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The Buster Keaton Story

It was probably early in 1955 that aspiring screenwriter Robert Smith drafted a treatment for a screenplay about an abrasive circus clown who somehow became a star in silent movies but was headed towards a drunkard’s grave until a virtuous woman rescued him. Well, I think that’s what the basic plot was. I cannot be sure until I find that original treatment, if it still exists. Robert Smith knew nothing whatsoever about cinema history and so he just made everything up in the most cornball fashion imaginable. It seems, from what little I can recall of the movie and from what I have read of the later treatments, that Smith at first wrote the story without a thought to any particular silent comic. It was just a generic tale of a generic unfunnyman, a standard gimmick, nothing more.

Some or all of the drafts of the treatment and screenplay are on file at the Margaret Herrick Library. I have so far read two early treatments. Neither was the original. By and by, I shall study and transcribe all the rest.

My guess (a guess, a guess, nothing more than a guess) is that Robert Smith was unable to sell his treatment to any of the studios. Then, in about June 1955, Smith somehow got the idea to attach a real name to his clown. What made him pick the name Buster Keaton we may never know. Could it be that he had heard through the grapevine that something called the George Eastman Awards would be given out in November, and that one of the recipients would be Buster Keaton? Maybe. Maybe not.

Now that we bring it up, though, I think it high time to take a look at the Georges. Open up your copy of Jim Card’s book, Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), and turn to Chapter 15, page 280. He tells the story.

In 1955, film festivals were proliferating throughout the entire film-watching world. I had often wondered about how our PR-conscious director, Oscar Solbert, felt about the Academy Awards each year appropriating his given name for the golden statuettes that are awarded. I should have anticipated that eventually he would counter with some award of his own. Thus I was not entirely surprised when he called me into his office one day and ordered me to set up a film festival for Eastman House. “We will award Georges,” he announced. I firmly believe he was confident that in a matter of time, the Oscars would be superseded by Georges.


Usually I was reluctant to work very hard on any project that was not of my own inception. But this one was proposed at just the right time for me. I’d be brooding over the suicide of Clyde Bruckman. The pioneer director and the one chosen by Buster Keaton to guide his greatest films was reported to have killed himself in despondency over being bypassed and forgotten. Yet his Keaton films were even then the favorites of film societies and museums. More people, in fact, were looking at the Keaton-Bruckman films at the time he killed himself than there had been in the 1920s when Keaton comedies occupied a niche only slightly higher than the Westerns. I had been wondering how best to give belated recognition to the film artists who were still alive, whose work was beginning to be really appreciated as creative accomplishments to cherish as part of our cultural heritage, rather than simply exploit as cute curiosities of a naive past. The general’s festivals might be just the proper vehicles.


So I gave him the pitch that had been fermenting since Bruckman’s passing. “General, the success of any film festival depends not on the movies that are shown, but on the guest celebrities that are lured to attend. Let’s meet this fact head-on. Our festival should not be just of films, but a festival of film artists. Suppose we give awards to the greatest living actresses, actors, directors and cameramen of specific periods of the past. Let’s go back as far as we dare, as far as we can find great people of the early days still alive. And let’s include cameramen. They’re always being left out of the big events. We’re committed to photography — so why don’t we honor the cinematographers on the same basis as the other artists?”


The general bought it — and with his customary enthusiasm. “It’s a great idea. Will you pick the people to be honored?”


“Of course not. We’ll let them choose themselves. Suppose we begin with the 1915 to 1925 period. We’ll have Kodak’s people in LA get us the addresses of every film actress, actor, director and cameraman who ever worked during that decade. We’ll get Earl Blackwell and his celebrity service to do the same for those in the East. Then we send them ballots with every single survivor’s name on it. We let them pick the five top players, directors and cameramen. Then the five winners in each category we bring to Eastman House and give them the George Award.”



At the George Eastman House in Rochester,
19 November 1955.
Here we see Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd catching up.


Buster was one of the winners, and he was immensely moved to have been chosen. He held the George Award in higher esteem than any other. As far as Buster had been concerned, showbiz was a living. He put his heart and soul into anything he created, but still, it was just a living. As far as I know, this was the first time he was recognized for artistry, and it was not publicists or reporters who gave them that honor, but his own peers. Together with the biography that Rudi Blesh had begun, on top of the interest that MoMA had expressed, it was this George Award that probably began to change his attitude about his work and its value.


