Make 'Em Laugh, page 2
But Charlie and his brother had inherited some of the performing talents that their parents had squandered; as a youngster, Charlie appeared in music hall skits and small parts on the West End. Sydney joined a successful music hall company called Fred Karno’s Speechless Comedians in 1906 and two years later procured a role for his brother. Charlie did so well with Karno’s pantomime style of humor that Karno promoted him to a leading role in one sketch because the previous leading man—named Stan Laurel—had moved on. Chaplin refined his comic style in front of live audiences for nearly six years under Karno’s tutelage; despite his eventual success in film, he always felt grateful for the precision of his theatrical training.
Chaplin enjoyed a huge success traveling across America during the 1910 Karno tour; billed as Chaplin the Inebriate, he headlined in several sketches, including his great drunk act, “A Night in a London Club.” He returned to the States in 1912, and while he was performing in Philadelphia a telegram arrived for the Karno company manager: IS THERE A MAN NAMED CHAFFIN IN YOUR COMPANY OR SOMETHING LIKE IT STOP IF SO WILL HE COMMUNICATE WITH KESSEL AND BAUMAN 24 LONGACRE BUILDING BROADWAY. Chaplin, thinking he had been left money by a dying relative, took the train to New York and found out that he was being made an offer by Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. He signed his first film contract in December of 1913 for $150 a week and was off to California to become one of Sennett’s legendary stable of comedians.
Sennett’s Keystone films were boisterous, fast-paced, sloppy affairs, and Chaplin had some difficulty fitting into Sennett’s schemes. He had made a few short films while trying to find a character or persona that he could latch on to. He thought a visit to the Keystone wardrobe department might give him an inspiration; it did more than that, it gave him his career. As Chaplin recounted in his autobiography:
I had no idea what makeup to put on. I did not like my get-up as the press reporter. However, on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which, I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.
The Tramp character was first seen by the public in Kid Auto Races in Venice in 1914, a quickie not much better made than an amateur film, but he repeated the character in several more accomplished shorts. Chaplin moved on to direct himself in all of his pictures (with the exception of the first full-length comedy, Tillie’s Punctured Romance) and quickly tired of Sennett’s on-the-fly style. In 1915, after thirty-five short subjects with Keystone, Chaplin moved on to Essanay Studios, where he was given the unprecedented salary of $1,250 per week, as well as his own production unit and ensemble of actors. As Chaplin historian Jeffrey Vance put it, “If Keystone was his infancy, the Essanay film company was his adolescence. He slowed things down, he took more time, and he added pathos, irony, and fantasy to his comedies.” Chaplin was now famous throughout the globe; according to one newspaper report: “The world has Chaplinitis. … Once in every century or so a man is born who is able to color and influence the world … a little Englishman, quiet, unassuming, but surcharged with dynamite is flinching the world right now.” He had also further refined the Tramp character, with his unmistakable size-fourteen boots, derby, and wiggling mustache:
If comedy is a man in trouble, Chaplin is up on the high wire with a monkey crawling on his face. When in danger of life and limb, he would always have some sort of preoccupation with dignity.
–Bill Irwin
You know, this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, and a polo player. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy. And, of course, if the occasion warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear—but only in extreme anger!
Chaplin’s contract with Essanay ended in 1916; his costly perfectionism disappointed the penny-pinching exhibitors, and there were lawsuits and recriminations. When Chaplin decided to sign with the Mutual Film Corporation, his salary was $670,000 (plus a $150,000 bonus), which was not only the highest amount of money paid to a performer in human history but the highest paid to any employee of any kind. He moved into his own studio, the Lone Star Studio, and over the next two years he created twelve short subjects, which critics believe to be his best, most essential work. Chaplin certainly thought so: “Fulfilling the Mutual contract, I suppose, was the happiest period of my career. I was light and unencumbered, twenty-seven years old, with fabulous prospects and a friendly, glamorous world before me.”
Comedy superstar: (l. to r.) Merchandising giant; before a bond rally; forming UA with Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks; behind the camera; The Adventurer (Mutual, 1917).
Charlie had one fault, I always felt. He’d milk his business, his gags too much. If he got something good, he never seemed to want to let go of it. But that’s such a minor thing. We all have them.
—Harold Lloyd
The Mutual studio, with its ensemble of gifted comedians and full resources, was, according to Vance, “like Chaplin’s comic laboratory. There he could experiment and could lavish the most precious thing in the world—time—on those twelve films. He was never more inventive.” Film historian Leonard Maltin adds that Chaplin displayed another important quality at Mutual: grace. “He sifted out the crudeness that you see in his earliest films and sort of ennobled himself, but never so much that he wasn’t still that little tramp man of the people.” Chaplin’s variety at Mutual was astounding. He alternates the Tramp with other characters, playing a daring escaped convict in The Adventurer, a beleagured waiter in The Rink, and most impressively, an inebriated toff in One A.M.—for all intents and purposes, a solo film in which Chaplin tries, in vain, to enter his own mansion and put himself to bed (he winds up in the bathtub, snuggling with the bath mat). He keyed into the comic sensibilities of his drunken character:
Even funnier than the man who has been made ridiculous, however, is the man who, having had something funny happen to him, refuses to admit that anything out of the way has happened, and attempts to maintain his dignity. Perhaps the best example is the intoxicated man who, though his tongue and walk give him away, attempts in a dignified manner to convince you that he is quite sober.
