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Ira Nayman on Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr.
50 Plays2 days ago
Joe and Mark welcome back writer and editor Ira Nayman, returning to Re-Creative for a third time — we like him that much!
Ira has returned to the podcast to discuss the work of actor, comedian and filmmaker Buster Keaton, in particular his stunning 1924 action/comedy Sherlock Jr., which Ira describes as “an amazing exploration of the nature of film itself” and “astonishingly smart.”
A film of “multiple layers,” Sherlock Jr. was years ahead of its time in terms of conception and execution.
Ira, Joe and Mark examine the film on every level, including the amazing and dangerous stunt work, for which Keaton is justifiably famous, and the surreal nature of his imagery, which continues to inform Ira’s own work.
For more information, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at contact@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Technical Glitches
00:00:09
Speaker
that Okay, when we actually put this podcast up, the theme will work. But for those of you listening, just know that when we recorded this, we don't seem to be able to get the theme working properly, which normally I would say it may not bode well for the show. But we have it ah an amazing and and now regular guest on the podcast. So I know that it will go well.
00:00:31
Speaker
But anyway, Mark, hello. Well, I need the theme to get my juices flowing though, man. Well, let me see. Let me see if can do this again. Hang on. Ah, there
00:00:47
Speaker
go. Soothing. Beautiful.
Mark's Nostalgic Film Memories
00:00:49
Speaker
Joe, I have a question for you. What a shocker. I've been thinking about this one. Did your family have access to a film projector when you were a kid?
00:01:01
Speaker
No, they did not. So we have, I mean, i did come of age when video cameras, you know, became rigueur.
00:01:16
Speaker
So there is some footage of us like, you know, when I'm a little bit older, but no, we didn't have ah a film camera. i met no I meant actually a projector though.
00:01:28
Speaker
Oh, a projector. Did you ever watch it? Like, I'm sure you watch films and in school. like Yes. oh yeah. It's before VCRs. We're all roughly the same age. um But did you ever did your family ever like use a projector at home?
00:01:44
Speaker
No, no. But yeah, I used to love those classes, eh? Boy, when they you know rolled out the projector. Oh, but it's so exciting. it was the most yeah I mean, kids today who would have no understanding of how exciting that was. So I just wondered, because I remember as I was watching what we're going to talk about today, i was remembering for one of my birthday parties, my father went to the library, the London Public Library, and borrowed a film projector, and we watched Laurel and Hardy shorts. Mm-hmm.
00:02:13
Speaker
No way. it was the It was the coolest thing. And I don't think I've ever given my dad credit for that because it's like, it's such a cool thing to see that at such a young age. So I just wondered, yeah.
00:02:25
Speaker
That's, yeah, wow, what a great thing to, I wonder what inspired him to do that. and ah yeah It might have been my mother's suggestion, actually. It usually is, isn't it? Yeah.
00:02:39
Speaker
And Ira, how about you?
Ira's High School Film Experience
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah. I can tie this into our theme tonight because one of the first Buster Keaton films I actually saw, I saw in high school.
00:02:51
Speaker
And it was projected for us ah using one of those projectors that Mark was talking about. Oh, wow. That is so cool. Yeah. See, my teachers never played anything as interesting as Buster Keaton. You know, it was all like, I don't know, some kind of dating thing. you know i don't know you know It was a short called The Rail Rodder.
00:03:15
Speaker
And the reason that we were watching it is because it was actually made in 1965 by the National Film Board of Canada. okay So what it was about basically was Buster Keaton is standing in front of Big Ben in London, and he reads this newspaper with this huge ad that says, come see Canada.
00:03:39
Speaker
And he decides to come see Canada. So he literally jumps off the bridge into the Thames and washes up on the Canadian East Coast where he finds a little tiny ah engine on and on the rails.
00:03:52
Speaker
ah He gets into it and the film is essentially... travelogue of Canada. So you've got Buster Keaton on this rail thing doing his comic stuff in the foreground while all these scenic vistas of different Canadian provinces are playing behind him.
00:04:11
Speaker
I remember seeing that actually. i saw that at one time. Yeah. Well now with the rail thing you're talking about was that the one where he pumps it with his hands? Well, it had an automatic motor, but I think it also had a pump the pump. The trick was that it had a like a chest in the front, and he kept pulling stuff out of it, impossibly more stuff than it could possibly hold.
00:04:35
Speaker
And also, years after I saw that, because I saw that when I was a kid, but years after I saw that, the National Film Board of Canada at the same time made a film called Buster Keaton Rides Again, which was a documentary about the making of the railroad. And he you get to see like his creative process. And this was only like a couple of years before he died.
Guest Introduction: Ira Naiman
00:04:59
Speaker
Ladies and gentlemen, we are talking to Ira Naiman, master satirist, author of multiple novels and collections of Les Pages of Fol. Am I pronoun pronouncing the name of your yeah website correctly? Close enough.
00:05:14
Speaker
yeahp All right. And the former editor of Amazing Stories magazine. Welcome to the podcast, Ira. Happy to be here. Well, happy to back. It's good. How many times have you been on this podcast now? I feel like it's... Third time, i think. Third time. Yeah. Yeah. yeah And you were the first, apart from Mark and I, to ah achieve the troisième status. Congratulations.
