guest:But that was, in a way, my first book.
Guest:I mean, it was only five people ever got to read it or wanted to read it.
Marc:So were you a film person?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I was always a cinephile.
Guest:And throughout grad school, I would take classes on film or teach film sometimes in the classes I was teaching as a grad student instructor.
Marc:Did you do undergrad at Berkeley?
Guest:No, I went to Vassar as an undergraduate.
Marc:Vassar.
Guest:Which has a great film society.
Marc:Okay, so you say you're studying abroad and Keaton's big in France, but when were you really struck by Buster Keaton?
Guest:Well, it was that year.
Guest:I was already 29, so this is not like I was a young, you know, it's not an adolescent.
Marc:So you'd seen all the movies?
Guest:No, I mean, I grew up as you did, I think, in an era when, well, there wasn't anything streaming, first of all, right?
Guest:Because there wasn't the internet.
Guest:But also, at least where I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, there were not, it was not easy to see silent movies, you know?
Guest:I mean, the local stations wouldn't run them.
Guest:I know some people who say, oh, I grew up and there would be, you know, silent favorites on Sunday afternoon movies on TV.
Marc:The one theater that did it occasionally.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, once in a while you could maybe see something on screen.
Marc:It's weird to think about that you couldn't have access.
Guest:So recently, right?
Marc:There's no access to any of this stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So the fact that there was this film festival in this little French town where I was studying, well, not little, Strasbourg, France is not a huge town, but they had this great cinematech, state subsidized.
Guest:I feel like I need to say that because it's something France has that we don't, right?
Guest:Which is like cultural support from the government.
Guest:Yeah, for the arts.
Guest:And they curated this amazing Keaton festival.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, of course, I knew who he was, but I think, honestly, I probably had him vaguely confused at the time with, like, Harold Lloyd and other silent comedians that weren't Chaplin.
Guest:And, you know, now to this day, when I tell people I'm writing this book, people will say, oh, Keaton, I love the scene where he eats his own boot, which is Chaplin, of course.
Guest:How could you mistake those two?
Guest:Or, you know, when he hangs off the building, Harold Lloyd.
Marc:And then there's the other guy.
Marc:I mix up Harold Lloyd and the other guy.
Guest:Harry Langdon.
Guest:He had sort of a childlike persona.
Marc:Who did the freshman?
Guest:That's Harold Lloyd.
Marc:Oh, OK.
Marc:OK.
Marc:And Harold Lloyd was hanging off the clock.
Guest:He's the guy who hangs off the clock in Safety Last.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I mean, my point is just and I think I was in this boat, too, that even cinephiles sort of picture it as, oh, it's this vague black and white period with these guys running around, scurrying around, being funny.
Guest:So they're so distinct.
Guest:Right.
Marc:The propaganda of talkies ruined our appreciation of the history of silent film.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, that was really.
Guest:And I think I try to chronicle this in the book.
Guest:The arrival of talkies was just this like nuke in the film industry.
Guest:You know, it just it destroyed so many careers and it changed the way movies were made so profoundly.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So when you first experienced Keaton, what is it about him?
Marc:Because, you know, to write a book like this after this long of having the first experience of Keaton so long ago, there must have been some thread of mild obsession with this particular guy.
Marc:I mean, I understand that what you're doing is you're kind of seeing the history of the beginning of modern film, a film period, really, just like, what, 20 years out of any sort of film becomes, you know, this.
Marc:You saw him as a lens through which to see the entire history of culture.
Marc:It's sort of a cultural crit thing, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:But what locked you in so hard to this guy?
Guest:That's such a great question.
Guest:I mean, all I know is that I remember at that festival when I was seeing all these movies being screened, and they showed basically everything, all of the silence, the shorts, the features, everything.
Guest:They showed it several times so you could go back.
Guest:And he just seemed like this creature from another world.
Guest:Like, what the hell?
Guest:How can this person exist, right?
Guest:I mean, when you see the things that he does with his body in that period, in his prime, right?
Guest:I mean, not just that he can physically...
Guest:carry them off, but that he could conceive of them in the first place, you know, some of these stunts and these huge large-scale gags like the train work and the general, right?
Guest:I mean, it goes way beyond this guy is a great performer or entertainer, which he was and had been since age five, and we should talk about his childhood at some point, but it's more that he...
Guest:masterminded the entire thing.
Marc:Yeah, and I think that's something that, you know, one thing I have been dealing with lately and realizing about just appreciation in general or historical context is that it's all sort of lost now.
Marc:That, you know, the world in which...
Marc:You know, real film criticism is sort of drove anything in the culture is sort of waning in a way.
Marc:And it's disturbing.
Marc:You know, it was so important even when I was in college, but it was already then the the age of the great film critics seem to be kind of.
Marc:drifting a little bit right it was kind of like the late kale years or something right exactly you know and and and then to that we just sort of i don't even know if we take it for granted or or just see it as artifacts but for you to kind of uh you know breathe life into you know the device and and the the sort of humanity of buster keaton as an artist is is kind of uh an amazing thing because i as i was looking at the book even seeing pictures of of mabel what uh
Guest:Mabel Normand?
Marc:Yeah, at the camera.
Marc:There's one picture in there.
Marc:Yeah, I love that photo.
Marc:Yeah, but it's like you really see a young woman.
Marc:For some reason, that picture, in light of all these other things you see of stills of people from the silent era, they don't seem real and they seem sort of ageless.
Marc:But for some reason, that picture, because she's smiling.
Marc:I'm like, oh, this is just an artist in her 20s doing a thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was so happy to find that photo.
Guest:And I found one of Roscoe Arbuckle as well.
Guest:Yeah, I saw that first collaborator on film where he's behind a camera, you know, and he's not in costume.
Guest:I think Mabel is in costume in that picture.
Guest:She was probably running to get in front of the camera right after she framed her shot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Roscoe isn't.
Guest:He's just in his street clothes and he's behind the camera.
Guest:And I like seeing them at work like that.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And to think that they're in their 20s.
Marc:They're in their 20s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's incredible that that whole generation and that's kind of the generation I'm trying to chronicle along with Keaton.
Guest:But people born in the 1890s, you know, they really grew up along with film.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The first film is projected in 1895.
Guest:So the medium is discovering what it can do in their hands.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's just had this tremendous shift around them.
Marc:And you made a point in the book to say, like, it's not the same as like the Internet.
Marc:It's not the same as the shift to streaming or whatever, because that was like this weird, slow evolution.
Marc:Like what was going on in the early 1900s on almost all levels socially.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Just like it was cataclysmic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And technologically, too.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Crazy.
Guest:And we think of our time, I mean, not incorrectly, but we think of our time as this time of, you know, unprecedented movement in motion and all that.
Guest:But honestly, compared to the first quarter of the 20th century, I mean, it's pokey around here.
Marc:Yeah, because the devices like were so like they changed.
Marc:I mean, I think that, you know, the advent of streaming and these phones and content and everything else, it does shift our sense of time.
Marc:But then it shifted the entire pace and structure of culture in a way.
Marc:I guess it sort of still does, but not as dramatically.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I guess part of the point that I was trying to make in bringing us up to the modern day is that now we're so steeped in that, in moving images, right?
Guest:It's all we can do.
Guest:We can't escape them.
Guest:They're in your pocket.
Guest:They're in your hand.
Guest:You can film yourself.
Guest:You can edit yourself.
Guest:Everything is conceived of as if it were a movie.
Guest:They hijacked reality.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that started that process of hijacking started, you know, right around that time.
Guest:I mean, in that same year that he was born.
Marc:Well, that was it's also like to me, like kind of confronting the idea that our lives as we live them are slow and kind of, you know, not that interesting.
Marc:But most of us spend so much of our life engaging with the phone that it takes on this this sort of frenetic reaction that it's actually a life we're living where it's not.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, that's a good way of phrasing it.
Guest:It's like we're editing our lives to make them more interesting as we're living them for other people.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And we did.
Marc:But also just reacting to things.
Marc:I have nothing really that our brain is sort of like, oh, my God.
Marc:It's like an old Bill Hicks joke where he's he's watching CNN and it's like war and famine.
Marc:And like does he like there's just this cacophony of stuff going on.
Marc:And then he opens his door and it's like crickets, you know, anyway.
Marc:I thought it was great that in sort of building this portrait of Buster that the sort of the vaudevillian element, that he was this vaudevillian star and the star of his family's vaudevillian act, that I think you really captured what I know as a comic to be...
Marc:Something that I think gets lost in film is that there's there's like blood and sweat and, you know, weirdness to stage acts, that there is a visceral quality to to the idea that, you know, he's being thrown around as a child by his dad and just all the other actors in the backstage scene that like that.
Marc:There's a humanness to all that that I think you really capture.
