Culver Pictures

Buster Keaton and Dorothy Sebastian in Spite Marriage, made in 1929.

In 1928, I made The Cameraman; in 1929, I made Spite Marriage. That was the last of the silents. In the start of the season of 1930, we made our first sound picture. Then I made six more for MGM in the next three years. But in every picture, it got tougher. As I said before, there were too many cooks. Everybody at Metro was in my gag department, including Irving Thalberg. They'd laugh their heads off at dialogue written by all your new writers. They were joke-happy. They didn't look for action; they were looking for funny things to say. You just keep fighting that, see.

Buster Keaton talks about how sound changed the way studios made pictures.

Then, of course, when you give me a Jimmie Durante--they brought him in there to play a part in a picture with me. Well, Durante just can't keep quiet. He's going to talk no matter what happens. You can't direct him any other way. Louis B. Mayer liked him very much; it could have been that he was brought out to replace me, I don't know. But I know for a finish they were picking stories and material without consulting me, and I couldn't argue them out of it. They'd say, "This is funny," and I'd say, "I don't think so." "This'll be good"; I'd say, "It stinks." It didn't make any difference; we did it anyhow. I'd only argue about so far, and then let it go. And I knew better. The last two pictures I made at MGM, I knew before the camera was put up for the first scene that it was practically impossible to get a good motion picture out of them. Sidewalks of New York--everything happened, and it was no good. Absolutely impossible. Another bad one was What, No Beer. The other one was impossible. I did What, No Beer with Jimmie Durante. We got criticized also for trying to do a farce. We did Parlor, Bedroom and Bath with Charlotte Greenwood. That's an out-and-out farce story. Well, I shouldn't have been put into anything that was a farce. Because I don't work that way. Life is too serious to do farce comedy.

Farce comedy as a rule is based on a simple misunderstanding, or mistaken identity. There are always a couple of characters in that show, and if they would come out and say, "Wait a minute, this is the case," all the problems would be solved. Then there's farce tempo. In all farce stories, everybody works faster than they do when they're telling a legitimate story. They take things bigger. People get hysterical easy.

Of course, my comedy was slapstick, in the two-reelers. But the minute we got into features, where an audience had to believe the story we were telling, we had to stop pie-throwing. There was never a pie thrown in any of our pictures once we started into features. No impossible gags were done.

By that time, Turpin was through, Sennett was through. What was happening to comedy? Was it on the wane? Well, I'd say that the minute sound came in, it was everybody talking their heads off and going for dialogue laughs. All your writers did the same thing. Once that started, it took years to ever get anybody even to touch that old type of material again. Most of the Marx Brothers laughs are dialogue laughs.

I tried every so often. You've got people now--Red Skelton could have worked in the silent pictures, the old comedies, just as well as he does in sound. But he was trained, and his first success and first love is radio, which is jokes. So today it's almost impossible to get Red to do a sequence without talking. He could do my kind of comedy, but he got further and further away.

After that, everything happened. I got to the stage where I didn't care whether school kept or not, and then I started drinking too much. When I found out that they could write stories and material better than I could anyway, what was the use of my fighting with them? It only takes about two bad pictures in a row to put the skids under you.

Chaplin was just lazy. He could have made pictures for a long time. Following The Dictator was when he got good and lazy. By the time he'd decide on a subject and make it, it would be three years later. Of course, the ones that got the greatest break in the world were these newcomers, and I don't think anybody ever explained it to them. If you go back and look at that first Abbott and Costello picture, that army thing, you'll find a very bad motion picture. But at the time they came out with that, there were no Harold Lloyd pictures being made, no Chaplin pictures, no Keaton pictures being made--and they hadn't been made for something like three years. There was no opposition. And they were such a relief to the picture-going public, to see those two screwballs. But if they'd come out with that same picture about five years sooner, you never would have heard of it.