00:05:39
Speaker
And obviously today we're we're talking about Buster Keaton because you're somewhat of an expert on this sort of thing and always extremely informative.
00:05:50
Speaker
oh Thank you. And specifically, you wanted to watch wanted us to watch ah Sherlock j Yes. Was there a reason why that was the one you wanted to talk about? or Well, when we first started about ke talking about Keaton, Joe actually suggested The General as the film we would talk to The General you know is probably his best known film.
00:06:13
Speaker
And so I can understand the attraction.
Why Choose Sherlock Jr. Over The General?
00:06:15
Speaker
But the thing about Sherlock Jr. is that it is... an amazing exploration of the nature of film itself.
00:06:27
Speaker
um yeah And for a film that only came out, what, 30 years into the film industry, it's really astonishingly smart. There are some shots that it was like, how did they do that in 1924, right?
00:06:43
Speaker
ah Yeah. 25. Somewhere in there. And i'm like, how did they do that? They didn't have Steadicams back then. I know that for sure. Yeah. and Yeah. There's an amazing shot.
00:06:57
Speaker
I think in the short, the goat, um it's just, it starts off as a shot of ah railroad tracks going way off into the distance and then curving off the side of the screen.
00:07:12
Speaker
um,
00:07:14
Speaker
As you're watching this shot, a train appears in the far distance and it slowly makes its way across to the center of the screen where it starts coming towards, it turns and starts coming towards the camera.
00:07:31
Speaker
And it keeps coming towards the camera and you can see that it's a train, keeps coming towards the camera. You can now see Buster Keaton is sitting on the front of the engine And it keeps coming and it keeps coming and it keeps coming and it stops on a really close up shot of his face. It stops on a dime. And it's like,
00:07:57
Speaker
how the hell could you possibly do something like that? Actually, that was really simple. He just shot it backwards. He just shot the train rolling out and then, you know, showed it backwards. The effects in in Sherlock Jr. are a little more sophisticated than that.
00:08:16
Speaker
Well, yeah, im thinking I'm thinking in particular of the the shot where the the figure of the woman is up against the fence and... The people who are chasing Buster Keaton, they chase him, and he jumps into the fence, doesn't he?
00:08:31
Speaker
He jumps through her. He jumps through her. He through her into the fence. It's like a vaudevillian magic trick or something. And then she starts walking away from the fence. Yeah. So it's as if he's literally jumped into this person through the fence.
00:08:46
Speaker
And yeah, you're like, like even like now... You know, like the the effect that you just um talked about, you know, we could guess because we're some, ah you know, i think sophisticated after 120 years of of film, we can go, oh, I bet he just shot that in reverse. This one, you're like, no, I have no idea how we did that. um Should we perhaps set the scene of what the film is actually about before we get into that? I think that's a capital notion. Yeah, that's right.
00:09:17
Speaker
So it starts with Keaton. We discover Keaton is a projectionist in a film theater. And he really wants to be a secret detective. And he's got this book, How to Be a Detective. And he's got his spyglass out and he's looking at things.
00:09:35
Speaker
And really the the sort of the plot of it, such as it is, begins with him visiting his girlfriend, I guess we could say, at her father's house.
00:09:46
Speaker
He has a rival for her and the rival steals the father's pocket watch and pins the crime on him. And so he's no longer welcome in the house, dejected. He goes back to the movie theater where a a film is playing that is also about a theft, in this case of jewelry.
00:10:05
Speaker
And after he sort of starts the projector going and gets the film going on the screen, he falls asleep. And as he's sleeping, a ghost version of himself rises out of his body and notices that the actors on the screen, on the movie screen, have been replaced by the people in his life. So the the female lead in the movie is now his girlfriend and the rival is now...
00:10:34
Speaker
you know, the bad guy. and he starts by trying to wake himself up. The ghost tries to wake him up, but he's fast asleep. ah So the ghost runs through the theater and into the movie screen.
00:10:46
Speaker
At first, he's thrown out of the movie screen, but then he kind of sidles up to the side of the screen and tries to surprise the bad guy by jumping into the screen a second time. Only this time,
00:10:59
Speaker
the scene cuts to a different place and he finds himself in a different place. And that's kind of where it starts. The bulk of Sherlock Jr. is actually this movie within the movie, right? yeah um the The whole, you know, stealing the father's pocket watch
Exploring Film Logic in Sherlock Jr.
00:11:15
Speaker
thing, not only is it a relatively minor plot point, but one of the things I point out is that that storyline is actually resolved by the girlfriend. Keaton himself is not involved with that. at all yeah he doesn't figure that one out no right she does um what happens is in his initial sort of entrance into the film world he's still working with the logic of the real world so to speak and so he's out of place he's very clearly out of place at the end of so actually this is
00:11:52
Speaker
one of the sort of effects that that really ah is is breathtaking. In the beginning, after he's jumped into the movie theater into the movie and the scene has cut to a separate scene. There's a sequence of a half a dozen different cuts and he's always prepared for the previous one. The one that stands out for me is the one where he's standing on a rock surrounded by water.
