New Arrivals

My contributor’s copies of Keaton’s THREE AGES from Eureka! Masters of Cinema and DIRECTED BY SIDNEY J FURIE from Imprint finally arrived! Like Christmas.

THREE AGES has three pieces I worked on and one more by Fiona and I highly recommend it. The Furie box set is packed full of extras including two video essays by me and I can’t wait to dig into the abundance of other materials.

Some mild confusion may be engendered by the contradictory accounts in the Keaton extras. John Bengtson’s typically erudite piece on Keatonian locations includes his opinion that Keaton would not have failed to make his rooftop leap at the climax of the film unless he’d intended to miss. My essay includes a photograph of a battered and shaken Keaton taken just after he slammed into the side of the building and fell to the padding below. It’s very well attested-to. Keaton could make terrific leaps, but the variable in this case is the improvised springboard he uses — could it have become slightly less springy during rehearsals?

As I mentioned before, David Kalat’s spirited commentary track has him adamant that Keaton NEVER considered cutting THE THREE AGES into three shorts for separate release, and that he certainly never spoke of this. I point to the Rudi Blesh biography — Blesh suggests this was a consideration, and he suggests it in between quotes from Keaton, whom he talked to for the book. Now, that’s not conclusive, but I think Keaton would not have missed this possibility — it was very much a Plan C scenario — they previewed the film multiple times and reshot and recut each time, mainly due to problems with the leading lady’s performance. Had a satisfactory result not been achievable, another answer was ready.

Kalat thinks that an “egotistical” filmmaker like Keaton would never have considered the possibility of failure, but “egotistical” is a very strange reading of Buster’s character. There’s self-confidence, for sure, but also humility. Comedy involved, said Keaton, “a certain amount of guess.”

The fact that Keaton had starred in THE SAPHEAD, a previous feature, does not prove that he felt no uncertainty about his first feature as co-writer/director. And even if he felt 100% confident, he also had Joe Schenk to reassure…

To me, it’s not a subject about which absolute certainty is warranted. Keaton may have been 100% certain that we wouldn’t be chopping up the film. But he knew he COULD.

3X3

I love David Kalat. I love his commentary tracks. But I’m reading in many of the reviews of the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray of Buster Keaton’s THREE AGES that Kalat has “debunked” the idea that Keaton ever considered that the film could be released as three shorts. Since some of the reviews are saying that my video essay on the same disc “repeats the canard” or whatever, I kind of want to debunk the debunking.

This is the quote from Rudi Blesh’s Keaton biography, written while Buster was alive, well, and cooperating fully.

This does stop short of Keaton saying, “I was considering cutting the film into three shorts if it didn’t do well as a feature.” But Blesh pretty much comes out and says that’s what he was thinking. And we presume Blesh had longer conversations than the one he excerpts here, so he was able to sound Keaton out about it.

Blesh’s book does contain plenty of errors, due, I think, to the difficulty in viewing the films and the faulty memories of some of his interviewees (Clyde Bruckman, for example, recalls Buster being matted into the shot of the animated dinosaur, which would have been awesome but certainly didn’t make it into the film that’s come down to us).

But consider this: Keaton, making his first feature, chooses to tell the same story three times. Clearly he’s to some extent looking to bridge the gap between shorts and features in the gentlest way. But do we seriously think it never occurred to him that, if the film flopped, he could subdivide it, as Griffith had done with INTOLERANCE?

It wasn’t his PLAN — and nobody has ever argued that it was. It was a fall-back option. But to suggest that it’s an option Keaton didn’t have somewhere at the back of his mind is to push the idea of Keaton as naif and idiot savant further than it should be expected to stretch.

Now, I don’t have my copy of the disc yet (come ON, Eureka!) so I don’t know exactly what DK says. But I feel moved to defend my stance.

Hairbreadth Harry

Click to enlarge — it’s worth it!

I’ve been greatly enjoying Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time, Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969, a stupendous compilation of funnybook esoterica. Above we see an adventure of Hairbreadth Harry, a twenties newspaper strip. It’s nice to see that Winsor McCay’s GERTIE THE DINOSAUR was still remembered in 1924 (the nightmarishly expanding creature also recalls McCay’s Rarebit Fiend short THE PET). According to Rudi Blesh’s Buster Keaton biography, Gertie inspired the dinosaur scene in THE THREE AGES, with Keaton reasoning that animation and live-action could be combined in a way inspired by McCay’s short.

This got me thinking about that dinosaur again — I’ve often wondered who made it. A Google search brought me a sample of Mark F. Berry’s indispensible-sounding The Dinosaur Filmography, published the same year as Nadel’s book, in which Lou Bunin (he of the peculiar ALICE IN WONDERLAND) named the great Charley Bowers as the artist responsible. This would make a lot of sense — Willis H. O’Brien is the only other Hollywood stop-motion man I can think of from this period, but if it was him we would know, wouldn’t we? — and would be Big News — a Bowers-Keaton collaboration! I hope it’s true, but we may never know.

Here’s another bit of Maurice Ketten’s strip with another movie reference ~