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"Frozen Face": Buster Keaton on the Art of Physical Comedy
From: Columbia University
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Joseph Frank Keaton VI (1895-1966), better known as Buster Keaton, was one of the original kings of comedy in early Hollywood. He became famous for his slapstick comedy routines and his breathtaking stunts during the silent era. After the introduction of sound, Keaton continued to write, direct and perform in scores of feature films, working until his death, in 1966. In this 1958 interview with Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Keaton talks about his 1924 film The Navigator and the art of physical comedy. |
Buster Keaton discusses the evolution of Hollywood comedies from two-reelers to the talkies.
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  n The Navigator, there was nothing to convey. We just had a story to tell, that's all. We just got the situation. It was because Frank Lloyd was about to make a picture called The Sea Wolf, and he had to have a batch of fourteenth- or fifteenth-century sailboats. So we were between pictures, and I lent him our technical man, Gabe Gabori. Gabe went up to Seattle, Vancouver, back down to Portland, Frisco, looking for hulls to buy. Then of course they'd rebuilt the superstructure. He ran across this concern in Frisco with this boat called the Beauford. The only historical thing she did was to get that one duchess or princess out of Russia just before they caved in on the czar's family. They smuggled her out to this country. And they were about to scrap this boat, sell it to an old iron place up there for $25,000. Now, she was an ocean liner 500 feet long. So he came down and said, "We could get that boat, we could tow her out into the Pacific Ocean and set fire to her if we wanted, or blow her up; we could do anything we want." |
So I said, "All right, let's make a deal with the scrap outfit. We'll put a skeleton crew on the boat, sail her down to Los Angeles"--she still had her engines--"and we'll use her till we're through with her and turn her back to them." |
Then we set out to write a story. The boat cost us $25,000, but that paid for a skeleton crew and for sailing her down to Los Angeles and back to Frisco. We painted her, too, see, to make her look better. We moved our generators and lighting equipment on, and put cooks and assistants on there, and we lived on that boat for a month, and shot all around it. We could take her anyplace and drop anchor, or have her out at open sea, or anything we wanted to do. I had a writer with me by the name of Gene Havez. It was a natural. The story established me as the son of a wealthy family in San Francisco. They had a private valet, chauffeur and footman for the car. The girl across the street had a father who was a boat owner, very wealthy. She'd been waited on all her life, too. We were both on Nob Hill. My first gag in the picture was that I saw a wedding outfit go past, dragging tin cans and wearing a sign on the back, "Just Married," and people blowing horns and things, and I said, "It's time I got married. I think I'll settle down." |
Settle down--I hadn't been out yet, see. I didn't even light my own cigarette. The guy lit that for me, too. I said, "Get James and the car out. I'll get married. Get me two tickets. Where's a good place to go on one's honeymoon?" |
He said, "Honolulu's very popular." |
"All right, get me two tickets for Honolulu." |
This is before I've asked the girl. So I came down and got in the car. The footman opened the door and put me in the back seat, put a robe over my knees, got in the front seat with the driver. |
When we did The Navigator, I said, "We're going to this Cannibal Island, and in the first part I want foreign agents that don't want that boat to fall into their enemy's hands." |
"Why don't you get a dramatic director over here?" he said. "Why don't you get Donald Crisp? He just did a great picture for Paramount called The Goose Woman." |
I said, "All right, I'll call him up and see if he wants it." I told Crisp, "Don't worry about the comedy part of it; we know what we're doing there." |
Crisp said, "Swell. Fine. It'll be an experience." |
Well, that camera wasn't up one day but what he absolutely ignored the dramatic scenes. He wasn't interested in any of them; he'd slough those off. He'd OK anything. He was only interested in the scenes I did. He just got interested in the comedy part of it and was only interested in me and the gags, which was the reverse English of what we wanted. |
There was nothing to do about it; we carried through on the picture. After he left I actually reshot some of the dramatic scenes. |
I went across the street, in this picture, in my car, to call on the girl. I went in, and her butler took my hat and the flowers that I brought. I walked right in there and said, "Will you marry me?" |
I turned around and before he could put my hat in the cloak closet, I got my hat and came back out. The footman jumped out to open the door and I said, "No, I think the walk will do me good." They looked at me as if I was crazy. I walked across the street, and they followed me, circling in the car. When I got back home, my valet came running in with the two tickets for Honolulu. I said, "When does the boat sail?" He said, "Nine o'clock in the morning." I said, "That's too early. I'll go aboard tonight." "Very well, sir." And I tore up one of the tickets. |
Comes night, and I start for that boat. The girl was all dressed to go out with her father. He said, "Drive past the dock, I've got some papers I've got to get off on the Navigator. I've just sold it." |