The tools available to Chaplin in his own studio appealed to the control freak in him. Most other silent comedy directors only shot another take if something catastrophic happened; Chaplin shot ten times the amount of footage he actually used in the Mutual films. His actors were trained to imitate his every suggestion to the letter. He frustrated his longtime cameraman by insisting that the camera capture him from derby to flatfeet as often as possible. Chaplin’s framing followed his philosophical dictum that “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, a comedy in long shot.” Yet all could be forgiven by his immense grace on film, his physical mobility, his tiny touches, the flourishes that kept the roughhouse from being offensive and elevated his very essence into the realm of art, something the audience hardly thought possible from the knockabout world of silent comedy of the early 1910s. W. C. Fields saw one of the Mutual films, Easy Street, in a revival house in 1930 and famously ejaculated, “The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer. He’s the best ballet dancer that ever lived and if I get a good chance I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”
Chaplin would move on once again, like a millionaire version of the Tramp. After his Mutual contract expired he signed with a company called First National, where he would create The Kid, and then left that studio to form United Artists with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in 1923. Chaplin created five more feature-length silent comedies, and as the world—and sound pictures—got more complicated, so did his politics, his personal life, and his reputation. But within five years of his first visit to America, he had been transformed from a strolling player into the first, and perhaps best known, celebrity of the twentieth century, at a time when there were no road maps or precedents for such popularity. It was a heavy responsibility, and Chaplin made many mistakes along the way, but he knew that, in the end, what mattered most appeared on a projection screen:
In my work I don’t trust anyone’s sense of humor but my own. … It isn’t because I think I am so much smarter than those around me. It is simply because I am the one who gets all the blame or credit for the picture. I can’t insert a title in a picture, for instance, and say: “People, I don’t blame you for not laughing. I didn’t think it was funny myself, but the fellows around me told me it was and so I let it go.”
“I’D DOUBLE CROSS ’EM SOMETIMES”
BUSTER KEATON
Abbott and Costello—never gave the story a second thought. They’d say, “When do we come and what do we wear?” Then they find out the day they start to shoot the picture what the script’s about. Didn’t worry about it. Didn’t try to. Well, that used to get my goat because, my God, when we made pictures, we ate, slept, and dreamed them!
–Buster Keaton, 1964
Buster Keaton’s fevered dream of a film career—his silent classics—lasted a mere dozen years, but he had already been a show business veteran for seventeen years before he had even set his feet above his head in front of a camera.
Joseph Frank Keaton was born in 1895, in a small farm town in Kansas. According to him, “I was born with a tent show on a one-night stand in Kansas. My mother joined the show when I was two weeks old. It was called ‘The Keaton & Houdini Medicine Show Company.’ Now that’s Harry Houdini, the handcuff king. He was the doctor and trickster of the outfit and my old man was the entertainer and comic.” It was Houdini, Keaton always claimed, who gave him his nickname; at six months old, the boy fell down a flight of stairs and sat up unscathed. “That was sure a buster,” said the master illusionist, and the elder Keaton said, “That would be a good name for him, don’t sound bad.”
Great Stone Face: as a vaudevillian toddler; with Fatty Arbuckle and Al St. John; the rest is silents. Far right: Sherlock Jr.; toying with sound.
At the age of five, Buster joined the family act, “The Three Keatons,” as a kind of miniature version of his father. The youngster was the eager foil for the knockabout act, which went on to headline in major venues across the country, and although responsible members of the community bristled at the physical abuse to which Buster was being subjected, he didn’t seem to mind. Whirlwinds came naturally to Keaton. According to Keaton scholar Patricia Tobias:
[As a little boy], he had been left at the boarding house. And his parents were onstage when a tornado blew through town. They went running back to the boarding house and they discovered that Buster was not in his bed. And reportedly, shortly thereafter, after they had started searching all over, someone showed up at the door and knocked on the door and said, “Is this yours?” and handed them their child who had been sucked out the window and deposited, unharmed, about a half a mile away.
What had become more harmful, over the course of nearly two decades, was Keaton’s father’s alcoholism, which started lousing up the precision of the family act. At the age of twenty-one, Buster broke up the act and accepted an offer to move to New York and appear in a Broadway revue. Broadway audiences, alas, never got the chance to see him.
The theater’s loss was the cinema’s gain. One afternoon in 1917, Keaton went with an acquaintance to watch one of the screen’s leading comics, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, film a two-reeler on East Forty-eighth Street. Arbuckle asked Keaton to join him for a scene or two in his short The Butcher Boy, and it was love at first sight. “Well, the making of a motion picture started to fascinate me immediately,” said Keaton years later. “First thing I did was I asked a thousand questions about the camera and got into the camera. Then I went into the projecting room to see things cut. It just fascinated me.” Keaton tore up his Broadway contract and joined Arbuckle’s unit, eventually moving out to California to make movies with him. He had also discovered one of his great assets, his deadpan facial expression:
I just happened to be, even as a small kid, I happened to be the type of comic who couldn’t laugh at his own material. I soon learned at an awful early age that when I laughed the audience didn’t. So, by the time I got into pictures, that was a natural way of working.