Robert Smith probably thought that studios might be more receptive to a script based on a real celebrity than one based on a fictional celebrity. He may have asked some acquaintances if they knew anything about this Buster Keaton fellow. My guess is that someone said, “Yeah, he was a kid in vaudeville, a star at four years of age, had an act with his parents called The Three Keatons. He was a hit in silent pictures but became a drunk when sound came in.” At that, Smith must have blurted out, “That’s enough! Don’t tell me more. I’ve got it. Thanks!” So he approached Buster Keaton with a proposal. Could he name his clown Buster Keaton? Buster agreed, for a thousand bucks. Paid. Done deal. Buster was convinced that nothing would ever come of this. It was an easy grand, and that’s what he cared about.


Now, how could Robert Smith get a studio interested in his story? Simple! He could send out a press release implying that plans were already underway.



The above story is notable as much for what it does not say as for what it does. It does not list Robert Smith’s previous production or direction credits, because he had none. It establishes his credibility by mentioning two of his screenplays, neither of which had yet been filmed. It states not that Smith will produce, but that he plans to produce. It does not mention which studio is backing the production, because no studio was backing the production. This news story was based on a press release that Smith mailed out from his home in the hopes of generating interest.

It would be a perfect vehicle, much easier to sell. It would claim to be about a real celebrity and it would include scenes of self-pitying and maudlin scenes of drunkenness and tug-at-your-heartstrings sentimentalism topped off with reform and a baby-makes-three-they-lived-happily-ever-after ending. Just what the doctor ordered! The studios would be falling over each other to purchase that story. To adapt it for Buster required only that a few words be changed here and there.

Smith, already on staff at Paramount, would not produce the film nor would he direct it. He did not have the qualifications even to approach a studio about producing or directing. He needed someone to stand behind. He approached young director Sidney Sheldon (yes, that Sidney Sheldon). The two had never met before, and Sheldon had never heard of Smith. He had, though, been a Buster fan since he was a kid, and he enthusiastically agreed. By August(?) 1955, Robert Smith and Sidney Sheldon were officially production partners. They would write the script together and Sidney would direct. Sidney was sure the script could be fixed once Buster was at hand, but in that assumption he was woefully mistaken. Robert and Sidney met with Paramount, which agreed to purchase sufficient shares to get the project off the ground, and Sidney then announced The Buster Keaton Story at the end of August 1955.

It is probable that Smith had never seen even a single one of Buster’s movies. That might explain his casting ideas. He thought that George Gobel, a verbal comic, could portray Buster. He also thought about Jerry Lewis. If you think the movie as it stands is awful, imagine how much worse it would have been with Jerry Lewis. That would have been prosecutable as a crime against humanity. He also thought about Donald O’Connor, a professional dancer. Buster was okay with either George or Donald, but with a preference for Donald, who could do physical comedy. Donald got the job, and, bless him, he threw a fit to change the script to replace the circus with vaudeville.




Robert Smith looks with proud satisfaction at the file copy of his script.
Donald O’Connor silently looks over at Buster as if to say, “Well, what can I say?”
Buster silently looks at Donald as if to say, “You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me.”


Sidney Sheldon told his version of what happened here and here and here. Definitely worth a read. Definitely.

Robert and Sidney now needed to watch some Buster movies in order to prepare their movie, and they surely asked around for prints. The only available films were MoMA’s 16mm circulating prints of Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, and The General. Those prints were perpetually being shipped to various high schools and public libraries and clubs and so forth, and chances of booking them on short order were slim, but they managed to rent at least The Navigator. At one time or another they also managed to rent Sherlock Jr.. Eventually they saw The General as well, but whether they saw the MoMA print or the AMPAS print remains unknown.

Curtis, on page 582, relates that the Sheldon trio viewed The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr. Kevin Brownlow confirms that Donald O’Connor saw The General and that he was so stunned by it that he called Buster “the D.W. Griffith of comedy.” Both those films were by now with the Academy, and so perhaps they viewed safety dupes in an Academy screening room or on one of the Academy’s flatbeds? Curtis suggests further that the budget did not allow for any recreations of the scenes contained in those two movies. The General, if memory serves, is not even hinted at in The Buster Keaton Story, and that’s a pretty profound omission. (My particular fascination here, by the way, is with Sidney Sheldon, who serves as a tenuous link between my two favorite filmmakers, Buster Keaton and Tinto Brass. Odd how the world works. Coincidentally, Buster and Tinto were both 14:1 directors!)

