Contradictory Claims |
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Advertisers, salesmen, bosses, preachers, proselytizers, attorneys will frequently say to you,
“Here’s the evidence. You decide.”
When they do that, you know that you are being tricked.
The evidence they present to you is incomplete, slanted, or faked, or perhaps it is all of that.
You cannot make an honest or informed decision about what is true and what is not
when you are presented only with contaminated evidence that has been
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So, what I say to you instead is,
“Here is the evidence.
Do not decide.
The evidence is fragmentary, unreliable, and contaminated.
So do not decide — unless, perchance, you have further evidence that would shed light on the matter.”
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Years. I don’t know how many years, but it was years. Years.
I thought I had finally pieced the story together properly.
I had not. I cannot. With the sources at my disposal, piecing this narrative together is impossible.
So, rather than piece it together for you, I shall present you with the fragments at hand.
If you can fill in the gaps and make sense of any of this,
please write to me and explain.
Please. Please. Please. I beg of you. Please.
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Ray repeatedly insisted that this happened in 1954.
Eleanor’s story, as she told it to Oliver,
is incompatible with Ray’s usual narrative of Buster wandering in simply to offer his garage full of junk to Ray.
So what do we do?
Well, we can turn to Jim Curtis’s new book, Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life (2022), pages 606–609:
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On an evening in 1958,
Buster took Eleanor to a screening of The General, a
picture she had heard much about but had never seen. The showing was at
a small theater in Beverly Hills known as the Coronet, the
“He came down,” recalled Eleanor, “and said, ‘Hi, I want to talk to you
after,’ and he went back up.–...
...With his move to the Coronet, Rohauer aggressively programmed
What Rohauer wanted to know that night was if Keaton had prints of
any of his pictures, but Buster had to tell him no. James Mason had transferred
all his personal prints to the Academy. Did Keaton own the rights?
Rohauer pressed. No, he told him, Joe Schenck owned them. It was, however,
a momentous meeting for both men. In Keaton, Rohauer would find
the vessel for his ambitions to become an owner and distributor of important
films. and in Rohauer, Keaton would find an obsessive champion for
his legacy as one of the world’s great filmmakers. Eleanor was dubious. To
her, Rohauer was the strangest man she had ever met.
What Keaton gave Rohauer that night was a target. The mother lode of
Keaton properties was close at hand — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences was within walking distance of the Coronet. All Rohauer, an
inveterate film collector, needed was access to those prints, presumably all
pristine 35mm originals. An association with Keaton himself would confer
legitimacy, but it wouldn’t go far enough toward Rohauer’s eventual goal,
which was a degree of ownership.
“The first thing I did was send Buster over to see Joe Schenck, to get
Schenck to help Buster get the rights to Buster Keaton Productions,”
Rohauer told Edward Watz, a business associate, in 1977. “Buster knew
that Schenck had a stroke, but I told him he recovered. Schenck lived at the
Beverly Hilton in the penthouse, so we went there and I waited in the lobby.
Buster came down and said, ‘I don’t know if he recognized me.’ So I had to
find another way to get somebody on our side.”
Said Eleanor, “Raymond knew Joe Schenck was in bad shape, but he
lied to Buster. He said, ‘He’s fine! He wants to help.’ When Buster came
home he was still upset. He felt like he was tricked into botherins his sick
old friend. We didn’t talk to Raymond for a while after that happened. He
knew to leave us alone.”
If the man behind Buster Keaton Productions was an invalid, Rohauer
assumed there would be no opposition to a newly created entity also called
Buster Keaton Productions. On
September 24, 1958,
papers were filed establishing
it as a California Domestic Corporation. This time, Keaton would
be the president, Rohauer vice president, and Eleanor secretary. Now that
he was formally in business with the Keatons, Rohauer could approach the
Academy on something other than bended knee. What he didn’t know was
that the surviving trustee in the liquidation of the original company, Leopold
Friedman, was breathing new life into the old, original entity....
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Jim Curtis continues his story in his next chapter, pages 611–612.