Marc:Well, that's really at the core of his that builds him into the performer that he is.
Guest:That was an incredibly fun part of the book to research.
Guest:In fact, it was so much fun.
Guest:It was hard to get out of his childhood.
Guest:There was always some other path I wanted to go down.
Guest:And I found myself thinking, maybe I should just limit this and just tell the publisher, no, I'm only writing about his childhood before he entered films.
Guest:Because it's a thing that even if you're a huge fan of his movies, you might not fully realize.
Guest:And I think it tends to get not glossed over, but like treated quickly in biographies of him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And even when I watched Bogdanovich's documentary, he does it, but not much.
Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like you could spend so much time looking into that period and it's tough.
Guest:It would be tough to do in a documentary because there are so few.
Guest:I mean, there's only still images that survive.
Guest:The act, the three Keatons was never filmed like most vaudeville acts were never.
Marc:But what you captured was that this was the entertainment.
Marc:This was the format.
Marc:This was the form that America was entertained by.
Marc:Was it just rogues and traveling, you know, acts?
Marc:That showed up everywhere.
Marc:And there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them of all different kinds that would tour and just show up on bills and cities, small cities, small towns.
Marc:But it was just it was commonplace.
Marc:You would go and see some weird family of jugglers or flamethrowers or acrobats and then, you know, someone singing to something.
Marc:It was just the way that that entertainment worked.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, every single bill you look at, you know, when you look at the old playbills from from slates that they would appear on at these, you know, these through the vaudeville circuit, every single one just has incredible other acts with them where it's like so and so and is talking monkeys and professor this and that.
Guest:And, you know, the robot that shoots at targets or whatever.
Marc:Or the one act that had a seal that you talked about.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:There was an underwater seal that traveled with a tank.
Yeah.
Marc:And filled it with water and they had a seal.
Marc:And all I could think of is like, could you imagine traveling with a seal?
Guest:And the tank, how heavy it would be.
Marc:Trying to keep a seal happy?
Guest:On a train.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's crazy that this was the life that these people lived.
Marc:And it was a much more interesting and exciting life.
Marc:And more of this, I don't keep wanting to use that word visceral, but the kind of like, I mean, to how engaged you've got to be to live in that world.
Marc:I think that's what I'm responding to when I say that we live in these images now or we live in these phones or reacting to things that aren't immediately in our life.
Marc:To live the life of a vaudevillian or even to live in a life that wasn't mediated in any way was so much more engaging, it would seem.
Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's very easy to romanticize that period because it is super, super fun to read about.
Guest:But as I also try to cover in that early part of the book, I mean, Buster Keaton's childhood was both, you know, sort of sounds enviably fun in so many ways, but it also, you know, he never got to go to school.
Guest:He essentially worked and supported his entire family from when he was five years old.
Guest:I mean, what happened in his family that was remarkable is that he's born into a performing family, but not a successful performing family.
Guest:His parents were on the verge of starvation, practically.
Guest:I mean, maybe that's pushing it, but they were barely getting by in his very early childhood.
Guest:And when he joined them on stage, which he did for the first time, it's hard to say exactly, but it was probably when he had just turned five.
Marc:So he's five years old and they've got him in this getup, him and his dad, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:They have matching sort of ethnic costumes, like Irishman costumes of the time.
Marc:And his dad just kind of tosses him around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It seems like their act evolved from something they did anyway as father and child, you know, just that they had this kind of rough housing relationship offstage.
Guest:And they very quickly developed that into this incredibly successful act.
Guest:That's the crazy thing to watch if you sort of clock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, reviews and press about them from the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is that, you know, he goes from Little Buster is assisting in his parents act to six months later, the star of the Keaton combination, you know, and and word about him has sort of traveled from coast to coast.
Guest:So he was like a child prodigy performer that was incredibly successful on the stage for 17 years, you know, until he was 21 years old.
Marc:But all of it revolved around most of it revolved around him reacting to his drunk father.
Marc:It was this sort of heightened faux abusive dynamic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's a huge question in looking at his childhood is like, was he an abused child or not?
Guest:Right.
Marc:I like that in how you sort of integrate in the cultural and sort of political history of the time that that, you know, that in New York at that time, that guy, Jerry.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Who was, you know, trying.
Marc:There was a progressive movement.
Guest:Right.
Marc:To, you know, get kids out of sweatshops and protect kids of immigrant families who were just using them to make money any way they could.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, there's this sort of the child protection movement we're talking about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which also grew up along with Buster.
Marc:Who the hell thinks of that now?
Marc:The idea that there was a time in this country where it was just a sort of free for all.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Use your kid in the mill.
Marc:Who cares?
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was no compulsory child education.
Guest:And, you know, there were certainly no laws about child abuse until there just started to be about the generation before Keaton came along.
Guest:But he didn't benefit from any of that.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Because like his dad dodged it.
Marc:The approach to that guy, those rules was like, you know, he's it's meddling.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:We can take care of this kid.
Marc:But he's the breadwinner of the whole thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that is actually a big question about those changes that were brought by the progressive kind of movement to reform childhood or to reform the way childhood was treated is that, you know, obviously it ended up being a great thing for most children and for culture as a whole.
Guest:You know, but there was a sense also that there was a meddling kind of... The state.
Guest:There was a nanny state kind of quality to it that lots of people, especially working class people, you know, which Keaton's family essentially was, even though they became successful in vaudeville, that they resisted.
Guest:And his whole life, I mean, he had one day of school, at least according to the way he told the story.
Guest:His parents put him in public school for one day, but he was on the road constantly.
Guest:He had no home.
Guest:You know, that's actually a rumor about him that somehow got started because one of his biographers speculated there's almost no writing in his hand.
Guest:There's one little piece of a scrap of paper he signed that you can see in an archive, but he didn't write letters.
Guest:He was not a word guy at all, and he said that about himself.
Guest:But yeah, he could read.
Guest:I mean, certainly.
Guest:He read the book that the general was based on that his co-director gave him.
Guest:You know, I think that that's somewhat of a classist rumor to circulate about someone.
Guest:You can learn to read without going to school.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:But someone's got to teach you to read.
Marc:And if that's not if you like you would want the source of that, because it doesn't matter.
Marc:But in the book, you know, you can sort of track where he learned certain things in the chapter on on minstrelsy and race.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That, you know, he was constantly around, you know, blackface performers.
Marc:So he was able to glean.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Those behaviors.
Marc:But, you know, nowhere is there sort of like and then this guy sat down and Todd Buster had to read on a train.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, presumably he did learn on the train like he did most things on the train as a kid, either from his parents or from somebody who taught him.
Marc:And also you brought up what's that guy's name?
Marc:Jacob Rice, the photographer.
Marc:Is it Reese?
Guest:I think you said Jacob Reese.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, because I studied those photographs when I took a history of photography thing where, you know, there was a lot of things that kind of led to this these rules around kids.
Marc:But the idea that some parents are like, what, I had to work.
Marc:Let the kid work at seven.
Marc:It's OK that she's at a sewing machine.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, I think in the case of Keaton, you know, his problem had less to do with the fact that he wasn't in school and wasn't doing all these things that kids in the 20th century were starting to be supposed to do, but just that he had an abusive father, you know, who was not abusive his whole childhood, who seems to have gone through a period when he was an adolescent of particularly getting, you know, drinking too much and getting violent.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, he had the act on stage was violent and their relationship off stage was violent as well.
Guest:And I think that that violence was enacted on the stage.
Guest:So it must have been not just funny to audiences, but frightening sometimes and thrilling, you know, thrilling in a gasp.
Guest:What's going to happen?
Marc:Is this real?
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because he was constantly outsmarting his father on stage.
Guest:And getting thrown across the stage, thrown into the backdrop.
Guest:Once he was aimed at a pair of audience members who were heckling Buster's mother for her saxophone playing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because she would stand at the front of the stage and play sax.
Guest:That was kind of part of the gag, you know, while this violence was going on behind her.
Guest:And somebody said something negative.
Guest:Performance art.
Guest:And Buster's dad gets furious and hurls his son, who was probably eight or ten at that point, so he weighed a good deal, you know, into these two hecklers and broke one of their noses.
Really?
Marc:You talk about how they like they made the little harness, the handle for the suitcase handle onto his jacket.
Marc:And also that detail of the father traveling with this table that like, you know, it was just a table that which was a prop that was needed for, I guess, many bits.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, before Buster came along, the act was actually billed sometimes as the man with the table, Joe Keaton.
Guest:Because, yeah, he was, I think, an acrobat.
Guest:He was probably not a particularly distinguished acrobat, but his son thought he was funny.
Guest:And he would do various tricks with his table, like jump onto it, jump off of it.
Guest:I don't know what all he did.
