Buster keaton movies directed11/27/2023 ![]() Curtis maintains that actor and playwright H. There are also numerous accounts of how Buster got his nickname. As a result, Joe was constantly battling the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first children’s rights group founded in 1874. As soon as he could walk, Buster was learning to roll (or get thrown) across the stage without getting hurt. ![]() Often biographies feel bloated with lengthy coverage of the subject’s childhood, but in this case it’s necessary. He joined the act permanently at age five. ![]() Buster was first credited on a program before he was a year old. Buster’s father, Joe, took his small-tent blackface act to small towns around the country and also performed in group acts with his wife. There are many stories of Buster’s performer mother taking spills and suffering accidents during her pregnancy, the kind of beginning one might expect for such a legendary stuntman. Born in 1895, Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton’s childhood has become the stuff of legend. Because of copyright lapses, the 1920s are particularly open to researchers, who can readily delve into back issues of Photoplay and Variety.Ĭurtis’s biography diligently reconstructs Keaton’s origins growing up in a vaudeville family. This archive allows writers to rely less on the deteriorating (or selective) memory of the few living practitioners from the era. Thanks to the brilliant curatorial management of Eric Hoyt, professor of Media Production at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (2022), historians, writers, and students of all kinds can now access a wealth of trade press, fan magazines, and technical journals of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Curtis conducted the interviews that were available, but he also relies heavily on historical newspapers and the treasure trove that is the Media History Digital Library. For decades, biographers could simply talk to their subjects and the people who knew them. Researching silent Hollywood can be daunting, but there has been a growing renaissance of classic histories thanks in no small part to the digitization of many essential primary documents. Curtis himself is an old hand to the genre, having penned award-winning biographies of W. ![]() The idea of tackling Keaton’s life was suggested by storied editor Victoria Wilson, who has written her own tour-de-force biography of Barbara Stanwyck. The biography is a massive undertaking, offering over 800 pages on Keaton’s life and work. His deadpan face, gaining him the nickname the “boy with the funeral expression,” brilliantly contradicted the outrageous situations in which his characters found themselves.įans of Keaton, as well as classic cinema, will be delighted to read James Curtis’s new book, Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life. His athleticism was as epic as his knack for comedy. Before stunt doubles were commonplace, Keaton performed some of the most dangerous stunts ever captured on film. The amazing stunts in Sherlock Jr., during one of which Keaton broke his neck (and kept on working). during my senior year (thanks Eric Beltmann!), I was transfixed and forever taken by Keaton, just as many of my own students are today.īuster Keaton is the stuff legends are made of. While I grew up watching black-and-white film and television (I’m of the Nick at Nite generation), I was first exposed to silent film in a high school humanities class. Students are shocked at how much fun an “old” film can be. provokes laughter as if it were a brand-new comedy. Though most of these students have never seen a silent movie, Sherlock Jr. To their surprise, I often begin my introductory cinema class with Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. My students, many of whom see their first black-and-white film in my classes, are pleasantly surprised at the power of Citizen Kane (1941) or the prophecy of A Face in the Crowd (1957). THERE IS A prevailing fear among cinephiles that future generations will be unwilling to explore Golden Age cinema.
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