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[Buster’s agent Ben] Pearson said... “And
he made that deal with Raymond Rohauer without consulting me. I didn’t
get any money out of that, and that’s all right, but Rohauer is one awful
guy.”
In September 1959, Rohauer persuaded Keaton to sign over any rights he
might still retain to his old pictures in exchange for a half share of the profits.
In turn, Rohauer assigned those rights to Buster Keaton Productions,
Inc. “What I don’t understand,” Keaton said to James Karen, “is what the
hell’s all this about these films? Who the hell wants to see a picture that’s
forty years old?”
It took a year, but now Rohauer was ready to make his move with the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On
October 26, 1959,
he met
with assistant executive director Sam E. Brown as a representative of Keaton
Productions. The following day, Benjamin D. Brown, a Los Ángeles-based
attorney representing the newly established corporation, wrote to the Academy
to confirm that Sam Brown had agreed to loan their print of Cops for
screening purposes. The Academy cautioned that no such oral agreement
had been reached, so the next day, October 28, a formal request for the loan
was made in writing by the attorney. On October 30, executive director
Margaret Herrick recommended the loan be made, but with the stipulation
that the print be accompanied by an Academy employee “to get out of a
difficult situation.”
Cops, of course, was copied, and it became the first 35mm Keaton subject
in Rohauer’s inventory.
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Whoops. Whoops. Whoops. Whoops. Whoops.
Let’s stop right there.
The reason I highlighted some of the dates in the above passages was to draw attention to them.
Nowhere did Eleanor state that their visit to the Coronet was in 1958.
It is fascinating to learn that it was on that night in what may or may not have been 1958
that Buster told Ray that James Mason had given his personal prints to the Academy.
We turn to the notes and discover that there is no citation, no source, no reference.
Where did Jim Curtis find any information about this conversation?
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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My guess is that Jim Curtis guessed the same way I guessed,
but what I guessed was just a guess, and my guess was based upon Jim’s guess.
Ray’s lawyer(s) filed the papers for the new Buster Keaton Productions on September 24, 1958.
That is why Jim guessed that Buster and Eleanor met Ray just prior to that.
Reasonable guess.
I read that and I said to myself, “Hey, that’s a reasonable guess! I buy it. Completely.”
What I did not notice was the problem, the problem that becomes just a little bit apparent a few pages later.
If Cops “became the first 35mm Keaton subject in Rohauer’s inventory” at about the end of October 1959,
then how does that explain what Ray was showing to Robert Smith, Sidney Sheldon, and Donald O’Connor
more than three years earlier, in 1956?????
Well, maybe that’s not a problem, maybe not, maybe not, maybe not, maybe not, maybe not.
Could it have been merely that Ray knew where to borrow materials to show Smith/Sheldon/O’Connor? Maybe.
Hold that thought.
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While you are holding that thought, let’s return to Jim’s narrative, pages 611–612:
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Two months later, on December 31, attorney
Brown wrote again to indicate that Keaton wanted to borrow The General
and Our Hospitality, also for screening, and that the prints would be picked
up on January 6, 1960. New 35mm negatives of Cops, The General, and
Our Hospitality would give the corporation three of Keaton’s most important
titles. This time, however, the process didn’t go quite so smoothly. On
January 29, Rohauer advised the Academy that Our Hospitality had “deteriorated
considerably” and that it was impossible to run all the reels. Both
it and The General would be returned the following week, at which time
Keaton Productions wished to borrow The Saphead, The Navigator, and
Sherlock Jr.
In order to cover the fact that all the loaned prints were being duplicated,
Rohauer conceived the fiction that Keaton had prints of many of his old
pictures stored in the garage of his old house on Victoria. It was, he maintained,
these prints that were being copied, not the prints that had come
to the Academy from James Mason. He also made the claim that he met
Keaton in 1954, and that he first examined the films, at Keaton’s invitation,
before the Mason prints ever came to light. Shrewdly, Rohauer never made
an outright claim to the copyrights of the films he was borrowing, trusting
that the name of the new corporation and Keaton himself would give him
all the credibility he needed. When the films were returned to the Academy
in late February, Rohauer told them that The Navigator and Sherlock Jr. were
each missing a reel, which was consistent with the records the Academy kept
as to which reels had been lost to decomposition. Not knowing this though,
Rohauer hopefully added that he was sure the missing reel to The Navigator
had simply been misplaced in the Academy’s vault.