Marc:Well, and also like through, you know, like through that chapter about, you know, seeing how these child protection laws were sort of created and evaded and why there was a sort of pushback on it.
Marc:Then you kind of move from there, like the beginning of film.
Marc:was sort of a novelty.
Marc:I kind of knew that, that it was not about making movies.
Marc:It was about, look at this interesting machine that can project these cool things.
Marc:And you talk about how, and I didn't know this history specifically, and maybe I had learned it once before, that these early sort of cinematechs were like storefronts or people's houses where it's sort of like they've got one of those machines down there.
Marc:So that was the attraction.
Guest:Yeah, in fact, often on vaudeville bills, like the ones that the Three Keatons would appear on, there would be some kind of, you know, cinematic portion of the program, and it would usually be billed in the early years, like, by the name of the machine, you know, like, it's the, and they all had different brand names, like, it's the, I can't even remember what they all were, the Cinematograph, or the, that was the French one.
Guest:The Cinematograph was their machine, yeah.
Guest:And then Edison invented his own machine that had a different name.
Guest:I mean, it's really hard to trace the exact genealogy of movies because they were happening from so many places at once.
Guest:But the Lumiere Brothers, as I start off the book with, were the first to project, publicly project movies onto a screen as opposed to, I mean, there were those machines that you could peer into and wind.
Marc:Yeah, Benny Levine's shoe store in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, where my grandmother lived, he had one of those machines.
Guest:Those old winding machines?
Marc:The winding machines that flip the cards so you get motion.
Marc:Yeah, I forget what they were called, but I used to love it.
Marc:You could just go back there and just do a whole little thing.
Marc:It was kind of fascinating.
Guest:I don't think I've ever seen one of those.
Guest:You haven't?
Guest:I've never done the winding.
Guest:I have to try it.
Marc:So, okay.
Marc:So, when film comes out, it's sort of this novelty.
Marc:So, did Edison do the train coming?
Marc:Or was that Lumiere?
Guest:That was a Lumiere film.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not shown in 1995, but a little later.
Guest:What were some of Edison's films?
Guest:I mean, I think The Kiss was an Edison film, you know, that famous one, The Sneeze, maybe.
Guest:I didn't look as much at Edison stuff, but I mean, the early American movies were basically attributed to Edison, although he was in no sense their director and he didn't really even invent the machine they were made on.
Guest:It was more like he he branded it, you know, because he was such a famous inventor.
Marc:Now, throughout your life, I mean, outside of pulling this book together, were you somebody that would seek out and watch silent films?
Guest:I became that over, you know, the 20 years or so that passed between that film festival I described and starting to write this book.
Guest:In Straussburg.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, if you want to say that that's sort of the beginning of my Keaton obsession, that was 1996.
Guest:And in the years since then, you know, I finished my degree and I started writing at Slate and I did all kinds of things in life.
Guest:But that kind of became a hobby of mine, you know, to just read more about that period.
Guest:And just the more I would I would learn about it, the more I would want to learn about it.
Marc:Well, because you're able to track through that period also like this sort of evolving narratives that became popular in commercialized film.
Marc:And some of them sort of still exist somehow.
Marc:There's one beat in the book at some point where you said that they were using the cameraman as a template for MGM comedies long after Buster was kind of pushed out or drank himself out or whatever.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:That, you know, that there are these templates and the same with Grand Hotel, even though I'm jumping way ahead, that these sort of multi-star vehicles became templates of corporate movie making and they exist now.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And that the sort of like strange kind of weird unrequited romances that were driving the slapstick of Buster Keaton, you know, they still kind of exist.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah, I wonder where slapstick is now.
Guest:That was something I wanted to ask you because you talk to comedians so much and you know much more about the world of comedy.
Guest:But, you know, where is slapstick now?
Guest:I mean, where do you or Keaton's influence in film or comedy now?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:You know, Bogdanovich was able to talk to a lot of people about, you know, certain actors.
Marc:Like, I guess everybody after a certain point, you know, has to pay lip service either earnestly or not to, you know, these these heroes of the silent age or earlier, you know, whether it's the Marx Brothers or what.
Marc:But, like, I'll tell you, honestly, after reading your book and watching Bogdanovich, I am able to see, you know, who sort of, you know, grew from that, from Chaplin and from Keaton, that there's a physicality that was integrated.
Marc:But Swapstick, I don't know where Swapstick is.
Marc:There were guys that were doing—the Farrelly brothers, I think, were—
Marc:Probably the most modern practitioners of flat out slapstick.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because they seem to love it.
Marc:But there are moments that people have physical comedy is is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine because there's very, very few people that do it well.
Marc:But, you know, people like Will Ferrell and even like Ben Stiller, I think at his comedic best is a hilarious physical comedian.
Marc:It's just not something you see that often.
Guest:It's not being written for.
Marc:You know, I guess.
Marc:But it's also this gift that that very few people have total control over.
Marc:You know, like like somebody like Will Ferrell, like he knows how to just turn that thing on.
Marc:And it's uniquely his.
Marc:But it's definitely physical comedy, you know, and there's stand ups that do it as well that I think are great at.
Marc:They can't help it, which I think is something, you know, you sort of describe about Keaton.
Marc:By the time he gets around to motion pictures, he you know, he can't help.
Marc:but be funny, and he's so adept at it in his bones that it just exudes out of him.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, that was part of why I wanted to spend so much time on his childhood is that I just feel like you can't understand the comedian he came and his physicality without realizing that he was this person who was thrown around on a stage and basically forced to learn how to fall in order to survive from his very early childhood.
Guest:And also, to me, this is fascinating that he is this person who became this
Guest:kind of pillar of American show business for, you know, 70 years of his life without ever choosing to go into show business.
Guest:I mean, he was just born into it.
Guest:He once said in an interview later in his life that if he had been educated, he would have wanted to be a civil engineer, which he would have been great at, right?
Guest:Building bridges and things like that.
Guest:But we would have missed out on so many laughs.
Guest:So it's good it didn't happen.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But also, you know, I don't know that, you know, it's hard.
Marc:It's easy to sort of backload that stuff when people are asking you questions when you're in your 50s.
Marc:But I mean, you know, the compulsive nature of somebody that ultimately becomes an alcoholic or is an alcoholic.
Marc:And this sort of, you know, death defying business of of of adrenaline junkies, you know, is, you know, I don't know that he ever would have become a civil engineer because he had this kind of, you know, addiction.
Marc:Right.
Marc:To to the thrill of timing and the thrill of literally death defying.
Guest:Yeah, it wouldn't have been dangerous enough.
Guest:You're right.
Guest:He could have he could have done it if he was actually standing on the bridge, you know, while it was being constructed.
Marc:But I also think the construction of his personality in, you know, in defiance of his father's abuse and and in sort of.
Marc:you know, getting comfortable with the type of insanity and chaos and sort of standing strong and solemn and almost expressionless in the face of it that became his sort of comedic brand.
Marc:You know, I think you described really well as how that evolved.
Marc:And then, you know, you searching for emotion throughout the entire book in his face is kind of sweet.
Right.
Guest:I mean, he's just someone, right?
Guest:I think the fascination with him in part is that expressionlessness and the fact that he's someone that you want to know and you want to understand and you know you're not going to be able to.
Guest:It's a thing that apparently his sister, his own sister, who lived with him for many years even in adulthood, said about him, which was that you never knew what he was thinking.
Guest:You know, he had this kind of impassive.
Guest:Also in photographs, you know, he had a sort of shtick where there's a few candidates of him smiling here and there.
Guest:There's one in the book.
Guest:But mostly, if a camera was on him still or moving, he assumed that mask-like expression.
Guest:You know, it was part of his persona.
Marc:So, you know, at the beginning of the show business, you know, it was interesting for me to sort of see all this history put together around, you know, the silent comedies.
Marc:That there were really only a couple places that did them.
Marc:They were very specific.
Marc:They were insane.
Marc:Right?
Marc:It was...
Marc:Senate.
Marc:Right.
Marc:His studio.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Roach.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And and Shank.
Marc:Is that is it Shunk?
Guest:Joe Skink.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Skink.
Marc:Skink.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Louis B. Mayer called him skunk because he couldn't stand him.
Marc:But these were the people generating comedy on the backs of only a handful of comedic performers and a large cast of people that would run around it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, that all shifted, too, during Keaton's lifespan.
Guest:And it's something else that I try to track is that film went from being, I mean, as you said, in the very early days, just something that was kind of shown for fun during the vaudeville bill to this growing business.
Guest:And that's the period when Keaton enters it, when a lot of times an individual performer like Arbuckle, who Keaton started with, or Mabel Norman, this happened for her, too, would have their own production company that would be financed by somebody like Joe Skank, who was really a producer.
