Culver Pictures

Buster Keaton sits on the ship used in filming The Navigator, made in 1924.

"No."

"Come down and do a bit with me before rehearsals start."

"All right."

I went down there and not only did the bit but stayed and worked through his whole picture, for about a week, and by that time I went up to our agent and said, "I want to stay in pictures. I don't want to go in no 'Passing Show.'" He said, "All right, we'll tear up the contract."

"What'll the Shuberts say about that?"

He said, "They can't say nothing. We'll just tear up the contract." The Butcher Boy, with Arbuckle, was my first film.

The first time I ever walked in front of a camera was the scene when I came in to buy a bucket full of molasses. They've made me do that half a dozen times on television, since.

The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

Buster Keaton talks about first making movies.

Fatty Arbuckle was one of the greatest friends I ever had. I was only with Arbuckle about three pictures when I became his assistant director. He came up and said, "From now on, you're assistant director." You fell into those jobs. He never referred to me as the assistant director, but I was the guy who sat alongside of the camera and watched the scenes that he was in. I ended up just practically co-directing with him. He was considered one of the best comedy directors in pictures at the time. The public made him.

Later, the complaints were so piling up--every state in the union had half a dozen boards, and it created a censorship problem. The first thing they did was to go down to Washington--all the brass of the picture industry went down there, and got the best man they could get out of Washington, D.C., which was William H. Hays. They made him head of the censorship of the motion picture industry. That was to offset and stop local censorship boards, because if they hadn't stopped them, the censorship rules in Kansas would have eliminated things from a picture that Massachusetts didn't worry about, and vice versa. By the time you tried to please all the censorship boards, you couldn't have made a motion picture. It wouldn't have been possible.

Certainly Fatty Arbuckle was wronged. He was no more guilty of that charge than I was. Everybody had their pictures in the paper for days and weeks, and it was headline news. W.R. Hearst told Joe Schenck in front of me, "This is hard to believe, but we sold more papers on the Arbuckle trial than we did on the sinking of the Lusitania.

After The Butcher Boy, there was The Rough-house, His Wedding Night, Coney Island. That was done at Coney--we used Coney Island for location. I remember making it very well, but it's nothing to write about. We just went down there, went on the concessions at Luna Park, and got in trouble--that's all there was to that.

During the First World War, I was in the infantry, at Camp Kearney, California. I was in France about four months when the war ended. Our division, the same as the other divisions, did a lot of entertaining. Headquarters troop sent out to find what talents there were throughout the division, and said, "Assemble them all at headquarters. We'll put them under the command of a chaplain, and give them a regimental band to travel with them in trucks, and try to produce a show, just to entertain the different places around your section." This is while we were all waiting for boats to go home. There was no money donated, no scenery, no props, no nothing.

In a division in the First World War--which ran around 38,000, almost double what it was in the Second--they could manage to find, out of that many, around 22 men that could sing or dance or do something. We organized a minstrel show. We'd play about three camps a week, then get back to our own base.

I did a couple of screwy things in the show.

Coming back, they took me off the boat, for having trouble with my ears, and sent me to the hospital in Baltimore, the big one. Then they sent me to Michigan to be discharged. From there I went right back to California and back to work.

While I was in the Army, they had moved the Arbuckle Company out of New York, back to California. When I got to California, I made two pictures with Arbuckle. Paramount had just bought the famous Broadway show called "The Round-Up," and they wanted Arbuckle to play the sheriff in it--which is a straight part, not comedy. They made the deal with Joe Schenck. Also, they would like to keep Arbuckle and make features with him, and use big stories like Brewster's Millions. So Schenck sold Arbuckle's contract to Zukor, and immediately turned Arbuckle's company over to me, and bought Chaplin's old studio in Hollywood and named it the Keaton Studio. That was Chaplin's studio before Charlie built the one that he's had for all these years. There were only Keaton films made there. A couple of times we rented space to some friends of ours to come in and shoot. I had 25 percent of that company.

Now, this was a very poor outfit, this Arbuckle Company that I fell heir to. These were my stockholders: Joe Schenck was president, and his brother Nicholas Schenck vice-president. David Bernstein was secretary-treasurer; he was also secretary-treasurer of Loewe's, Inc. Marcus Loewe, Doc Giannini--the original president of the Bank of Italy, which later became the Bank of America--Irving Berlin, those were my stockholders.

When they first made the deal to take my pictures, which would have been two-reelers, Loewe had bought the Metro studios in Hollywood. They bought a show from John Golden called "The Henrietta." It was done twice on Broadway. It was done in the Gay Nineties first. The second show starred William H. Crane and Douglas Fairbanks. That was one of his Broadway hits, before he went into pictures. The character in the show was called Berty the Lamb. His father was a Wall Street tycoon, and he was the Bear of Wall Street and they called his son Berty the Lamb. So in one of Fairbanks's early pictures, the second or third, he used that character. He didn't use the original show, just the character.