During discussions with Buster, Robert and Sidney surely asked if there were any other films they could see. As a matter of fact, there were. Just ask Ray Rohauer.



As usual, hastily written news items are riddled with errors. Ray was not the manager of the Coronet. His Society of Cinema Arts leased the Coronet on the days when no sets were on stage. He did not and could not provide prints of every Keaton film, because nobody in the world had (or has even now) prints of every Keaton film. He provided what he could, and that constituted “every [extant] Keaton film.” What he provided were almost certainly all 16mm prints. In later interviews, Ray claimed that after Three Ages gummed up the printer in the summer of 1954, General Film Laboratories refused to accept his orders anymore. Yet here he is in September 1955 still taking his jobs to General Film Laboratories! So much for that story!

That was not my only discovery. Brace yourselves.



Yes, Donald O’Connor, Robert Smith, and Sidney Sheldon showed some of Buster’s movies to college kids, and Buster attended at least one screening, namely of The General, as we shall learn. Oh how I would love to get a schedule of all those screenings! The arithmetic, as you can see, is a mess. Robert, Sidney, and Donald were able to view only 28 of Buster’s silents, not 35. Robert and Sidney made this clear in a note to the Paramount executives. Of those 28, no more than 25 could have been from Ray Rohauer. Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator definitely came from MoMA, and The General came either from MoMA or AMPAS. No. I’m wrong. The General must have come from MGM, which had a print and a fine grain in its vaults. I bet it was Buster who told the gang about that. That makes me curious: What were the 25 that Ray supplied? Here is a list of all of Buster’s pre-MGM starring silents. I struck out the films that the trio definitely did not see. I inserted check boxes by the films they definitely studied, whether or not they included re-creations of them in The Buster Keaton Story. I inserted clickable check boxes in case they might help you to do some figuring, because maybe you can figure something out that I cannot.


The Butcher Boy
The Rough House (misidentified as The Cook)
His Wedding Night
— Oh! Doctor (not available in the 1950’s)
Coney Island
— A Country Hero (lost film)
— Out West (not available in the 1950’s)
— The Bell Boy (not available in the 1950’s)
— Moonshine (not available in the 1950’s)
Good Night Nurse (misidentified as Oh! Doctor)
— The Cook (not available in the 1950’s)
Back Stage
The Hayseed
The Garage
The High Sign
The Saphead (available from AMPAS, not Rohauer)
One Week
— Convict 13 (not available in the 1950’s)
The Scarecrow
Neighbors
The Haunted House
— Hard Luck (not available in the 1950’s)
The Goat
🗹 The Play House
🗹 The Boat (re-created in TBKS)
The Paleface
🗹 Cops (closing title re-created in TBKS)
My Wife’s Relations
The Blacksmith
— The Frozen North (not available in the 1950’s, re-created in TBKS)
The Electric House
🗹 Day Dreams (re-created in TBKS)
🗹 The Balloonatic (available from a UK distributor; re-created in TBKS)
— The Love Nest (not available in the 1950’s)
Three Ages (available only from Rohauer)
— Our Hospitality (available only onsite at MoMA in the 1950’s)
🗹 Sherlock Jr. (available from MoMA, not Rohauer; re-created in TBKS)
🗹 The Navigator (available from MoMA, not Rohauer)
Seven Chances
Go West (available only onsite at MoMA & GEH in the 1950’s)
🗹 Battling Butler (available from AMPAS and MGM)
🗹 The General (available from MoMA, AMPAS, and MGM, not Rohauer)
🗹 College (available from AMPAS, re-created in TBKS)
🗹 Steamboat Bill, Jr. (available from AMPAS)


Now, think a moment. According to Jim Curtis (page 611), Ray did not begin acquiring his Buster collection until late in 1959. Yet, according to Jim Curtis (page 607), Ray “served as a source for Robert Smith, who asked him to help locate some of the shorts and features that he, Sidney Sheldon, and Donald O’Connor wanted to study for The Buster Keaton Story” — in 1956!!!!! Is there a way to harmonize those two statements? Yes! If Ray had access to five or six films in 16mm, he could have shown those to the Smith-Sheldon-O’Connor trio, and then a few years later he could have begun his 35mm collection in earnest. Yet that does not fit the rest of the information. Olga sent me a snippet from an unpublished interview that Marion Meade conducted with Sidney Sheldon:


Marion Meade: Okay, I just want to ask you one other thing. Do you recall a man who was kind of associated with him by the name of Raymond Rohauer?
Sidney Sheldon: I do. I got us some film with him.
Marion Meade: But he wasn’t involved in the...
Sidney Sheldon: Not at all.
Marion Meade: Okay, he just supplied the film that was used, or just for your...
Sidney Sheldon: ...film not that was used, because we shot all the things fresh. But old films on Buster he was able to get hold of.