Marc:It's so funny because this is where independent film is now.
Marc:The financing's different.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But ultimately, a lot of these people that get a little traction, I would say most actors that have made a little money have production companies.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But I don't know that they necessarily produce movies all the time.
Guest:Yeah, but they don't have... I don't think that they have, most of them anyway, exactly what Keaton had, which was that they had their own... And Chaplin had this too, and on a much larger scale, which is that they have their own lot and their own dedicated crew.
Guest:So there's like a cameraman sitting around waiting to make your movie.
Guest:That's something that disappeared.
Marc:I think there were more lots around.
Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Like you may have a company, but you're still hustling to find space to film and people to film with.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you're recreating each project each time.
Guest:And I think he had a dedicated crew that just sat there through the 20s.
Guest:And then suddenly, as I said, with the coming of sound, all of that disappeared.
Guest:And nobody had that, except if you were chaplain or somebody who was so wealthy from, you know, incredible success that you could you could hang on to that individual studio and hang on to your money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which Chaplin was much smarter about.
Guest:I mean, Keaton was a terrible businessman.
Guest:And it's a tragic thing when you read his history to watch, see all the moments that he could have made better choices.
Guest:I mean, obviously with drinking, but even with business decisions.
Marc:Well, I think that's that comes with the territory of sort of having an abusive father that you're just going to, you know, kind of suck it up and be a doormat guy.
Guest:Yeah, he was a very passive person in his personal life and in his business life, you know.
Marc:But let's get moving through like how how film evolved along with him was that like I didn't really realize that there was such a huge span of time between, you know, comedic shorts and actual features like the entire business was shorts.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because the idea was that they were sort of almost like the cartoon that you would watch before the movie and they filled an important bill like that so that you could have this whole program for the evening.
Guest:So even Chaplin didn't wasn't making short comedy and long feature length comedies.
Guest:I mean, until when did he get started?
Guest:I don't know the exact year, but, you know, it was, I don't know, 1919, 1920, something like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because where the money was and what people wanted to see from funny guys were these little 20 minute shorts, which still are some of Keaton's best work.
Guest:I mean, people don't
Guest:screen them as much, but they're all fantastic.
Guest:Like One Week?
Guest:Yeah, One Week, which I have a whole chapter about in the book.
Guest:I mean, I think One Week is one of the greatest American comedies.
Guest:What's wrong with that movie?
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:Nothing's wrong with it, and it's still kind of amazing to watch, the device of it.
Guest:And everybody gets it.
Guest:I mean, I've shown that movie to people in their 80s and to my child when she was six.
Guest:They all laughed at it.
Marc:Well, I think a lot of people look for that.
Marc:And I think a lot of times like there's something being a sophisticated adult that once you start feeling the entire movie business gearing itself to appeal to five year olds and 70 year olds, it becomes sort of annoying.
Marc:But but I mean, with slapstick shorts, you can accept it.
Guest:Right.
Marc:As opposed to the entire.
Guest:I mean, they're timeless in a different way.
Guest:There's like it's like cave art or something like that's going to live forever as long as you can show it.
Marc:And I think that like in talking about really establishing Keaton as as a genius of film.
Marc:And I thought it was very interesting in the book as well that you were able to kind of create some parallel between all the working artists at the time when he was starting to enter his most prolific period.
Marc:of independent creation, you were able to talk about the writers, the painters, everybody who was sort of functioning at that time.
Marc:He probably had no idea who they were, but they were all drawing from the same sort of shift in reality that was going on.
Marc:And I guess, would that be the industrial or post-industrial?
Marc:What period are we really talking about in growth?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:There's different ways of naming it, right?
Guest:I mean, when you talk about the people who were his contemporaries, it would be called the lost generation, you know, which was originally, I think, Gertrude Stein's phrase.
Guest:But, you know, just...
Guest:Just somebody who was sort of born in the late 19th century and lives into the first, you know, is a young person in the first quarter of the 20th century.
Guest:There's just so many artists in that pack.
Marc:All of them were starting, like all the artists, many of the artists that grew to define, you know, modern painting, modern literature, you know, modern, you know, theater.
Marc:That was all happening then.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald is somebody who comes up in the book.
Guest:There's a whole chapter about him and Keaton.
Marc:Later, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Even though there's no evidence that they ever met, they both worked for MGM at the same time.
Marc:On the decline.
Guest:Yeah, and they both were almost exactly the same age.
Guest:I think they were a year apart in age only.
Guest:And both had this very similar trajectory, right, of being extremely successful at a very early age.
Guest:They both hit it big in 1920, basically, for the first time.
Guest:I mean, for film and Keaton.
Guest:He's already been doing stage.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they both kind of hit the skids at the same time, you know, and then kind of scraped their way back.
Guest:And after scraping their way back, both found themselves working behind the scenes at MGM.
Guest:This was Keaton's second period at MGM after he'd already been, as you said, fired from being, you know, their star comedian.
Guest:And so there's a chapter that's essentially just sort of speculating, like, what was it like?
Guest:Did F. Scott Fitzgerald ever sit in the commissary next to Buster Keaton?
Guest:That question just fascinated me.
Marc:Well, yeah, but also like, you know, that you were able to draw the connection between, you know, his experience at MGM to sort of fill in some of the blanks around what Keaton must have been living through with Irving Thalberg and who that guy was because of, you know, passages from The Last Tycoon.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I hadn't sort of realized I'd read The Last Tycoon, you know, in my another obsession period with Miss Gerald.
Guest:It didn't go as deep.
Guest:But I hadn't really known about Thalberg when I did, you know, and I certainly had not sort of realized that that.
Guest:Keaton and Fitzgerald were crossing paths at that point.
Guest:So suddenly the Lost Tycoon became this treasure trove because it's all about MGM at that exact period, you know, that second period when Keaton would have been there.
Guest:So you really get a sense.
Guest:It's a wonderful book, too.
Guest:But you just really get a sense of how that machine, that studio filmmaking machine in the early sound days was working.
Marc:And how it was created.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know, and what it did to talent.
Guest:I mean, how much violence there was behind its creation.
Guest:And Keaton was one of the victims of that violence.
Guest:And so was Fitzgerald in a way.
Marc:Well, yeah, and also just this sort of diminishment and sort of infantilizing with money and fame of artists.
Marc:You know, like all these actors and it was just, you know, if they could make money, fine.
Marc:If they couldn't, we'll throw them somewhere else and put them in something else.
Marc:But there was this kind of...
Marc:And it still exists today.
Marc:And it's always a gross or disappointing and horrific part of the business is that, you know, that thing that Mayer says about, you know, if you give them awards, they'll do whatever you want.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He created the Oscars for that reason.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Just to placate, you know, the egos of creatives to keep them doing things for him that were that shallow in that way that he knew how to exploit talent and just use us for as pawns in the big game, you know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, that's that that way of conceiving of, you know, filmmaking and the studio system as this machine or factory farm or whatever is is really contemporaneous with that exact moment, you know, that Keaton found himself at MGM.
Guest:So, I mean, it was really that was really bad historical timing.
Guest:He'd had so much historical luck in his life where he kept hitting things at the peak, you know, like vaudeville at the peak of vaudeville and then the golden age of silent film.
Guest:But he really hit the skids and had a horrible streak of luck there in the 30s.
Marc:I guess it was a streak of luck.
Marc:But I mean, the bigger crime to me seems that that once talkies happened, that there was a complete sort of erasure or diminishment of of any of that success.
Marc:Like a vaudeville success didn't eventually didn't matter.
Marc:And of really putting him into the pantheon of great filmmakers.
Marc:That didn't matter either.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because like the actual like once film becomes and always was such a business that no one was really talking about the art of film.
Marc:So it was always relatively disposable and constantly progressing and moving forward.
Marc:So that shit just represented the past on some level.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's why so much of it is lost.
Guest:You know, I mean, it's something like 75 to 80 percent of silent films that were ever made are now gone forever, you know, because they just weren't.
Guest:There was no value to them.
Guest:I mean, the celluloid that they were printed on was more valuable than the images.
Marc:But I think like, you know, using like if you really start because I think.
Marc:In my recollection of how Manville, even in some other critics, maybe the French, contextualized Keaton was that, you know, he was a predecessor to the surrealists and he was a predecessor to that kind of absurd, you know, Dadaism and absurd theater and all of that stuff that that his genius, whether he knew it or not, and he was totally unaffected through his compulsive construction of stunts and devices and everything else was something uniquely.
Marc:Creative and a real sort of heightened bit of art, you know, like not unlike whatever the hell Gertrude Stein was doing with with writing.
Marc:It was similar.
Marc:And I'm not I'm not saying that in a condescending way.
Marc:I'm just not familiar with it.
Marc:But I know she was deconstructing something.