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When we turn to Jim Curtis’s book and flip to page 745, we find this endnote
pertaining to page 612:
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In a 1976 interview with Keaton biographer Tom Dardis,
Harold Goodwin was asked about the films Keaton supposedly kept in his garage.
“What?” Goodwin responded. “Oh no, he didn’t have any of those.” Dardis: “Really?
No nitrate copies of The General, Cameraman, Navigator, The Three Ages, all the shorts?”
Goodwin: “No, none of that. He had a 16mm projector, so he might’ve rented some of
the old films from a camera store, but he didn’t own any.”
Edward Watz once asked Eleanor Keaton if Rohauer’s account of how he and Buster
took Keaton’s personal print of Three Ages to a lab to be copied was true. “She sort of
twinkled her eyes, smiled, and said, ‘Well, it makes a good story, doesn’t it?’”
Rohauer promulgated many falsehoods concerning his relationship with Keaton,
and key among them was his assertion that he and Keaton met in 1954.
“Rohauer slipped once,” said [Ed] Watz, who was employed by Rohauer for four years,
“and told me that he didn’t know Buster when The Buster Keaton Story was being made
‘or I would have worked on Paramount to make safety copies of all his films.’
I didn’t point out the discrepancy to him....”
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So, Hal’s story should put paid to any idea that Buster had copies of his movies.
(Yes, camera stores did offer 16mm prints for rent, usually condensations or excerpts.
Probably the only two Buster films available from camera stores at the time were
The Goat, which was shown at the Eaglet in Sacramento in
February 1954, and Roaring Rails, which was a pirated edition
of the
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Now, you read Ray’s account of Buster wandering in to the Coronet to offer Ray some junk.
You read Eleanor’s account that she and Buster walked in to see The General.
She said nothing about offering Ray some junk.
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If you are not yet exhausted by this story, then you have far more stamina than I.
It is a challenge to write this story in a way that can be easily understood.
It is downright impossible to write this story in a way that is delightfully engaging.
My apologies.
Sorry.
That is just the nature of the problem when we have a complicated narrative
that is riddled with corrupted sources.
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Let us continue.
Keep all this background in the back of your mind.
Let it hover around in there.
And while that information is quietly buzzing around,
carry on with the rest of this story.
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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Back to The Buster Keaton Story |
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MoMA, an internationally renowned art museum, was interested in Buster’s works,
and the Academy was interested, too.
When Buster saw that, he had a change of heart.
Now, for the first time in his life,
he was open to a request from those two foundations to seek out his old movies.
Helping influence him, perhaps, was his winning of the George Eastman Award in 1955.
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Is that what really happened?
My tentative reconstruction makes sense and it fits the known data,
but most stories that make sense and fit the known data turn out to be wrong.
I need more data, but I have no idea where to get more data, since all the people involved in that story are dead.
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For what it’s worth (probably nothing), I’ll include an assertion made by Dardis on p. 250.
Here, again, I have to eat humble pie.
I had mocked Dardis for his first statement, and yet his first statement turns out to be true.
Here we go:
“Someone told Buster
in 1937 that a failure in the cooling system of the vaults where
the negatives of all his silent films had been stored had resulted
in their total destruction. Except for the films that he had personally
retained for his own collection, Buster believed for the
next decade that most of his best work had perished. Luckily this
was not true, for these negatives were actually just a block or two
from where he worked — at MGM.”
That first sentence appeared patently ridiculous to me.
Well, then I listened to George C. Pratt’s
lengthy interview with Buster conducted for the George Eastman House in 1958.
“”
Oh how I wish I knew the exact date of that interview.
I bet it was before September.
Yes, there was a massive heat wave in 1937 that
Curtis (p. 551) quotes Walter Kerr’s “Last Call for a Clown” in
Harper’s Bazaar vol. 85 no. 2886 (May 1952), pp. 156–157:
“A lot of Keaton is already gone for good.