Not too specific, is it? We need more information. All right. At the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills is a file box on The Buster Keaton Story. One of the manilla folders inside is labeled “Paramount Pictures scripts 1.B-1068 THE BUSTER KEATON STORY - script” and inside that manilla folder is an early treatment on which both Robert Smith and Sidney Sheldon take authorship credit. The treatment opens with a foreword, which serves as a memorandum to the Paramount Pictures executives. Among the things they state is:


We have made two surprising and delightful discoveries about Keaton comedy. (1) It doesn't date. Play "The General," "The Navigator," "Battling Butler," before an audience now. Despite the jerky movements of the film, the lack of sound and sound effects, the people in the theatre laugh as loudly as they ever did. Sometimes they applaud spontaneously. (2) Any experienced comic can play the routines as well as Buster. Even Oscar Levant was hilarious when the orchestra of a Metro musical turned around and the violinist, the horn player, the drummer, And the oboe man, all were Oscar. The whole sequence was lifted intact from an early Keaton two-reeler, "The Showhouse."
Put a Buster Keaton routine in the hands of a really fine comic, a George Gobel, a Hope, a Kaye, a Donald O'Connor, a Jerry Lewis, a Red Skelton and he will rise to new heights. Surely Skelton reached his all-time peak in the sequence of "Neptune's Daughter" where, as a fake Argentine polo player, he was hoisted on the back of a Percheron by block and tackle. This routine was probably the longest and loudest single yock in the history of talking pictures (run it before an audience and see). And every move and gesture of it was created and taught to Red by Buster, who was on M-G-M's payroll for that purpose.
We have viewed 28 Buster Keaton silent pictures, and were pleased to discover that while many of Buster's routines have been imitated by modern comedians, there are still a hundred or more of the funniest and best that have never been touched.
Many of these will fit exactly, and hilariously, into a biography of Keaton. That biography, of course, will be freely adapted to make the finest possible motion picture. As the Jolson Story wasn't exactly the life of Al, and "Caruso" might never have been recognized by Enrico's life, so we're taking a few liberties with "Buster." But what "Caruso" and "The Jolson Story" did with the life of a great operatic singer and a great entertainer, in terms of both financial and artistic success, we expect to approximate with the life of a great comedian.
Here then is the Buster Keaton Story, most of it true in fact, and all of it true in spirit. A story of laughter laced with tears, a story of the human heart, now sad, now gay.


Zo, how on earth could they have viewed 28 of Buster’s silent films if only three features were available from MoMA and only a few other films were available from Ray Rohauer?


The routines that Smith, Sheldon, and O’Connor re-created were, with one exception, based on viewing the original films. The one exception, of course, was The Frozen North. They re-created a graphic from Cops, which was available in 16mm from some distributor somewhere. They re-created a routine from Day Dreams, which was a lost film, available nowhere, and which was not in Buster’s garage or in James Mason’s bunker. To the best of my knowledge, a battered and fragmentary abridgment had only just been discovered at the Prague exchange, probably on the urging of Henri Langlois. Only Langlois and Rohauer had copies at this time, as far as I know. The Balloonatic was in commercial release with added soundtrack in the UK. When I scribble all that onto my scratch pad and do a tally, my total does not come out to 28. Yet there were 28, and the bulk of them could only have come from Ray Rohauer. So, the idea that Ray first met Buster in 1958 and did not begin his collection until late in 1959 loses all credibility.