Guest:Yeah, no, Stein is such a great connection to make.
Guest:I try to talk in the book about how Keaton is really a modernist artist without realizing that he was.
Guest:I mean, he's the last person to classify himself as any sort of artist.
Guest:And in fact, he didn't even like to be called an artist.
Guest:But he just seems so contemporaneous with Stein or Fitzgerald or Hemingway and literature writer Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, all these people that were writing new stuff and reinventing the medium as they were writing it.
Guest:Consciously.
Guest:Yeah, who were sort of thinking through what a book was as they're writing a book.
Guest:I feel like Keaton is constantly doing that, but he's doing it instinctually.
Guest:He's pure.
Guest:I mean, it's weird to conceive of any artist as that, but if any artist is, it seems to me like he is.
Marc:Well, yeah, because there was no context to, there was nothing established saying that film was an art.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So there was nothing to sort of like, you know, turn on its head.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Whereas you've got people like the literary crowd who were, you know, who were fighting the old models, who were actually pushing back against the history of literature, which is already a heightened art.
Marc:But film was like half garbage to these people.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:So half of the work that film had to do was also kind of getting onto the cultural radar.
Marc:Which you talk about.
Marc:Like, how do you shift from theater to film?
Marc:How do you get the middle class?
Marc:To like, you know, it was almost like it reminded me of those scenes of those, the sort of lower theater productions, like in Amadeus and stuff.
Marc:There was definitely a theater, you know, situation for people to throw things at.
Marc:You know, that seemed to be what film represented.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Like it was just like the rabble.
Guest:Yeah, there were there were lots of critics who theater critics who refused to see movies, you know, into the teens, you know, the 1910s or so.
Guest:They were just saying, like, this is beneath me, basically, you know, and for a very different reason.
Guest:Joe Keaton, Buster's dad, hated film because it was going to come eat his lunch and he knew it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I thought that was interesting that, you know, in the face of that, that these critics, you know, not until I guess that guy Sherwood.
Marc:What's his name?
Guest:Robert Sherwood.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:to work with the camera to create new and interesting surreal effects or stunt effects or lighting effects or all that stuff.
Marc:I guess lighting didn't happen until later.
Marc:But that none of these critics were able or willing to see that we were dealing with a new medium that had a lot of possibility.
Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, film criticism, right?
Guest:Obviously, film criticism has to grow up along with film as well.
Guest:And that's something I try to track some, too.
Guest:And there wasn't, for example, Variety didn't run a film review.
Guest:And this is the first American, you know, film review, supposedly, until 1909.
Guest:So that's already, you know, 15 years almost into the existence of film.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then they were just sort of little blurbs.
Guest:It just sort of took a long time for, you know, for thoughtful critics to start doing the kind of things that Robert Sherwood, the longtime critic for Life, who I write about and who crisscrossed with Keaton a lot.
Marc:Right.
Marc:He liked Keaton, but I had no idea that guy was a huge presence.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, if you think about the connections, right, that the guy who was the film critic for life in the 1920s, you know, later becomes he tried to write a Pulitzer Prize winning play.
Guest:Then he wins four Pulitzer Prizes, three for drama and one for nonfiction.
Guest:He works with President Roosevelt, you know, as a speech writer and and he helped start the Voice of America.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he's a little hard on Buster, though he liked him.
Marc:It's like out of all that amazing accomplishment, he's still got to take shots at poor Buster.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Who he liked.
Guest:Well, I mean, but I actually I love that that relationship between them in that chapter, because I feel like he was the kind of critic that Keaton was a filmmaker, which is to say he was kind of inventing the medium as he went along, you know, and he's still really fun to read now.
Marc:It's hard to think of a time where like it didn't exist, but like it didn't survive in the same way that tabloidism or this sort of cross pollination of media through the movie industry, you know, into these other magazines and into, you know, whatever in order to promote their product sort of took over and remains.
Marc:That's what that's where the world we live in now that, you know, it wasn't the criticism that won.
Marc:It wasn't the highbrow that won.
Guest:There's still a few of us out here, just sad dinosaurs.
Marc:No, I know.
Marc:And I think it's essential, but it's hard to find a place in the world that we live in because like the worst of it is sort of won out media wise.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's pretty sad that, yeah, there's so there's so few jobs for people like me right now.
Guest:And then on, you know, the end that you're closer to the production end.
Guest:I mean, you know, I really feel like we're not in a good place right now for people who want to do the kind of, you know, wildly creative invention.
Marc:And also there's so much.
Marc:But we don't have to get into that yet.
Marc:But let's talk about the step from comedy shorts to comedy features.
Marc:Because really, when you talk about Keaton and what becomes hammered home in this book, and I think in most full assessments of him, is these eight or nine features that happened between the age of 20 and 30 or whatever.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that was really the masterworks.
Marc:And he, in doing those, sort of defiantly, there was not anyone doing comedy full-length movies before him, really, right?
Guest:Well, I mean, but he sort of started when the whole industry started, I would say.
Guest:I mean, he wasn't necessarily a pioneer in that respect, but he was one of the first.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I mean, I think, in fact, his first feature, which was called Three Ages, he deliberately made so that it could be chopped into three shorts in case it wasn't successful.
Marc:And that was the satire of Griffith?
Guest:Yeah, it's a satire of intolerance.
Marc:Of intolerance, right.
Marc:That must have got some good laughs.
Guest:It's still a good one.
Guest:I mean, it's one of his weaker features, but it's still really fun to watch.
Marc:Well, I mean, I just think the impact of intolerance and the problems within that thing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:There's kind of this idea that Keaton could take the piss out of anything that lofty.
Marc:It's such easy game, you know what I mean?
Marc:It's easy fodder for him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he really was a spoofer and a paradist of things of his time, which we don't always... They're funny on their own, so you don't have to get that it's a spoof in order to laugh at it.
Guest:But yeah, something like that is spoofing Griffith.
Marc:And even one week, you went into detail about the sort of build-your-own-house kits.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's a moment that he was just seizing the way an artist does, like a magpie, just seizing something from the culture...
Guest:Which is build it yourself homes, you know, Sears Homes and other companies that would ship out on a railroad car and you would just get all the boards and the nails and everything in a pattern to put it together.
Guest:And that was this huge phenomenon in this same period we're talking about, just right up through, I guess, about 1925, 30 or so.
Guest:And he must have seen that happening as a kid, right?
Guest:You're riding the rails his whole life.
Guest:And so, yeah, he turns it into this great domestic comedy, basically like what if a couple had to build a house together in one week?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you were really like, it's interesting.
Marc:There's nuances that, you know, I don't like, you know, I think the benefit of somebody like yourself shedding light on this stuff is it in for me, too.
Marc:And I guess I've gotten cynical or I've gotten lazy.
Marc:But, you know, these things are here to be read into and to assess, you know, for you to spend time to really talk about how the ending of that short of one week, which is a comedy short that there was some hope at the end.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:But I don't know that me even, a relatively smart guy, is going to look at that and read into it that much.
Marc:But it's all there.
Marc:I don't think you're making a mistake.
Guest:But it's there in the sort of happiness that you feel at the end of the movie after that great last joke, which I won't spoil, right, of one week.
Marc:We're not going to spoil Buster Keaton movie?
No.
Marc:Like, it's so weird that, like, I wrote something down when I was reading the book.
Marc:It's like, because now everything gets old very quickly or everything is just always new.
Marc:I can't figure out what it is.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Because as soon as something was released, it's sort of like, when did that come out?
Marc:Last week.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:That long ago?
Marc:Like, but there's still this idea that, like, everything's always available all the time.
Marc:So you can't, you know, literally the idea that there's a moment where we're saying, like, well, let's not spoil the end of one week.
Guest:The Buster Keaton film made in 19... Yeah, it's now 101 years old.
Guest:But that last joke is too good to spoil.
Guest:I really do want people to experience it for the first time.
Guest:And he used it twice or three times, right?
Guest:Yeah, but it was never as great as it was in that very first time.
Marc:No, I think that's right.
Guest:Whereas other jokes that he did, like the famous house frame that falls down on his steamboat Bill Jr.
Guest:were jokes that developed throughout his career.
Marc:The first time he did it was with Arbuckle, right?
Guest:With Arbuckle, right.
Guest:And so just this idea that a frame of something would fall on you and you'd be right in the window was an image that he had in his mind for at least 10 years and kept kind of growing it and growing it and growing it in scales.
Marc:Well, that was the interesting thing, too, about the evolution and the production of gags and how you create gags that, you know, that, you know, when you're dealing with these bits that require, you know, architecture and cranes and timing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And, you know, and massive sets like, you know, you're building a bridge.
Marc:So an actual train can can can fall into a river like it's it's crazy.