We immediately went to this foreign outfit, looking down through their window. They said, "There she lays. If this boat has just now been sold to Argentina"--or one of those countries--"that boat will carry some ammunition and supplies, and even eventually may become a troop ship. It's up to us to see that she doesn't leave the Bay of Frisco. So we'll go down to the docks tonight, before the new crew goes aboard. We can overpower the night watchman, cut her hausers. The wind is always blowing towards the open sea. She'll go adrift and end up piled on the rocks. She's worthless. Very simple." |
Meanwhile, I went down to the docks. The watchman came past to punch a clock on the other side, the outside, and they brought the gate over--it was Pier 12--and the gate covered the "1" so only "2" stood out, and that's the pier I was looking for, Pier 2. So I went on in. I took my own grips with me. I wouldn't even let the valet come with me. I go on down there, go aboard the ship, I can't find any lights, there's nobody to help me. I finally find the stateroom, and go in there, and end up lighting a candle to put myself to bed. |
About this time, the foreign agents arrive, overpower the night watchman, cut the big hausers and ropes with an axe. But as they're overpowering the watchman, the girl and her father arrive, and the old man comes down. Well, the minute this strange man came down, they jumped him, too. But as they jumped him, he yelled "Help!" enough for the girl to hear it. They dragged him into the little dock house and muzzled him and tied him up. She doesn't know that. She runs right for the boat. She goes on there, and she starts right for the wheelhouse, where she knows her father was going. So while she's on the inside, going up the stairs to get there, the agents come down and cut the ropes, and the boat drifts away from the pier. The gangplank fell off the boat, off the side of the pier, just as she arrived at it. She's in an evening gown. There's the boat, pulls away with her on it. The only thing that goes wrong is, the wind changes and takes that boat out of the Golden Gate to the open sea. |
The following morning, she's hunched up in a corner, sick. I wake up, ring for service--no bells are working, it's a dead ship, nothing works. I came down to the dining room, tried to get waited on, nobody waited on me. Then I went into the galley--there were no cooks, nobody. I started to roam the decks. I was on this deck roaming, she was on that deck roaming. For a finish, I threw a cigarette down from the upper deck, and it lit on the open deck down there, and she saw the lit cigarette and knew there was somebody on board, and then she started running. I heard her voice, and started running. But we just kept missing each other, as we ran up and down the stairs. The camera could see us doing it, but we couldn't find each other. |
We finally met. Of course, your situation is that you've got two people on a dead ocean liner, adrift on the Pacific Ocean, out of sight of land. Neither one has ever been in a kitchen in their lives. She wouldn't know how to make a cup of tea; he's worse. You couldn't get two more helpless people. That's all you set out to do: survive. That was The Navigator. |
We drifted onto a cannibal island, and drifted onto it stern first, so we sprang a leak. We could hear the water rushing, and we went down and saw it. "Try and stop it." Well, trying to stop that from the inside was impossible, and that I could tell, and I said, "That would have to be stuffed from the outside." She sees a deep-sea diving outfit and says, "All right, you fix it." So I didn't have any choice but to put that on and go down and try to fix it while she pumped air to me. And we're right off a cannibal island. Anything would be better than falling into the hands of the cannibals. So of course you know how that rounds out. |
As to what I do with my face, and the deadpan idea--sure, I know what I'm doing with my face. In my early experiences, as a kid growing up in front of an audience, I had learned at an early age that I happen to be the type of comedian that couldn't laugh at anything he was doing. I also learned that the more seriously I took everything, and how serious life was to me in general, the better laughs I got. So by the time I went into pictures, working with a straight face was absolutely automatic with me, and mechanical. I didn't set out to do it for motion pictures. I'd worked that way for years already, on the stage. To make sure, when I started getting the reputation of being called "Frozen Face" and "Blank Pan," we went into the projection room and ran my first two pictures to see if I'd smiled. We didn't know. But I hadn't. I didn't even realize it. |
In our early successes, we had to get sympathy, to make any story stand up. But the one thing that I made sure of was that I didn't ask for it. If the audience wanted to feel sorry for me, that was up to them. I didn't ask for it in action. Certainly Chaplin has done that, asked for it. I've seen him do it--he gets sorry for himself. The only time I did it, I did it in more of a burlesque way, because it was one of the early two-reelers, Hard Luck. In that picture, because I was down in spirit and heart, I started out to do away with myself. There were about six gags in there that were pips. I got a rope and got out on a sawed-off log, which put me three or four feet above the ground. I threw a rope up over the limb of this tree, tied myself off to it, bid good-bye to the world, stepped off the stump--but the limb I'd tied to was so limber that it just let me go down to the ground, with just a light strain on the rope. I ended up lying flat on my back on the ground, trying to get up. It didn't work. Then somebody said, "Will you chase that cat?" and I got up to run, forgetting I was tied up, and nearly killed myself. I got that rope off my neck in a hurry then. |
The next thing I did was go to Westlake Park and dive off the bridge. I didn't know there was only two feet of water there. I nearly broke my neck, with that dive. Not actually, but that was the gag. |
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