Time for commentary. The Buster Keaton Story was a work of purest fiction. There is nothing wrong with a fictional work based on a real person’s life. After all, The General is a fictional work inspired by an episode of William Fuller’s life. More to the point, one of the world’s greatest movies is a biopic of Franz Liszt that concludes with the composer piloting a rocket ship. Fine. My objection to The Buster Keaton Story is not that it was a work of fiction. My objection is that it was a terrible work of terrible fiction, utterly puerile. Had the script been written by an unintelligent eight-year-old it could not have been any worse. Horrible movie. Not as bad as The Deer Hunter, but no other movie is that bad. It’s close, though. It probably rates as a close second. It’s worse than The Story of Mankind. It’s worse than Sidewalks of New York. It’s worse than Free and Easy. Much worse. It would have been better had it concluded with Buster piloting a rocket ship. It’s freely available online, but I cannot bring myself to watch it again. It caused me physical pain when I saw it on Sunday, 11 July 1982, at 11:30am on KLKK Channel 23 in Albuquerque. Everything about it horrified me; it was terrible in every way. Downright embarrassing to watch. Dreadful movie.


As horrible as the movie was, it was nonetheless most instructive. Donald O’Connor and others in the cast did the routines and they performed the gags to technical perfection, but all the routines and gags fell flat. The routines were not funny. They never had been. The gags were not funny. They never had been. The routines and the gags had just been frames upon which to hang irony and the characters’ attitudes. Devoid of the contexts, the set-up is lost and hence the irony is lost. Devoid of proper direction, the performances display technical mastery but not character motivation. That is how brilliant concepts were trivialized, reduced to less than nothingness, with every drop of humor drained away.


Sidney Sheldon told his version of what happened here and here and here. He condensed the story tremendously, and it seems he misremembered some things. The part of his story that is completely convincing is Buster’s behavior. Buster, I am sure, did not even read the script, and he wanted to contribute nothing apart from some recreations. Sidney asked if he would like to change the script. He asked Buster for stories, anecdotes, incidents, corrections, but Buster declined to say a word. Well, he did say one single word, only one, several times over: “Nope.” I can understand why. After MGM and Sidewalks of New York, Buster simply had no confidence in such a studio product. He decided to let the bosses do whatever they wanted to do and he refused to get upset about it, so long as he got paid. In my opinion, that was a bad decision. Sidney Sheldon was a good guy and he would have fought for Buster had only Buster fought for himself. (I am reminded of Gore Vidal who inadvertently wrecked several of his own movies, one after another after another, by his defeatist behavior.) By another miracle, Buster’s bad decision paid some good dividends in the long run. Had he made a good decision, he may well have had fewer lucky breaks afterwards.




Buster and Donald seem to have been genuinely fond of one another. The publicity stills, even the ones that were staged and posed, reveal a real playfulness underlying the pretended playfulness. Importantly, the candids are invaluable documentation of how Buster trained himself and his actors. As far as I know, though Buster really seems to have detested the movie, he never spoke ill of it — well, not until years later when he was in Germany, as we shall see. He was grateful for the income it brought him as well as for the renewed recognition it brought him.


I guess making the movie was like a trip to the dentist. You don’t want to go, but after it’s over, you’re glad you went.


It would have been better to do not a biopic, but a story about a Donald O’Connor character who solves a problem by emulating a Buster Keaton movie he had seen in his youth. Buster should have been called in to direct it. The result could have been incisive instead of sappy.


I really like Sidney Sheldon and I really like Donald O’Connor, but Holy Mother of Moo Moo, their movie was brutal.


Brutal as it was, The Buster Keaton Story was a blessing in disguise. Buster had lived through two decades of neglect. Then, thanks mostly to this rotten movie, he entered a final decade of laudits — laudits bordering on worship. Eleanor hated Sidney Sheldon’s biopic. Everybody hated Sidney Sheldon’s biopic. But if it weren’t for that sickening movie, Buster would now be nothing more than a footnote. That movie was the best thing that could have happened to him, because it opened endless doors and accidentally unleashed an ever-quickening cascade of opportunities. It benefitted not only Buster, but every connoisseur of comedy and cinema. It was almost certainly this wretched movie that brought sufficient attention to Buster that the Academy Awards decided to bestow upon him an Oscar. As much as I detest Sidney Sheldon’s unwatchably offensive biopic, I am grateful to it.


Charles Samuels was horrified by The Buster Keaton Story. It so upset him that he decided to set the record straight. That is why he paid Buster for interviews that would become a book-length as-told-to autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (NY: Doubleday, 21 January 1960, $4.50). That is another blessing that came about only in response to that offensive movie.