Guest:Yeah, the lunacy of that shot, you're talking about the shot from The General, which was the most expensive shot in movies up to that time and was in a way, I mean, it was on a long scale, but in a way that was what started to put him on the path toward losing his independent production company.
Marc:But the masterpieces, what do you consider the masterpieces?
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I mean, almost everything he did in the 20s would stand for that.
Guest:I mean, there's just a few weaker links in there, but even those have really funny passages and ideas.
Guest:I mean, I guess if I were programming a Keaton festival and I had to choose, I think the features I would choose would probably be...
Guest:I mean, the general, just because that was one of his own favorites of his movies, is something that is so Keaton, only he could have come up with this idea of the train chase.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:With the trains almost as characters in the movie.
Guest:The Navigator, which was another movie he cited as his favorite a lot, which is, in a way, the general on a boat, right?
Guest:Except it's just one boat.
Guest:It's not a chase.
Guest:It's just about being stranded at sea on this huge freight.
Guest:I guess it's a freight ship, you know, but just a gigantic ship with one other person.
Marc:The whole idea of that was because somebody scouted, somebody who was in his crew...
Guest:Right.
Guest:Was Billy Bitzer his guy?
Guest:No, that was that guy.
Guest:Billy Bitzer worked with Edison, I think.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Marc:He was the cameraman for Edison.
Marc:Yeah, I just know the name.
Marc:Billy Bitzer.
Guest:He was a super important early cameraman, but no, he never worked with Buster.
Marc:But someone realized that there was a ship up for auction and was like- Oh, no, he worked with Griffith.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:Griffith, right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:But somebody gave Buster the heads up that there was a ship that they were trying to sell-
Guest:Yes, that was somebody in his crew.
Guest:And when I talk about those years when he had a dedicated crew and lot to himself, I mean, that's something that you have the power to do with that kind of mobility and freedom of a small operation.
Guest:So yeah, Fred Gabori, who was his production designer, who designed almost all of these incredible structures and stunts that you think about in Keaton movies, just happened to be scouting some other location for another movie not even related and saw that there was a huge freighter for, I believe it was for lease, not for sale.
Guest:And he just called up Keaton and said, you have to build a movie around this.
Guest:And he
Guest:And he did.
Guest:I mean, he took a lot of ideas from his collaborators.
Guest:You know, he was not a guy who insisted on hogging credit.
Guest:In fact, he's not credited as the director of almost any of his movies.
Guest:And he essentially directed them all, you know, with somebody else sort of helping behind the camera.
Marc:Yeah, I think that like in this book that you really humanize some of these people in a way that maybe I don't read a lot about them, about Arbuckle or about like, you know, that you kind of cleared some of this stuff away from the Arbuckle story.
Marc:My buddy Jerry Stahl wrote a book called I Fatty years ago.
Marc:I read that.
Marc:Yeah, it's a good book.
Marc:And, you know, just that, you know, that that culture of tabloidism was really built around, you know, that Arbuckle thing, wasn't it?
Guest:Yeah, that and a few other a few other scandals that happened right at that same time in Hollywood.
Guest:But, yeah, the Arbuckle trial was a huge part of it in 1921.
Marc:And it's also interesting that he was vindicated, right?
Marc:Isn't that the word?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I forget what the word is, but he was, yeah, he was cleared of all charges, acquitted, I guess, after three trials.
Guest:There were, I think, two hung juries.
Guest:And then the third time around, he was completely acquitted.
Guest:Didn't matter.
Guest:With, you know, an apology statement from the jury saying, you know, this has all been a kangaroo court and, you know, this man has committed no crime.
Guest:But not only was his Hollywood career over, I mean, he did come back and sort of direct some B-movies under a pseudonym, but, you know, in front of the camera, his career was basically over.
Guest:But as a result of that, also, eventually, the production code kind of went into effect.
Guest:You know, it was because of that scandal and a few others that we got such a thing as the production code and, you know, not being able to show this or that on screen and the morality police coming into the movies.
Marc:Because of the immoral life that these...
Marc:stars were leading.
Guest:Yeah, I think just the idea that Hollywood was this, you know, immoral place and that, you know, young women were going to be seduced and murdered there.
Guest:And, you know, and in fact, there obviously were either was a lot of large scale harassment and sexism and sort of violence under the surface.
Guest:But in the particular case of the Arbuckle trial, there was no murder and there was no sexual assault.
Marc:It's weird, though, just talking right now about that.
Marc:I wonder in relative to any other, you know, walk of life.
Marc:is there more or less sordid behavior?
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:It's like... Right, I mean, there just happens to be a camera on that industry.
Marc:Well, yeah, and it's just like when people go, like, there's a lot of drug addiction in comedians, right?
Marc:I'm like, I don't know.
Marc:Is there any more than any other job?
Guest:Right, in rug salesmen or anything else, right?
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:But, I mean, there is money and weirdly sort of cloistered lives lived out here of a decadent nature only because, like, there's... Well...
Marc:You give someone a lot of money and a lot of and they can hide away.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And, you know, and they can't go out anymore and act like a human.
Marc:You know, who knows what's going to happen.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was all, again, just starting then.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Hollywood was kind of a settlement.
Guest:You know, they called it the film colony, you know, at the period when he is that what they call it.
Marc:Is that what you kept saying that?
Guest:I mean, it's a thing you see a lot in coverage of the time doings in the film colony, you know, which makes it sound like it's just some outpost in a remote jungle or something like that.
Marc:So the span of all his feature films, Go West, Battling Butler, The General, College, and Steamboat Bill Jr.
Marc:Those are the big ones.
Marc:The Cameraman, which he said was great, right?
Guest:The Cameraman is great.
Guest:The Cameraman is the first one not with his production company.
Guest:So that's the moment he gets to MGM.
Guest:But for his first movie at MGM, he managed to eke out something that was- Made money too.
Guest:It was very successful for them, and it feels like a Keaton movie through and through.
Marc:But when you did the research and when you write this, knowing that Libby Mayer was this sort of conservative, moralizing guy who was autocratic and also incredibly greedy and powerful, did you at some point feel like he was crushing Keaton on purpose?
No.
Guest:I mean, Keaton and Mayer, it's hard to know because they had less direct contact.
Guest:They didn't like each other.
Guest:And I think Mayer was not crazy about comedy in general.
Guest:He knew that they needed to have a comedy arm in the studio, but it was not to his taste.
Guest:You know, he liked kind of big spectacles and beautiful women and the kind of thing that MGM specialized in that you think of with MGM, big, glossy production.
Marc:And sort of, you know, mythic kind of like he...
Marc:It was fairy tales.
Marc:I'm not finding the word, but he was very anti-sex.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He was very interested in female purity on screen and off and wanted his stars all to have spotless reputations, which none of them did.
Guest:They were all doing incredibly scabrous things behind the scenes.
Guest:And he was very sentimental.
Guest:He was known for this, even though he was, like you say, autocratic and could fly off the handle and yell at people.
Guest:He could also cry very easily.
Guest:There's actually there's a there's a I can send this to you.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:There's a there's a little bit of a late Keaton film, one of the last films he made where he imitates Louis B. Mayer's weeping style, his sort of fake crying, you know, and it was something he would do to manipulate his employees.
Guest:But yeah, their relationship is seemed like it was more hands off.
Guest:You know, they married worried about the money that he was wasting by, you know, drinking and not showing up to set on time.
Guest:But he he mainly had contact with him through, you know, studio lackeys.
Guest:In fact, he fired him through a memo that he had delivered to his to his bungalow.
Guest:Thalberg was more like the producer that Keaton was day to day dealing with at MGM.
Marc:Yeah, and Thalberg always gets, you know, kind of spoken of in these heightened terms as this real artist.
Marc:But the way that you sort of put him together in the book, he was more of a kind of architect of corporate filmmaking.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, he's a really fascinating figure because in a way he was an artist, but the thing that he was an artist of was production, you know, and specifically big studio kind of corporate style production.
Marc:Yeah, it's just like all of this stuff sort of still rings true to me that, you know, when making the decision to not...
Marc:put Buster in Grand Hotel after they said he was going to be put in because of a casting decision that would ultimately make the movie more appealing to people going to the movies or something.
Marc:Right.
Marc:By putting the Barrymore brothers in it.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And then not telling Buster and Buster finding out from reading it in the trades, which is a standard fucking way that this business works.
Guest:Yeah, it's so sad.
Guest:That's just, that's so awful that it's still that way.
Marc:You always hear it secondhand that like, oh, that's not going to happen.
Marc:It's the worst, but it's still the way this business works.
Marc:Also, the idea of none of these executives or people within the development process of MGM could really assess why Buster was amazing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They didn't get it.