A laboratory fire wiped out his two-reelers and some of the early features.”
Where on earth did Walter get that information?
Destruction by fire is not the same as destruction by emulsion melting off.
So, was there a fire or was there a failure in the cooling system that melted off the emulsion?
What’s more, if a fire destroyed the camera negatives,
was there a second fire that destroyed the lavenders,
and a third fire that destroyed the release prints?
These should all have been stored separately, yes?
Dardis got his information from the printed edition of Pratt’s interview with Buster,
published in Image, vol. 17, no. 4 (1974), pp. 19–29.
This interview, interestingly, was conducted in response to the recently released Paramount picture,
The Buster Keaton Story,
and also in response to James Mason’s donation to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
of several of Buster’s films, which were then duplicated for MoMA.
It was also in response to the recent acquisition by the George Eastman House of The Cameraman.
Though this interview was conducted at some unspecified time in 1958, it was not published for another 16 years.
I suppose the original recording was not available to Dardis.
The tape has now been digitized and posted to
SoundCloud,
and we can hear the
Pratt: “Some people think that, uh, these,
a good many of these early
Buster: “Some of ’em.
Uh, none of these have ever been on television.”
Pratt: “Where would they be?”
Buster: “I don’t know.
I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Dardis above maintained that Buster had kept some of his films for his own collection.
When we listen to the Pratt interview, though,
we witness no such hint of such a private collection.
Buster had kept some preview prints at his Italian Villa,
but when he moved out in 1932, he left them behind.
When he said that “some of ’em” were still around,
he referred to the preview prints that Mason had found at the Italian Villa and donated to the Academy.
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Keep reading, because I have a guess about where these original camera negatives were.
My guess is that they were at Standard Film Laboratories, in fine condition.
My guess is that the personnel at Standard just assumed they had been ruined in the heat wave
and so sent them out for silver reclamation.
That is when there was a
Where on earth did Dardis get these ideas?
We turn to his endnotes, only to discover that there are no endnotes for page 250.
Am I making it clear that Dardis is absolutely not to be trusted?
NOTHING he wrote can be trusted. NOTHING.
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Now do you understand why it took me two weeks to read that two-page passage from Curtis’s book?
His book is over 700 pages, and at my rate of progress,
it would take me 700 weeks, thirteen and a half years, to complete a reading of his book,
which is why I put it back on the shelf.
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So, that’s the story as best as I can figure it out right now.
A few parts are verified, most is hypothetical, but it’s the best I can do for now.
As more information is revealed or discovered, my story will change, I’m sure.
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Happy Coincidences |
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Let’s continue this story of The Buster Keaton Story
and James Mason’s discovery of the bunker.
I am not completely convinced that the two stories are interweaved as I have reconstructed them above,
but I am nearly convinced.
What about you?
Do you agree with me?
If they were connected, and I’m pretty sure they were,
then we can tie them in with other events.
As we saw above, several stories collided.
There was the Sidney Sheldon movie, the research needed for it, and the James Mason discovery,
but there was more, as well.
As far as I can make out, six stories collided.
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Story # 1, Downswing.
Buster, beginning in the early 1930’s, was a fifth-tier character actor.
He was busy pretty constantly, appearing in cheapo shorts, in cheapo movies, occasionally on stage,
and sometimes he was hired to write gags for lesser comics.
Beginning in about 1949, he popped up on all manner of TV shows and TV commercials,
but only as an aging parody of his younger self.
Despite that, he loved television work; he found it rejuvenating.
By no means was he prominent.
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Story # 2, Monetization.
Then Paramount Pictures changed his life, literally and metaphorically.
As presaged above, Robert Smith and Sidney Sheldon
formed an independent company to produce a movie called
The Buster Keaton Story.
Once Paramount Pictures purchased shares in the venture in August(???) 1955, it was a go.
Donald O’Connor was hired to portray Buster.
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Story # 3, Research.
Robert Smith, Sidney Sheldon, and Donald O’Connor
needed to watch some Buster movies, but how? Where?