Bob Youngson, with a sense of humor even larger than his waistline, edited together comical highlights of silent movies into a Twentieth Century-Fox feature called The Golden Age of Comedy, released one month prior to The Buster Keaton Story. It was a huge hit, though I don’t know why. The left side was lopped off to make room for the narration and music, and then cinemas, probably without exception, lopped off close to half of the height, rendering the image and action meaningless. Nonetheless, it was somehow a major hit, and it did much to get the public enthusiastic about silent comedy again. There was not a frame of Buster in it, but still, it introduced 30-year-old comedy to people less than 30 years old, who had never seen anything remotely like it before and who fell in love with it. For his follow-up Twentieth Century-Fox feature, When Comedy Was King, released in early March 1960, Youngson did indeed include some of Buster’s material, namely, a condensation of Cops, and audiences were convinced. Then, on 11 August 1960, as we shall explore below, a 25-minute condensation of The General was shown on ABC TV, and that seems to have been a direct attempt to capitalize upon The Buster Keaton Story. Altogether, this added energy to the sudden turn-around in Buster’s fortunes and popularity. It surely helped that Youngson continued with Days of Thrills and Laughter in 1961 (without Buster), and then with 30 Years of Fun in early 1963 and The Big Parade of Comedy in 1964, with more Buster clips.


There was a book as well. The book would have happened with or without The Buster Keaton Story, of course. On 2 November 1959, Bramhall House of NYC published Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial History. Joe Franklin signed himself as author, but the copyright page states that the “research assistant” was one William K. Everson. What I have heard for decades is that Bill Everson was actually the author of this book, not Joe Franklin. Some of the text reads rather like Bill’s style, but by no means all, not even a little bit. That’s not important. What is important is page 186, in which the author wrote that the surviving Buster movies were: The Haunted House, The Balloonatic, Cops, Sherlock Jr., and The General, all available for viewing. Also mentioned, with the implication that they still survived and were available for viewing, were Our Hospitality, The Navigator, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and The Cameraman. A casual reader simply takes that as a statement of fact, namely, that those films were available as of November 1959. I, on the other hand, am not a casual reader. I see that statement and, when I eventually manage to pick myself up off of the floor, I try to figure out how that could possibly have been the case. Where were these films available for viewing? That could only have been at MoMA, I think. As we know, The Balloonatic, Cops, and Steamboat Bill, Jr., had been recovered from James Mason’s property, and Mason donated them to the Academy. MoMA, I guess, paid the Academy for duplicate negatives. Perhaps. Or perhaps the Academy donated them. I assume that The Cameraman, or, rather, what was left of it, was donated by MGM (to this day, there is a crucial three-minute segment that is missing). When was The Haunted House found, and who found it, and how? It certainly popped up prior to November 1959.


Actually, I just now (October 2022) purchased Classics of the Silent Screen. I had read it about twenty times back in 1973, when my mother borrowed it from the Hoffmantown branch of the Albuquerque Public Library. This is the first time I have looked through that book in nearly half a century. My heavens! Now it comes together! Now I can see where so many misinterpretations came from! The idea that the characters of Buster’s leading ladies were all “dumb” comes from this book and was repeated everywhere. Actually, they were all quite clever, not “dumb” in any way. Ofttimes they found themselves in situations in which they were out of their element, but they came through, always. This is the book that described Buster’s character as “unemotional” and “defeatist,” which is absolutely contrary to the character he portrayed on camera. It’s all so strange, isn’t it?


Stan Brakhage

Are you familiar with Stan Brakhage? Very famous maker of abstract films, for instance this. In his book, Film Biographies (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1977, pp. 181–182), he told a story that’s worth retelling.


I was living in Los Ángeles; and I went often to The Coronet Theatre to see old cinema classics, etc. One night a friend and I took ‘pot luck’ on whatever The Coronet might be showing. We were disappointed, on arrival at The Theatre, to discover ‘the show’ for that night was a ‘twenties’ comedy by an unknown, to us, comedian named Buster Keaton.

We went ‘in for it’ anyway but sat in the back so that we could easily leave. The title “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” flashed on the screen; and the first long camera ‘pan’ across an old river town had my friend and me fidgeting.

But soon some jokes came along to humor us. The gags of ‘The Father’s’ disgust at the sight of his ‘Son,’ played by Buster, called forth more than usual laughs from me. I’d just been recently to see my father and had ‘had it,’ the same kind of reception.

My friend was ‘taken by’ the “Romeo and Juliet’-like development of the plot, he being involved with “influences of Shakespeare on our times’ or some-such.

