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| Culver Pictures |
| Buster Keaton said he could always find plenty of material on the typical movie set because of his background in vaudeville. |
We didn't stick to any format. We would just get an idea, and once you started on the idea it would lend itself to gags and natural trouble of any kind. There was no format. We started making pictures in 1922 (Hard Luck was a two-reeler). The Three Ages was the first feature. Then I made Hospitality and one called Sherlock Junior and then The Navigator. Two pictures a year, and I stayed there till 1928, doing that, before we shifted over to the Metro Goldwyn studio. At no time in the Keaton Studio did we ever have a script, for the features or the two-reelers. Never for either. How did we do it? When the three writers and I had decided on a plot, we could start. We always looked for the story first, and the minute somebody came up with a good start, we always jumped the middle. We never paid any attention to that. We jumped to the finish. A man gets into this situation; how does he get out of it? As soon as we found out how to get out of it, then we went back and worked on the middle. We always figured the middle would take care of itself.
Well, by the time we got something all laid out and were talking about it, the head technical man who builds your sets and gets your locations, the head cameraman, the head electrician, the prop man, the wardrobe man--those fellows who were on weekly salaries, right there in the studio when we wanted them--all knew as much about it as we did. We'd say, "All right, we'll need a set," and take a piece of paper and a pencil and say, "Put it on that angle, so I can get around quick out of there and back through there."
He'd say, "All right, we'll fix that and that and that."
"Where do you think we ought to go?"
"Well, Cardville's a good location for this."
"Start in Scene 1?"
"Yes."
"Well then, we'll start on location. I'll have the sets here in case of bad weather." You see, everybody knew what you wanted, so there was no problem there. You didn't have to have it written down.
When we started into production, here we'd put up this nice living-room set, and right off of it was a broom closet. He made this a very good-looking set, because we were going to do a pretty long routine in this thing and it called for a lot of action. We'd get in there and start to shoot, and find it wasn't working right. We were going out of our way to make things happen; it's not good. But I found out I got in trouble in the darn broom closet. Well, right then and there I'm liable to spend three days in that broom closet, and only half a day in this living room that we'd filled with 45 or 50 extra people.
When a big studio today has got their schedules laid out, and those people are called and everything, you go in there and shoot, regardless. You can't improvise, as we did then. Why, we'd change every other minute. We never knew what we were running into. When we ran into something good, we stuck with it. That's the great handicap today--no flexibility. The minute you're not flexible that way, the desire to originate and ad-lib is gone. You've lost that. You're too damn mechanical.
The first cameras we used were the Bell and Howell cameras, and they were hand-cranked. We didn't start putting motors onto the cameras until about 1924. I've cranked a camera on a scene. The reason I did that is because I'd be on a location someplace, and I'd run out of actors to do bits. So I'd make up one of the cameramen and send him in to do the bit, and I'd crank the camera.
We were cutting then; I always cut my own pictures, from the time I started making them. I watched Arbuckle do it, and that's all there was to it. Oh, yes, he cut his own pictures. They've lost that skill today. Sound tracks have made that almost mechanical. We used to study frames of pictures, for the love of Mike!
There's only one way you might remember that picture Hard Luck. There were something like four outstanding belly laughs. What we called a belly laugh is not what they call a belly laugh today. Today they call just a substantial hearty laugh a belly laugh. We didn't; that was just a laugh. I mean, a laugh that you didn't forget for a while. That picture, a two-reeler, had about four of those in. The last one was one of the most talked-of gags that has ever been done in the picture business.
I got out by a country club, in an open-air swimming pool, and there was a very high diving platform there for some professionals. So just to show off in front of the girls lounging around the pool, I climbed up to the top of it, and posed, and did a beautiful swan dive off the top of that thing. And I missed the pool! I made a hole in the ground, disappeared; people came up and looked down in the hole, shrugged their shoulders, and the scene faded out. It faded in to a title that said "Years Later," and faded back in to a scene: the swimming pool now was empty, cracked, nobody around the place, deserted. And I came up out of the hole with a Chinese wife and two kids, and pointed up to the platform and said, "I dove off there--that's what happened."
That was the fade-out of the picture, and that audience would still be laughing getting into their cars in the parking lots. It was so darned ridiculous that there was no way to time the laugh, because if the audience stayed in there and watched the feature picture coming on, they'd still be laughing in the middle of the next reel of the feature. It was timing--all timing. The scene was short--it might seem a long time on the screen, but actually probably from one scene to the other, including the subtitle, it would probably have been about 20 feet. I haven't happened to see any prints of that picture lately. I've tried to locate one.
"The Reminiscences of Buster Keaton" in the collection of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. Interview from November 1958. Copyright 2000 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.