The Museum of Modern Art had one 16mm print of each of
Sherlock Jr.,
The Navigator, and
The General,
which meandered around to various high schools and public libraries,
but how was one to see those unless the prints happened to come to town?
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Story # 4, Recovery.
This is the vague and confusing James Mason story, related above.
Jim Curtis’s book, on pages 577 and 578, goes into some detail about what was recovered,
as well as what was recovered from other sources at about that same time.
That is what should occupy us here.
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Now, suddenly, fortuitously, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had Buster’s prints!
Better yet, a few of them were still viewable!
Might it be that Smith, Sheldon, and O’Connor arranged to have Paramount
make safety dupe negatives of
Cops,
The Boat,
The Balloonatic, and
College so that the trio could study them on a flatbed editor, or perhaps even in a screening room?
If so, those few movies were not sufficient.
What else could they possibly find?
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The following three paragraphs I wrote some time ago, but now I present them in a different font.
I have polished them a little bit, but I have not corrected them.
You’ll see why.
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Somehow, they knew about or learned about a repertory house on La Ciénega Boulevard called the
Coronet, and they knew or knew about or learned about its owner/operator, Raymond Rohauer.
Somehow they knew or learned that this Raymond Rohauer was always on the hunt for lost movies
and had gathered an interesting collection.
How the Smith-Sheldon-O’Connor trio knew to make an inquiry of Rohauer remains a mystery.
Or was it Ray Rohauer who knew to let the trio know about his little treasures?
You see, by this time, Ray had dug up at least two Buster movies
and he showed them to the Sheldon gang.
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That had to have been sometime in 1956, probably at the beginning of that year.
The movies must have been
Day Dreams and
The Frozen North.
Ray had found bootlegs of those two movies in Prague.
Maybe.
Maybe it was Henri Langlois and/or someone else associated with the Cinémathèque Française
who found bootlegs of those two movies in Prague.
If so, Ray managed to arrange to purchase copies.
Day Dreams was abridged and The Frozen North was badly censored.
To this day, nobody has found all the missing sequences.
Both films looked (and still look) dreadful — dark, flickery,
with
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That was probably it.
I think it only seven Buster movies are represented in The Buster Keaton Story.
Yes, I could verify that by watching the movie again, but I would rather jump off of a cliff.
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Well, that’s what I wrote before I made a discovery on Tuesday, 5 March 2024.
This discovery, which cannot be refuted or even doubted, changes my story.
Ready?
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Those three tiny tiny tiny little ministories from The Hollywood Reporter
serve to destroy any narratives we have so far pieced together.
By no later than September 1955, Ray Rohauer already had a large collection of Buster’s silent films.
Buster had starred or costarred in 46 silent films, 1917 through 1929, and Ray had 35 of them.
By no later than March 1956, Ray agreed to have his nitrate materials printed onto safety dupe negatives
through General Film Laboratories Corporation of Hollywood,
the very lab that he would later allege had by then refused to accept his business anymore.
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What is the true story?
What really happened? When? How?
I do not know.
I can guess, but I guarantee you that my guess is wrong.
Nonetheless, I shall supply you with my guess
simply because it might get your imagination flowing,
and something in your head might click and suddenly you’ll know where to look for better info.
And if you find better info, please, I beg of you, I implore you,
PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!!!! Thanks!
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• My guess is that Ray had collected his
• My guess is that some were original nitrate release prints that he had scooped up from disused film exchanges
or possibly from reclamation centers, but that others were preprint materials.
• My guess is that he probably got most of the films in a single day, from a single exchange or a single reclamation center,
and that he was charged by the pound, at the going silver-reclamation rate plus an under-the-table conspirator’s fee.
• My guess is that many of these were materials that Standard Lab had written off as destroyed by a malfunctioning cooling system,
but that actually were still quite usable.
• My guess is that Ray engaged in some underhanded dealings in order to acquire these items.
• My guess is that once he acquired the bulk of his collection in a single day,
he filled in the gaps by copying further films from MoMA’s archive.
