An Ideal Mentor: Buster Keaton’s Apprenticeship With Roscoe Arbuckle
If you’re a fan of classic comedy, you’ve likely heard of Buster Keaton’s earliest film appearances in Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s slapstick comedies, many of which are considered classics today. With its freewheeling atmosphere and talented fellow comedians, Arbuckle’s “Comique” studio was arguably the perfect training ground for Keaton, and Arbuckle himself was the ideal mentor.
But not everyone knows just why Arbuckle was uniquely talented, aside from hearing vague references to his being a skilled director, or why his Comique studio suited Keaton so well. When we explore Keaton’s early career, it’s not hard to conclude that he came to Comique at precisely the right time.
As fans know, in 1917 Keaton was twenty-one and looking to strike out on his own after a lifetime of performing in his family’s popular vaudeville act. His father Joe’s growing dependence on alcohol coupled with other professional struggles had brought the act to a painful end. Keaton went to New York City and happened to get a chance to tour Arbuckle’s new Comique studio. Keaton instantly fell hard for motion pictures, and left the stage behind with no regrets.
It was a fresh start for young Keaton, and it just happened to be one for Arbuckle as well. He had also spent much of his life on the stage and was also striking out on his own. After losing his mother when he was twelve and experiencing frequent neglect by his relatives, Arbuckle began supporting himself by performing. He was touring with stock companies starting in his teens, and by 1909 he was supplementing his income by appearing in Selig films.
In 1913 Arbuckle was hired by Mack Sennett to appear in his Keystone comedies. He quickly became a star, having both a charismatic, irreverent personality and an ingenious ability to come up with gags. He was at home with the rough slapstick and stuntwork the studio was known for, and despite his broad frame he could easily do the kinds of pratfalls associated with more wiry performers. Soon he was directing his own starring films, impressing Sennett to the point that whenever he went away on business he reportedly made Arbuckle his second in command.
Being second in command at Keystone was no small matter. When Arbuckle first joined in 1913, it was still a fairly small, ramshackle studio, which director Eddie Sutherland called “the barest, most barren, most desolate looking place you’ve ever seen…” Thanks in part to its popular comedians like Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, and yes, Arbuckle, Keystone’s popularity soared. By 1915 Keystone had joined the Triangle Film Corporation and Sennett was able to renovate, adding among other things a 5-story building and a large stage which could accommodate up to 15 film crews. In time he was boasting around 300 employees on his payroll, with Arbuckle continuing to be one of his top talents.
In that exciting atmosphere, Arbuckle was showing increasing subtlety and skill as a director and even as an editor. His three-reel Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916), co-starring Mabel Normand, included lovely seaside photography and charming special effects. The following He Did and He Didn’t (1916) mingled comedy with straight drama, showing surprising versatility. It was also the first Sennett comedy Arbuckle directed on the East Coast, a clear move towards having more creative freedom. Thus it comes as no surprise that when producer Joseph Schenck offered him a deal to have his own studio in New York, he gladly accepted.
Thus, the Comique Comedy Corp. was also a fresh start for Arbuckle, who now had full creative control to make whatever he pleased. And newcomer Keaton, who Arbuckle recognized from the stage, fit right in at his bombastic new slapstick studio and was eager to learn about film from the inside out. Arbuckle was happy to show him the inner workings of a motion picture camera, which Keaton quickly learned how to take apart and put back together again.
At Arbuckle’s studio Keaton not only experienced the freedom and possibilities of film, which could be shot at any location a director pleased, but the way it could capture complex gags. Unlike the stage, where a gag had to be executed perfectly each time, a performer could take as many takes as necessary to choreograph whatever gag he pleased. Arbuckle was known for his intricate pancake-flipping gags where he tossed them in the air, caught them behind his back, bounced them off his shoes, and other such feats. He would often devote hours to a single difficult shot, doing take after take until he accomplished the perfect flip he needed. Similarly, Arbuckle spared no expense in getting as much footage as necessary for his comedies in general. In the editing room he would whittle it down to create a coherent story and make sure he had a precise balance of laughs–an art in and of itself. He would tell interviewers that he would shoot around 15,000 feet of footage for each two-reel short, leaving only 2,000 feet of deftly-edited comedy.
At Comique, Keaton also learned when a film director could be sparing. He later recalled that some stunts were almost guaranteed to cause bumps and bruises, so the goal was to shoot them in one take if possible. Other large-scale gags might involve moving machinery like trains or wrecking part of a set, meaning precise planning and timing had to be involved. Fewer takes could also result in fresher performances, giving much of the comedy a spontaneous feel. Both strategies of using as much film as necessary and knowing when to conserve would later be used by Keaton at his own studio.
From their first film The Butcher Boy (1917) to their last, The Garage (1920), Keaton and Arbuckle were two of the most well-matched and creative coworkers in Hollywood. To the end of his life Keaton would credit the friendly, generous Roscoe with teaching him everything about film that he knew, later reminiscing: “I could not have found a better-natured man to teach me the movie business, or a more knowledgeable one.”
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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.
Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.