The average mind of the motion picture audience is twelve years old.
–Fatty Arbuckle
Roscoe, something tells me that those who continue to make pictures for twelve-year-old minds ain’t going to be with us long.
–Buster Keaton
By 1919, Arbuckle would get a contract to make his own feature-length films (and two years later, he would be washed up in Hollywood, due to a spectacular scandal not of his own making), and Keaton would be given his own studio by Metro and charged with putting out a half-dozen two-reelers a year. Before they went their separate ways, Arbuckle said to Keaton, “Here’s something you want to bear in mind, that the average mind of the motion picture audience is twelve years old. It’s a twelve-year-old mind you’re entertaining.” Keaton recalled, “I was only with him about another couple of months or something like that, and I says, ‘Roscoe, something tells me that those who continue to make pictures for twelve-year-old minds ain’t going to be with us long.’” He was right; silent film comedy was destined to grow in its ambitions. But Keaton had been a performer for nearly as long as silent films had been around, so he didn’t need to experiment with who he was or what he could do. He just pulled the collaborators in his unit together, came up with a beginning gag and an ending gag—“we figured the middle would take care of itself,” he always said—and started shooting the movie.
The first release that bore his unmistakable imprint, One Week, concerned a couple who buy a “some assembly required” home, only to be double-crossed when a rival mixes up the boxes. But Keaton the director double-crosses the audience, too. Keaton’s character manages to assemble something vaguely resembling a house anyway, but, as Tobias describes it:
At the end of the film, this house that he has built winds up having to get moved. It’s on the wrong lot, so he’s trying to get it across the railroad tracks, it gets stuck, and you see the train coming. And he and his wife stand back and cover their eyes and they know that the train’s going to smash their house—but it goes by on a parallel track. Well, then just as they’ve breathed a big sigh of relief, another train comes from the other direction and demolishes the house.
“I always wanted an audience to outguess me,” said Keaton, “then I’d double-cross ’em sometimes.”
His fascination with film technology allowed him to work out brand-new gags in the most painstaking detail. In 1921’s The Playhouse he exposed a sequence of film nine times to get the effect of him dancing onstage with eight exact doubles of himself. In his most adventuresome short film, Sherlock Jr. (1924), he invents a scenario where a movie projectionist falls asleep and dreams himself into the movies he projects. Keaton was insistent that the film’s gags could only work within the context of a dream—he was a vocal proponent of the believability of a gag—but the dream allowed him to walk in and out of the action on a motion picture screen, something no one had ever done; luckily his crew had the skill to pull it off.
His body was as fearless as his imagination. His long tenure in vaudeville allowed him to do stunts no one else could accomplish. Dick Van Dyke, a fervent acolyte, recalled:
He was an athlete. He could have been in the Olympics. I saw him do things that no human being should be able to do. I finally got to meet him in his later years. I was asking him about how he used to put one foot up on the table and then the other foot and then seemed to pause in midair for a second before he’d fall. And he did it for me in his own kitchen at about sixty-eight years old.
On occasion, Keaton’s luck might run out. While filming a sequence in Sherlock Jr., Keaton was sprayed to the ground by the full force of an open spout on a water tank. He got up and finished the shot, unaware that he had broken a vertebra at the top of his neck—it wasn’t until an X-ray pointed it out a decade later that he discovered the fact. But he always respected the audience’s desire for a genuine thrill; as Tobias puts it, “He realized that if you’re going to show something, you need to really show it.”
Keaton’s ultimate devotion to imperturbability came during the shooting of his last independent feature, Steamboat Bill, Jr. Forced by studio brass to change the framework of his scenario from a flood to a tornado, Keaton and his crew meticulously recrafted all their gags. One of them, perhaps his most famous, involves Keaton standing stock-still while a house falls down around him. In 1965, Keaton described the near-military planning that went into the gag:
First I had them build the framework of this building and make sure that the hinges were all firm and solid. It was a building with a tall V-shaped roof, so that we could make this window up in the roof exceptionally high. An average second story window would be about twelve feet, but we’re up about eighteen feet. Then you lay this frame-work down on the ground, and build the window around me. We built the window so that I had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder, and the top missed my head by two inches and the bottom my heels by two inches. We mark the ground out and drive big nails where my two heels are going to be. Then you put that house back up in position while they finish building it. They put the front on, painted it, and made the jagged edge where it tore away from the main building; and then we went in and fixed the interiors so that you’re looking at a house that the front has blown off. Then we put our wind machines with the big Liberty motors. We had six of them and they are pretty powerful—they could lift a truck right off the road. Now we had to make sure we were getting our foreground and background wind effect, but that no current ever hit the front of the building when it started to fall, because if the wind warps her, she’s not going to fall where we want her, and I’m standing right out front. But it’s a one-take scene and we got it that way. You don’t do those things twice.