• My guess is that he managed to purchase safety dupes of a few more films from the Cinémathèque Française.
• My guess is that, apart from the public-domain properties, he had no rights to any of this material.
• My guess is that he agreed to make new safety dupe negatives for Sheldon & Smith and/or Paramount
on condition that they would indemnify him for any copyright breaches, and on condition that he would acquire some shares in the production.
• My guess is that Paramount paid for the lab costs and kept the safety dupe negatives.
• My guess is that Ray did not meet Buster until August or September 1958.
• My guess is that Buster had only a few films, which he turned over to Ray at that time.
• My guess is that Ray did not dare confess to Buster that he already had a nearly complete collection of his films.
• We hear in the
1958 interview conducted by Eastman House’s George Pratt
that Buster was under the impression that most of his films had vanished.
By that time he knew about what James Mason had donated to AMPAS
and he knew about the few movies that Smith & Sheldon had referenced for their movie,
but he was absolutely unaware that Ray had supplied 35 movies to Smith & Sheldon.
• My guess is that Ray needed to get hold of the James Mason donations simply because he suspected they would be superior to his own materials
and might fill in some gaps in his collection.
• My guess is that it would be easier for Ray to stake legal claim to materials acquired through Buster’s signature
than to the materials that he had earlier collected by subterranean means.
• My guess is that after Ray made copies of the James Mason collection for Buster,
he immediately supplemented Buster’s collection with most of the remainder of his earlier collection,
and by then he did not feel the need to explain to Buster how he had managed to find all those films so quickly,
and Buster never bothered to ask.
• My guess is that, in order to help consolidate rights ownership,
Ray convinced Hans Andresen of KirchMedia/Atlas/Beta to clear the rights to issue the films in Europe.
• My guess is that my guess is mostly wrong.
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Why do I think I’m mostly wrong?
Because not everything fits.
If Smith, Sheldon, and O’Connor studied all 35 Buster flicks that were in Ray’s collection,
if they chose a dozen of them to show to college kids throughout Los Ángeles,
if Buster attended at least one of those screenings (he almost certainly did, as we shall discover),
and if Smith and Sheldon assembled a featurette consisting of routines from 17 of those 35 films,
then how could Buster not have known about any of this?
Yet he did not know about this, really, he did not, as we could hear in the interview conducted by George C. Pratt.
That is where my narrative breaks down, and I do not know how to repair it.
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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As you can so clearly see, I pretend to be absolutely perfect
because I want you to believe that I am infallible, that my every conjecture is
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Shall we ponder?
As we can see from the above, Ray certainly did not have a copy of
The Frozen North.
He also certainly did not have a copy of
The Boat, which James Mason had only recently discovered and donated to AMPAS.
Ray also certainly did not have copies of
The Rough House,
Oh! Doctor,
His Wedding Night,
The Cook,
Hard Luck, and
The Love Nest, which were not discovered until decades later.
To this day, nobody has found a copy of
A Country Hero.
Ray would not locate a print of
Three Ages until 1958.
The Cameraman and
Spite Marriage were owned by MGM and were (and are) still under copyright.
That’s twelve films missing from his collection.
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It would be fascinating to learn, step by step, and in detail, precisely how each film was recovered.
Yet we’ll likely never know, because Rohauer performed so much of that recovery himself and he kept everything a secret.
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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Rudi Blesh, in Keaton, p. xi, wrote that he had begun rewatching Buster’s movies at MoMA in 1954.
He named which ones he saw over the next few years:
Cops,
The Boat,
Our Hospitality,
The Navigator, and
The General.
Only the latter three were in the MoMA collection in 1954.
Cops and The Boat were from the editing shed and donated to the Academy,
which either made dupe negatives for MoMA or donated the materials outright.
That could not possibly have been any earlier than 1956.
Rohauer’s personal collection,
though known to Sheldon & Smith,
and though notated in a ledger sheet maintained by an accountant at Paramount,
was not generally known.
Rohauer did not donate his collection to museums.
Rohauer saw museums as sources to be plundered,
not as beneficiaries of his own nonexistent charity.
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