Why has comedy waned? Well, their conception of making that kind of picture is so foreign to the way we used to think. I was called up to come out and "play doctor" to three Skelton pictures, besides being in on the start of a couple of his, and working on them. Skelton remade three of my pictures that Metro gave him to do. In every case, in those three remakes, the second picture didn't compare to the original for laughs or entertainment. This was all for one reason: the writers and producers today insisted on improving the originals, so all three pictures died of improvement. They'd say, "We'll improve that," and in improving it, story construction went out the window, and so did character. There were badly done gags, misplaced gags. They made a picture with Skelton called A Southern Yankee, and they were going to try to get it as near to The General as they could. They started that off with a battle scene, cavalry plowing over the hill towards the camera, guns going, flags waving--heavy music, very heavy. Everything. The minute that picture started, they came on with the fanfare and the flash--from the time the lion roared on the screen (this was MGM), the blast was on. Now, we would go out of our way to see how quiet we could start a motion picture. In other words, I wanted an audience to sit back in their seats at the start, and get comfortable. Not bring them up on the edge of their seats with the title and the opening scenes of the picture, but put them back in their seats. We made sure that we never got any big laughing routines in that first reel. We only wanted a few snickers, little incidental pieces of business that were not important, while we planted the plot and the characters. Then we let that come.

To this day, I can't talk a modern producer into seeing it from that angle. You see, it's so much easier for me to bring that man sitting back in his chair up onto the edge of his seat, than to give him a breathing spell and bring him back up there for the finale. If I'm going to spring him right up there for the very start, how am I going to keep him there for an hour and 40 minutes? You can't do it.

Of course, people want to laugh today, just as much as they ever did. To say they don't is just nonsense.

Oh, comedians are still around. They come and go. You lose one, and another comes along to take his place. But for this type of material, your new batch has never been trained that way. They haven't had the experience.

Things change so fast and go in circles; three or four years from now, they're all liable to be doing Sennett comedies. You can't predict that. You never know what the change is going to be. But you find yourself back doing them. They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do. Every now and then, even today, Jackie Gleason does whole 15-minute scenes of it. Sid Caesar's been doing it on and off, ever since he's been in television. Every now and then Skelton does one. They all do it. You brought over a clown from France who works that way--the way he works, he's marvelous. But that's a different type of pantomime. I don't do what they call old English or French pantomime. I never did--like you point this finger, and that means "I want to put a ring on your finger," or you put your hand over your heart, and it means "I love you." Your finger to your lips means "One little kiss." I never did that in my life. But body action pretty near told the story for me. You could almost tell by the way I turned and walked whether I was happy or mad or whatever. I didn't have to worry about expression; body action told you that.

It's hard to say what's going to happen in Hollywood, because television has wrecked it. To me, right now, it seems the picture business is just as dead as it can be. You've got to spend $5 or $6 million to get a picture that's worth going to see. Program pictures just simply don't draw, and you're a cinch to lose money if you make one. Well, that's not a very good situation to have. I'd like to see them merged, the way it should be done, and pay television, so you pay for your television the same as you do for your phone or gas or electricity or water. The man comes and reads the meter and you're charged accordingly. They can also tell the channels you've been watching, so they know the ratings. With that done, you could afford to make motion pictures for television that would get you your money back. But it's impossible at present to spend a million dollars for television, because you can't get that kind of money back.

Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out--nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too.

No, Hollywood hasn't changed. There's only been one radical change in Hollywood, and that was when sound first came in, because it brought a whole new cycle, new factions, songwriters, dialogue directors, stage directors, stage producers.

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A whole new faction moved into Hollywood, and from then on, for some silly reason, there was class distinction. People who got $500 a week were seldom seen with somebody getting $1,000 a week--you'd never see them at their house. In the old days, it was a common thing for a prop man in our studio to say "Good morning, Joe," when the boss of the studio came walking past. We didn't used to have to put policemen on the gates to stop each other from going to the other one's studio. I'm liable to go to Mr. Schenck's house and there'd be the assistant cameraman, invited to the party. Then. But that don't happen today.