We were ‘guffawing’ along with the rest of the audience and began, then, to notice a man, sitting in front of us, who never once laughed. We even made ‘raised eyebrow’ expressions at each other about it, ‘shrugs of shoulder’ and the like.

Then came the cyclone sequence in the film. A whole town blows up and down around the hero, buildings falling and narrowly missing him, etc.; and ‘the house came down’ within The Theatre, too, everyone laughing more than I’d ever heard before, myself and friend laughing uncontrollably. When we had time to notice, between absolute fits of giggling, we saw the man’s shoulders in front of us rigid as ever, not so much as a tremor of laugh moving him. We became as amazed by this mysterious stranger as we were by “Steamboat Bill, Jr.”. Toward the very end of the film, the man in front got up and turned to leave; and it was, of course, Buster Keaton.


To make sense of Stan’s story, we need to pinpoint the date, and, since the Coronet did not advertise or announce its shows in the newspapers, that becomes a difficult task. The one time I heard Stan Brakhage speak was on Saturday, 26 January 1980, at the SUB (Student Union Building) screening room on the UNM campus, where he introduced five of Buster’s short films and took questions afterwards. An audience member asked him when Buster was born, and Stan didn’t know. He said that he never paid any attention to dates. None. It seemed that he didn’t know the difference between 1820 and 1940. It was all the same to him. He explained that he refused to memorize anything he could just as easily look up. Someone blurted out that Buster was born in 1895, and Stan was thankful that someone volunteered to answer the question for him. (Actually, now that I think about it, I’m the one who blurted that out.)


It is likely that Ray Rohauer had a 16mm print of Steamboat Bill, Jr. as early as the summer of 1954, copied from the decayed nitrate in Buster’s garage. We know that James Mason recovered Steamboat Bill, Jr., in the spring of 1955. Ray probably paid General Film Laboratories to make a 35mm preservation negative immediately, and he probably then set out to gain exhibition rights, probably from UA, but that’s just my guess. Question: When did Stan’s story take place? He remembered that it was sometime between 1955 and 1957. I had thought that impossible, but now that I have more information, I see that it fits perfectly. In earlier drafts I wrote that Stan lied. He did not lie. He told the truth.


When we check on Stan’s dates, we discover that he was employed at the Coronet in 1956 as a projectionist and janitor in exchange for room and board, and, yes, there were living accommodations in the Coronet Theatre building.

Elsewhere, Stan elaborated. When I read his account, I scoffed at it as the most patently obvious confabulation by a disturbed personality who was trying to get attention. Now I discover that, yes, he was telling the truth. Take a look at “Stan Brakhage Dialogue with Bruce Jenkins, 1999” (I corrected a few of the more bothersome typos):


There’s another piece of fantastic luck. That I should be the janitor when Rohauer is getting these films, the rights to them and getting them transferred out of nitrate into safety film, which he did because MGM [sic] wanted to do The Buster Keaton Story. One of the lousiest films in the whole history of Hollywood, Donald O’Connor trying to play Buster Keaton. I was there at these meetings just tagging along with Raymond and Keaton. They’d have these conferences and Keaton was like what do you call it? He was like reference. What do I mean here? He was the authority on himself.

O’Connor is sitting there and saying, “Well, in that film The College, how did you do that trick where you turned somersault and kept the coffee intact, didn’t spill the coffee?” Keaton, who at this point is — God, he was in his 70’s — he said, “Kid, I can’t do it like I did it then.” He said, “But I’ll show you a trick, a way you could probably do it.” Then he did right in front of us this somersault, and he slipped this thing onto a table and picked it up so quickly you could hardly see. You could have cut three frames out of the movie and you’d never see that it hit the table at all and did this somersault like that, and ended up with the thing intact and everyone just sat.


The Buster Keaton Story was filmed in 1956 and released in April 1957. Rohauer’s involvement in The Buster Keaton Story was simply to supply the films to Robert Smith and Sidney Sheldon in about March 1956. That was all. Interesting to learn that Ray and Stan witnessed any story conferences.

