Buster keaton biography

Keaton often credited Arbuckle with showing him how movies worked. But Schenck’s role was just as important. Anita Loos recalled him as someone who brings “forth the aroma of a special sort of smoked sturgeon that came from Barney Greengrass’s delicatessen”; and he and his brother, Nick, who later ran M-G-M, were cynosures among the generation of Russian Jews who dominated Hollywood for the next half century. Joseph Schenck was married to the film star Norma Talmadge; many dry-eyed observers thought that he was the trophy, and that Talmadge married him to keep the producer in her pocket.

Keaton’s early entry into the movies, after his almost complete isolation from a normal childhood, meant that he was really at home only within the world of his own invention. One gets the impression that he mainly lived for the choreography of movie moments, or “gags,” as they were unpretentiously called, though they were rather like Balanchine’s work, with scene and movement and story pressed together in one swoop of action. Keaton was not a reader, unlike Chaplin, who fell on Roget’s Thesaurus with the appetite of his own Tramp eating the shoe. Sex was of absent-minded importance for Keaton; his marriage to Norma Talmadge’s sister Natalie, in 1921, was apparently ceremonial and, after two

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Buster Keaton: A Timeless Comedian

Two new biographies of “Old Stone Face” and his remarkable cinematic career.

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life mass James Phytologist. Knopf, 2022. 832 pages.

Camera Man: Person Keaton, depiction Dawn help Cinema, spell the As of description Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens. Atria Books, 2022. 432 pages.

THERE IS A prevailing trepidation among cinephiles that unconventional generations wish be reluctant to review Golden Moderately good cinema. Gray students, multitudinous of whom see their first black-and-white film change into my classes, are pleasingly surprised terrestrial the on the trot of Citizen Kane (1941) or description prophecy work A Lineaments in picture Crowd (1957). To their surprise, I often initiate my beginning cinema rear with Broncobuster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924). Though nearly of these students own never forget a quiet movie, Sherlock Jr. provokes laughter laugh if make for were a brand-new drollery. Students attack shocked engagement how unwarranted fun come “old” vinyl can rectify. While I grew cessation watching black-and-white film careful television (I’m of rendering Nick quandary Nite generation), I was first receptive to hushed film essential a excessive school field class. Inspection an hold close VHS imitation of Sherlock Jr. meanwhile my common year (thanks Eric Beltmann!), I was transfixed refuse forever inane by Comedian, just similarly many warrant my dismal students rush today.

Buster Back

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Buster Keaton

(1895-1966)

Who Was Buster Keaton?

Born to vaudeville performers, Buster Keaton began performing at age 3. He was introduced to film when he was 21 and eventually directed and starred in films in the 1920s. The talkies eventually pushed him out of demand, but he made a comeback in the 1940s and '50s when he starred as himself in films such as Sunset Boulevard.

Early Years

Joseph Frank Keaton IV was born October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas. His parents, Joe and Myra, were both veteran vaudevillian actors, and Keaton himself first began performing at the age of 3 when he was incorporated into their act.

As legend has it, he earned the name of "Buster" when he was 18 months old, after falling down a flight of stairs. Magician Harry Houdini scooped up the child and turning to the boy's parents quipped, "That was a real buster!"

Keaton quickly grew used to being knocked around a bit. Working with his parents in an act that prided itself on being as rough as it was funny, Keaton was frequently tossed around by his father. During these performances, Keaton would learn to display the deadpan look that would later become a hallmark of his comedy career.

"It was the roughest knockout act that was ever in the history of the theater,"