Marc:And they just misread him completely because they were shallow and they had no depth of understanding of what those movies meant.
Marc:But I don't know that anybody did until long after it was done.
Yeah.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:I think that these executives at this time must have just seen the business evolving, not like this guy's a genius.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, Thalberg did think Keaton was very funny.
Guest:And one story about him is that, you know, he loved the cameraman himself, the first movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that he would ask for it to be run in his own private screening room.
Guest:People would just hear him laughing in his screening room.
Guest:He liked Keaton both personally and as a comedian.
Guest:But I think, you know, what took precedence, like you say, ultimately was, you know, what's going to bring in audiences?
Guest:What kind of product does MGM want to brand itself with?
Guest:You know, MGM was making some great movies around that time.
Guest:It's not at all the case that they were just churning out garbage, although Keaton's films were pretty much garbage, but successful garbage for them.
Marc:Only because they didn't really they they didn't invest in the auteur, really.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, all they had to do was, you know, leave him alone and give him the equivalent of his own unit within the company.
Guest:And, you know, he would have, he still had it in him to churn out, you know, movies that were as great.
Guest:But nobody there saw that.
Guest:And I don't think it's quite right that Thalberg was, like the movie Mank, I don't know if you saw that movie.
Guest:Yeah, I did.
Guest:It has a very small part for Thalberg, right?
Guest:There's a guy who plays him and they very much show him as this kind of corporate lackey who did everything Mayer wanted and who had no artistic vision.
Guest:Right, that's right.
Guest:And that seemed very reductive because I think he was extremely invested in the films that he made and extremely creative about making them.
Guest:But the vision that he was trying to articulate, which was kind of what studio filmmaking was becoming then, was just something that had no room for someone like Keaton anymore.
Marc:And I think that I'm not sure that's not true.
Marc:Are you?
Marc:You mean that it could have worked?
Marc:Well, I mean, like, you know what?
Marc:Like, it might have been that, you know, yeah, he could talk and that, you know, he was OK with talking pictures.
Marc:But it seems like a lot of the tours that were able to to sort of surface out of the studio system were guys that had undeniable vision.
Marc:But it was it was his undeniable vision was was dated at that point.
Marc:It would have been difficult, I would think.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think the Grand Hotel moment that you talked about would have been a crucial moment of kind of seeing what would have happened if he had appeared in good sound movies.
Marc:Well, yeah, but not not necessarily as the the writer director.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know, could he continue honoring himself as a performer?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or could he another question?
Guest:Could he have worked as just a director within the studio?
Guest:I mean, he was such a natural when it came to placing the camera.
Guest:You know, he had an incredible sense of sort of how to how to create.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:But he's not a word guy, right?
Marc:So like, you know, and even in the cameraman, when he had that, you know, those one or two fights that you talk about around taking things out that he saw as cluttering the narrative.
Guest:Right.
Marc:That even the ones that apparently were left in were not bad choices.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But he just didn't think that way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He liked to keep narratives very, very clean.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so there's not exactly what you'd call character development in his movies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, because it's more to me, it's almost more like they move like a cartoon or a comic strip.
Guest:You know, they have these kind of figures and they're about movement.
Guest:And, of course, you're emotionally invested because he has that quality of you wanting to know and understand and sort of help him get out of these horrible situations he's always getting into.
Guest:But it's not about getting to know a character.
Guest:So it is really fascinating to me to think about Grand Hotel, which he was almost cast in, in this role that Lionel Barrymore eventually played.
Guest:How would he have done those line readings?
Guest:How would he have worked in physical comedy?
Guest:I can't imagine he wouldn't have been good in that role, but maybe he wouldn't have made sense.
Guest:But a lot of people in that movie don't quite make sense, and it's still a good movie.
Yeah.
Marc:I think you really capture really well how the studio system, even in its infancy, with the vision of manufacturing as many movies as possible to kind of make it like an assembly line business and a monopoly to some degree, and how crushing it was to the spirit of these.
Marc:I think that in talking to you about it, what becomes apparent is that
Marc:This guy was of another time and he defined the time and he defined the medium and he's undeniably a genius and somebody totally unique in his vision.
Marc:But, you know, he lived long enough and allowed himself to be.
Marc:sort of um diminished and humiliated by a changing uh industry and it's like it's heartbreaking because i don't know that he by the time he was being diminished that he saw his work as as amazing as it really is or that the industry did either it seems in watching and i i still got like 100 pages of your book to read that he didn't really get his proper elevation
Marc:until the 60s, when he was assessed by European film critics and a retrospective was put together to honor him, that he was put into the canon of film geniuses effectively.
Marc:It didn't happen until long after he was done.
Guest:Well, keep on reading.
Guest:Keep on reading because there is a period.
Guest:It's not quite that bleak.
Guest:I mean, it certainly I think is true that as a member of the pantheon, you know, that didn't start to happen until the last couple of years of his life as his films were restored and things like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in fact, after his death, you know, even more so to the point that now often, you know, in these kind of.
Guest:crowdsourced from critics lists of what are the greatest comedies of all time, he'll make it on and Chaplin won't even make it on.
Guest:Their reputations now are sort of neck and neck in a way.
Guest:But that did come later.
Guest:But in the 1950s, in fact, he had a career resurgence that's really heartening to read about and really fun to explore online as well with television.
Guest:Yeah, with television, which was live at the beginning.
Guest:I mean, early television, he really got in on.
Marc:Really early television.
Marc:Yeah, I think I remember that from Bogdanovich, but I'll read more in detail in your book.
Guest:But so this is why I want people to not take away that, you know, even though he did have this really, really dark time of alcoholism and depression in the 1930s, which I want to talk about with you as well, it's not at all the case that it's simply, you know, a crash and burn narrative and he was a child star and, you know, film.
Guest:No, I didn't feel.
Guest:So he really kind of clawed his way back and started to do interesting experimental things.
Guest:He was not in charge of the game to the extent he had been.
Marc:He was in a Beckett short film, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of the one of the last things that he did in the last couple of years of his life in 1965, I believe it came out.
Guest:He taped it in 64.
Guest:But he he is in the only movie that Samuel Beckett ever wrote, which is called film, just film.
Marc:And if that isn't a tip of the hat of the sort of lofty modernness, kind of like, you know, cryptic, you know, nod.
Marc:I don't know what is.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, if you think about it, of course they go together.
Guest:Beckett and Keaton, you know, and Beckett in fact grew up loving him and watching him and Chaplin.
Marc:Well, he is Godot, right?
Guest:In that he never arrives.
Marc:No, but just in that, like that, that play is sensibility wise would be good for Keaton.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, he was offered the part, and I write about that as well.
Guest:He was offered the part of Lucky, who is the character who's sort of like an enslaved person.
Guest:And, you know, in Waiting for Godot, there's a guy, Pozzo, who brings on this other guy with a rope around his neck.
Guest:And that character, Lucky, with a rope around his neck, is totally silent except for a couple of, like, gibberish speeches.
Guest:These kind of long speeches that are kind of parodies of, like, academic gibberish.
Guest:It's a really...
Guest:strange role the whole play is but I mean that role in particular takes a very particular talent to play right Wallace Shawn actually played that character in an online production of Couteau that I saw since the pandemic but that was the part Keaton was offered and he didn't take it in the first American production so it started in France and this was going to be the first American production that had Burt Lahr in it he was one of the two main guys and Keaton was offered the part of Lucky he never read the script and
Guest:His wife, Eleanor, his last wife, usually read scripts for him and sort of told him about them, and then he would decide.
Guest:And she read it and said, I have no idea what the hell this is about.
Guest:And so they turned it down.
Guest:But that's another kind of moment where it's a sliding doors thing, right?
Guest:What would have happened if he had appeared in the first Waiting for Godot?
Guest:Where you really can incorporate physical comedy and the stuff that he was so good at.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I'm glad that, you know, time sort of like at least gave him the honor and respect that he deserved and that, you know, it did turn around and he seemed to end.
Marc:It seemed like, you know, that last marriage to Eleanor was great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's the fact that he found happiness for really the last, you know, I don't know, third of his life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It helps to redeem how painful it is to read about that period where he did sort of lose everything and lose himself.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And I love that, like, you know, the speculation that in that bit where the building falls on him, that last movie, it wasn't the cameraman.
Guest:That was Steamboat Bill Jr., his last independent.
Marc:That, you know, he was so depressed and possibly suicidal that he actually didn't give a shit.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Whether he lived or died in that stunt.
Guest:Well, the background to that stunt is really, I mean, it almost seems like it has to be a compressed timeline for a biopic or something.
Guest:But I think this is true, is that the day before, a couple days before he was going to film that stunt, so it had already been completely rigged out and everything for this two-ton house front to fall over him.
