WHAT’S UP, BUSTER?
Documentary explores comic genius’s jaw-dropping reel life and unlikely ending
Peter Bogdanovich is busy. The actor, director, film historian and former critic will turn 80 next summer, but in addition to helping complete and release Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind last summer, he has a new documentary out about silent film star Buster Keaton, which he also narrates.
It’s both a discussion of Keaton’s life — interviewees include everyone from Dick Van Dyke, who delivered his eulogy in 1966, to unlikely fan Werner Herzog — and a greatest-hits reel of his body of work. (It’s worth watching for the clips alone.)
Here are five things we learned from The Great Buster:
1
Keaton got started early
Born in 1895 to travelling vaudevillians Joe and Myra Keaton in Piqua, Kan., (the town they happened to be in when she went into labour), Joseph Frank Keaton was performing by the age of three, often as a prop that his parents would literally toss about the stage. After one such pratfall, the story is that audience member Harry Houdini exclaimed that he took “some buster,” or tumble. The name stuck. And the money from the show meant he had his own automobile by the age of 12. 2
Fatty Arbuckle got him started in pictures Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle invited Keaton to watch him shoot some two-reel short comedies, and Keaton had an epiphany. His first screen credit was in 1917’s The Butcher Boy. Over the next six years — with time out for military duty — he would appear in 35 shorts, 19 of which he also wrote and directed. By this time, Arbuckle was implicated in the death of a young actress, and his career foundered. To distance itself from him, the film company was renamed Buster Keaton Productions. 3
His output was prodigious In 1921, the year of the first of his three marriages, Keaton released a half-dozen two-reel comedies. Then, in the five years beginning in 1923, he wrote, directed and starred in 10 feature films, including Three Ages, Sherlock Jr. and The General. He then moved to MGM, which didn’t encourage his loose creative style — he called it “the biggest mistake of my life.” But those five years marked his golden age. 4
He liked trains, both big and small One of Keaton’s short-film gags involves a train that seems about to run into a house. At the last second it’s revealed that they’re on different tracks — but then another train hits the house instead. The General features some incredible train-based humour, including one shot of a train wreck that cost $40,000 — a record for a single shot in a silent film. And his last directing work was on the made-in-Canada National Film Board short The Railrodder. But friends reveal that he also had a backyard full of model trains.
5
He died playing bridge
Keaton’s life was full of dangerous stunts, like the one where an entire wall falls on him, but a window cutout allows him to remain unscathed. He broke his neck ( but didn’t realize it) while making Sherlock Jr. And — shades of Tom Cruise — in Three Ages he missed a leap from one building to another, and fell 10 metres into a net. Rather than try again, he used the shot and built a whole new scene around it. But in 1966 he was playing bridge with friends when he suddenly sat down and died. A few months earlier, the Venice Film Festival had honoured his career. The ovation lasted a full 10 minutes, and left the stone-faced comedian in tears.