Stan’s story about witnessing an unlaughing Buster in the Coronet auditorium has the ring of truth to it, but I was unaware of any possibility of seeing Steamboat Bill, Jr., at any time in the 1950’s, and so, yet again, I dismissed his account. Also, I was certain that Buster would have had Eleanor by his side, a detail that went missing from Stan’s telling. Eleanor denied that she and Buster were at the Coronet except for that one evening to see The General. Yet now I learn that, yes, Buster did attend screenings without Eleanor. Every detail I had scraped together that proved Stan was a liar has now been proved wrong, and so I have done a 180° on that subject. I now trust Stan implicitly and I shall accept anything he said. He has demonstrated his reliability.


Keep on reading the rest of “Stan Brakhage Dialogue with Bruce Jenkins, 1999,” because the stories continue, with more details that I found worse than implausible but that I now accept totally.


Stan and Ray were friends, but soon enough, most likely because Ray Rohauer was Ray Rohauer, they became enemies, or something resembling enemies. Decades later they had some sort of hesitant rapprochement, but I don’t know the details. I wonder if Stan ever chatted with Buster at all. If not, that would not surprise me. After all, read his chapter on Buster, and you will discover that his encounters with Buster, which should have remained vivid, were vaguer than vague, so vague, in fact, that it seems they never exchanged a word. This is all very curious, yes? No?


Stan’s anecdote about the unlaughing Buster in the audience completely matches a story told by Bob Olds:




Case Closed

Before we conclude this web page, let us go back to Jim Curtis’s book. Buster Keaton Productions, Inc., had been established as a New York corporation. Now, in 1958, Ray and Buster, with Eleanor, established a different Buster Keaton Productions, Inc., as a California corporation. Though commentators have tried to make this look absolutely sinister, there was nothing remotely dishonest or deceptive about this. It was perfectly legal for a California corporation to bear the same name as a New York corporation. Now that Ray and Buster were partners in Buster Keaton Productions, Ray, in October 1959, arranged to borrow AMPAS’s print of Cops, which he received probably in early November and immediately duped. That was the first item he ever borrowed from AMPAS. See page 611 of Curtis’s book. Then, on 31 December 1959, Ray asked to borrow the nitrates of The General and Our Hospitality. On 29 January 1960, Ray responded that Our Hospitality was badly deterioriated and that not all the reels were usable. He returned The General and Our Hospitality and asked next for prints of The Saphead, The Navigator, and Sherlock Jr. A significant point that Jim Curtis makes here is that this was the beginning of Ray’s collection of Buster films, and that it began at the end of 1959 and continued into the early months of 1960. That is an excellent point, and an important one, and I am thrilled to have that information at my fingertips.


Then Olga Egorova pointed something out to me. There was a pattern here, and I entirely missed it. It was in late 1959 and early 1960 that Ray started asking for Buster movies that were readily available from MoMA and at least one 16mm supplier. So, Ray’s requests do not indicate that this was the beginning of his Buster collection, but the final stages of it. When he first got his hands on the films in Buster’s garage in 1954 and on James Mason’s collection in 1955, he made sure to make preservation negatives of the films that were available nowhere else. That was his first priority. Films that were available elsewhere could wait. And wait they did. By the time Ray could get around to them, they were already stored at AMPAS. The single obscure film that Ray now asked for was The Saphead, which was not by Buster at all, but merely featured him as a contract player, and was in no way representative of Buster’s style or talents.


With that final insight, as far as I am concerned, the case is closed. Ray had or had access to several Buster movies in 16mm at least as early as September 1950. In 1954, he rescued six or eight decayed films from Buster’s garage, but he may have copied them only to 16mm. In 1955, he rescued as much of James Mason’s collection as he could, paying General Film Laboratories to make 35mm preservation negatives, but he did not finish his work in time, and the various reels that he had not duplicated were donated to AMPAS. In 1959 and 1960, he finished the job, borrowing the remaining items from AMPAS and copying whatever was still usable.


Buster Keaton Rare Interview Recording
Regarding The Buster Keaton Story (1957)

Sold on 14 November 2010 for $298.75.
Had I only known about this, I would have placed a bid.
Who has this tape?
I would happily pay to get a copy.


Paramount Pictures previewed The Buster Keaton Story on 7 April 1957 and premièred it in NYC ten days later. Buster steeled himself against the pain and agreed to do his contracted promotional work for it. Ironically, The Buster Keaton Story, a dreadful flick that did average business at best and that has mercifully been forgotten, put Buster back into the limelight. The money he earned from that movie bought him the little ranch house 22612 Sylvan Way in Woodland Hills. He had dreamed of such a place since his youth. He was now a hot commodity again. Everybody wanted to hire Buster.