Guest:He hears from Joe Skank, his producer, and brother-in-law, who he's been making movies for, patronized by financially for a decade almost.
Guest:He hears that his independent studio is being taken away.
Guest:It's just happening.
Guest:He's suddenly told, this is your last movie that you make the way you want to make it.
Guest:I'm now handing you over to my brother, Nick Skank, who runs MGM, and you're going to become an MGM contract player.
Marc:Skank, what a name.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Also, just to tell people who are listening, because obviously we can't go through the whole book, the way you sort of string through it, how women are treated and how they're represented, and the struggle of actresses throughout this thing is good.
Marc:I think that the idea that there was in the 20s or the teens, there was a lot of women directors around doing this.
Marc:And then as the business became more lucrative and more manageable, it just kind of became the domain of men and they were pushed out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that was something I learned in the process of writing and researching this that I didn't know at all, which is that there was this period in the teens, like you say, where there were more women working in the industry in high positions than there are now.
Guest:You know, I think it was 1917.
Guest:I remember reading this statistic and maybe in the last couple of years it's been surpassed.
Guest:But up until, you know, a couple of years ago, there were more women working in high positions like directors, cinematographers having their own production company than there have been in any year since, including now.
Guest:You know, like 1917 was the high point.
Marc:It's wild.
Marc:And also like, you know, the sort of addressing the race issue from the scenes in college.
Marc:Is it college?
Guest:Yes, there's a blackface scene in college that I write a chapter.
Marc:And also like talking about what's his name, Burt Williams.
Guest:Burt Williams.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And the history of him and Vaudeville and, you know, Buster's connection to Vaudeville and just the way race was handled at that time on screen, off screen.
Marc:And there was obviously an insensitivity, but was it malicious?
Marc:It's hard to know.
Marc:Right.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it's really, really hard to encounter any culture of that period without finding blackface somewhere and even further into the 20th century.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Judy Garland did blackface and Fred Astaire did blackface.
Guest:And I mean, it was really, really a standard, obviously, in vaudeville, but even in film for the first half of the century was a very common trope.
Guest:It's weird.
Marc:It's really it's because it was standard and because there was this lack of cultural empathy.
Marc:that, you know, it just, I don't think these people really thought of it as anything insulting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think, well, even watching Mad Men, you kind of see that, right?
Guest:I mean, it's really taken until the last 25 years or so, you know, Spike Lee's movie about blackface, you know, for us to start to look at it.
Marc:That thing is, I watched that again, specifically to sort of feel the weight of what minstrelsy really looked like.
Guest:Bamboozled.
Guest:Yeah, it's one of my favorite Spike Lee's movies.
Marc:It really is because he went out of his way to heighten the production values of that minstrel show to such a degree to where the grotesqueness of it becomes more apparent because of how meticulous he played it.
Marc:How not only historically accurate, but so heightened.
Marc:It was mind-blowing to me.
Marc:Remains mind-blowing to me.
Guest:Yeah, I rewatched that actually when I was writing the chapter about Burt Williams because I was just reading and watching everything I could get my hands on about blackface.
Guest:And that movie really impressed me, like more than it did when it came out.
Guest:It's really aged incredibly well.
Marc:Yeah, I don't love the narrative.
Marc:I think it gets a little hokey.
Marc:I think that Damon did something with that character that was annoying.
Marc:But just for the footage of the show alone.
Guest:Yeah, that's what I mean.
Guest:The film within a film or whatever.
Marc:That was the whole thing.
Guest:One thing I wanted to talk about that we haven't talked about was drinking.
Guest:I mean, we haven't really talked about his alcoholism in that period, which is something that I feel like has been either undercovered or over-covered in discussion of Keaton, right?
Guest:There's either kind of wallowing in the dark years and sort of pretending that he never got out of it.
Guest:And then, as other biographers have done, just glossed over it entirely.
Guest:And understandably, his widow, Eleanor, did not like for that period of his life to be dwelt on.
Guest:It was relatively short in terms of duration.
Guest:It was just a few years of his life.
Guest:But
Marc:Where he was like, you know... Like down and out, you know?
Guest:I mean, he really was at sort of rock bottom to use AA language, which he would never have used himself.
Guest:But, you know, that period, which happened to coincide with the Great Depression, right?
Guest:How ironic is that?
Guest:He is suddenly just walloped by depression and alcoholism and just a really non-functioning marriage and a non-functioning life.
Guest:And it becomes clear for the first time, as will happen when somebody is a child star and has, you know, been basically like working since age five to make people laugh, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He just he just hit this wall, you know, and it just seems like he could really have drunk himself to death, you know, that at that moment.
Guest:But he didn't.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And somehow he dried himself out, you know, via these sort of awful drying out methods and systems that existed at the time, you know, getting sent to sanitariums and cures and things like that.
Guest:And at some point, he just somehow white knuckled it through and made it work.
Guest:But as I also write about making it work meant a very different thing in his life.
Guest:and at that moment than it would now.
Guest:So he was not some sober guy who was drinking green juice and preaching the wonders of sobriety or something like that.
Guest:In fact, he fell off the wagon several more times during his life.
Guest:It seems like his whole life he had this very conflicted relationship to addiction and alcohol, and it was in part because he was such a shut-down guy, such an impassive face.
Guest:He was not in touch with himself, let's put it that way.
Marc:Yeah, but even if you are, alcoholism, if you want to...
Marc:you know believe the disease model you know is something that is not you you're going to be a victim of it right you know it's not a matter of self-awareness or anything else because once you start it's like fucking game over right and you're gonna have to reel it back in however possible right live it right i guess i just mean that we have more of a model now to understand i guess but like the the success of sobriety is limited still
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Do you believe in the disease model yourself?
Marc:I mean, I know it's a complex thing, but... I kind of do, you know, because, like, the disease model, it's sort of multi-tiered, right?
Marc:So it's a malady of... It's a physical, mental, and spiritual malady.
Marc:So, like, the idea that it's this trifecta of things, like, if you remove the spiritual thing, which is, you know, you can, and just deal with this sort of biological nature of it, and whether it's conditional or not...
Marc:Right.
Marc:Whether you got it psychologically because you grew up in it or there actually is a genetic component.
Marc:I have to sort of look at the propensity to be an alcoholic or an addict as as a disease.
Marc:Yeah, I do.
Marc:I mean, it's why not?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Because then it's treatable.
Marc:If you don't call it a disease, then you're going to try to will it away, which never seems to work.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it was great talking to you.
Marc:I sadly have to go to a funeral now.
Marc:Oh, I'm sorry.
Marc:It's okay.
Marc:Bob Saget passed.
Guest:I know.
Guest:God, that's going to be a sad affair.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I'm going to run over there.
Marc:I've got to go put a black suit on.
Marc:Black suit for award shows and funerals.
Marc:That's what they're for.
Guest:Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to me and thanks for reading the book.
Guest:I'm really excited that you're actually reading it.
Guest:I know you can't read everything that
Marc:No, I know, but I wanted to, and I wanted to make sure I was engaged with it.
Marc:And I think it's great.
Marc:Because it's got me thinking again about why film is important, that these people are people, what is art and film, and just history in general.
Marc:Because I think now, because everything operates at such a kind of frenetic present, that we're just losing any sense of history.
Marc:Maybe it's just because I'm old.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:What do you find?
Guest:That we're losing any sense of history?
Guest:I mean, I didn't write the book out of that fear or that sense.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, there's a big legacy part to writing this book as well.
Guest:And feeling like, I would feel this when I would talk to people, like I interviewed Kevin Brownlow, who's a silent film scholar, who's in his 80s, who really, I mean, the reason that a lot of these oral histories of people from the silent era have survived is because he took them in the 60s.
Guest:He's incredible.
Guest:And getting to interview someone like that for my book makes me feel like
Guest:I'm carrying the torch, you know, and I want to be one of those people who's kind of making sure that six-year-olds get to laugh at Buster Keaton movies.
Guest:In fact, we're screening some for kids in New York around the time the book comes out.
Marc:It's a noble effort.
Guest:I mean, there's some of the great works of American art, you know, so I think they need to be out there and people need to know they're there.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:Well, I'm glad to help that effort.
Guest:Well, thank you so much for having me on.
Guest:It was a delight.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Cameraman is now available wherever you buy books.
Marc:It's a great read, especially if you're a film buff or a film head or a Buster Keaton fan.
Marc:Again, the new dates for Napa are Friday, February 18th.
Marc:The new dates for San Francisco is Saturday, February 19th.
Marc:The new date for San Luis Obispo, Saturday...
Marc:March 5th, and the new date for Santa Barbara Sunday, March 6th.
Marc:I shall not be moved.
Marc:Well, actually, I moved those dates, but I'm setting up the song.
guitar solo
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey LaFonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.