00:12:18
Speaker
He figures the only thing he can do is jump into the water and swim away. So he jumps into the water, but then there's a cut and he actually ends up in a snowbank. yeah I really liked the one where he cuts to the African,
00:12:33
Speaker
ah felt and he's he's got two lions around him. yeah i just it just because It's mostly the way he plays it. He just plays it so perfectly like, oh, I'm now here. Oh, those are lions. Oh, they see me. Oh, I'd better get out of here. And then, of course, it cuts again. The tension was nice in that little tiny scene. Yeah, and one of the lions actually gets up and oh yeah yeah yeah appears to pose a danger. yeah yeah Yeah, one of the amazing things about Keaton is that that at the same time as he may be the fastest person in silent film comedy, like he's constantly moving and running, but then you get these moments of just peace, right? And you can actually see a thought process going on in his head, exactly as Mark described. There's an amazing ah sequence in ah the feature, Our Hospitality, where he's running away from people he knows wants to kill him and he climbs down a ah rock face and stays in, um you know, an indentation in the rock face.
00:13:43
Speaker
One of the people who ah is chasing him notices he's there and says, hey, I'm going to throw down a rope so you can get up out of here. And he doesn't see the man. So he doesn't know that it's his enemy. He says, okay, fine. Man throws the rope down. keaton ties the rope around his waist so that he can help himself get pulled up.
00:14:06
Speaker
And just as he starts to make his way up, he sees that it's his enemy. He jumps back into the alcove and he pulls on the rope. And all of a sudden the rope that was taught is now not so tight. Why is that? And you can see him looking at the rope and he's thinking...
00:14:26
Speaker
And then something falls down past the ah the face of the cave that he's in. and he's like, oh, that's interesting. And all of a sudden the rope is taut again. But now instead of being taut up, it's taut down. And just as he puts it all together, just as he realizes what must have happened, he gets pulled off the rock face.
00:14:47
Speaker
okay um But yeah, again, the the idea that you can see the wheels turning, you can see him thinking. It's also true that in Keaton's world, the universe is sometimes friendly and sometimes not.
00:15:05
Speaker
Right? ah Sometimes it helps him ah get out of jams. Sometimes it puts him deeper into jams. And Keaton is stone-faced throughout it. he His nickname was the Great Stone Face because unlike most other actors of the time, he would underplay emotions rather than overplay them.
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah. Many years earlier, it seems, than became the norm. ah Why did he do that? Because didn't he start out in vaudeville like with his family? He did. And that's very overplayed, vaudeville. Or was it just that he had developed a greater understanding of the film medium and the requirements of it?
00:15:47
Speaker
Maybe. Yeah. Well, the thing about his performances in vaudeville is that he was actually a child performer. Oh, okay. the um the His role in the the family stage presence was that he would basically be dressed up like an adult, even though he was like...
00:16:09
Speaker
eight and he was only like three or four feet tall and with this giant top hat and um his dad was like six feet tall with really long legs and he would do this kind of roundhouse kick where he would knock the top hat off Keaton's head.
00:16:25
Speaker
right The story goes that one night, ah his father, who was ah an alcoholic, which unfortunately he became as well, missed and clocked Keaton on the side of the head, just knocked him unconscious for several minutes.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yikes. Wow. So that was the kind of environment he grew up in. But he wasn't... um an integral part of the act, if you know what I mean. Right. Yeah. He was the subject. Yeah.
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah. And to be fair, his father appears in many of his films, many of his feature films. So whatever issues were there were,
00:17:08
Speaker
resolved however they get resolved. So something that struck me about about this film was its relative sophistication really. like it i mean it was ah it was somewhat narratively complex not in terms of the you know the the plot of the crime but the story within the story, and you know almost a a little bit Christopher Nolan inception-like.
00:17:33
Speaker
It almost seemed to threaten to get away from them at a certain point. And yet he was able to hold the audience's hand long so that the audience knew what was going on all the time. They knew you know reality from film, from they understood, we understood watching in all the different layers.
00:17:52
Speaker
And and I wonder how it was received at that time. Was this a considered a groundbreaking film?
Initial Reception of Sherlock Jr.
00:17:59
Speaker
Did audiences get it? Were they sophisticated enough to get it at the time?
00:18:03
Speaker
No, no, not at all. Not at all. Really? oh Yeah, just that doesn't surprise me. Yeah. One of the reasons why, you know, The General was a much more popular film um was because it was a much more simple film, right?
00:18:19
Speaker
It was just basically a train chase one way and then back. This, as you say, has multiple layers. One thing that I i started saying about 10 minutes ago and should probably finish is just that once that sequence of jump cuts that starts Keaton's journey into the film world happens, there's a blackout, that it fades to black. And the next time we see Keaton, he has now taken on the persona of Sherlock Jr., the best detective in the world.
00:18:51
Speaker
Right. And that's Keaton essentially coming to terms with the film universe. So from that point on, the film within the film is based in film logic, not real world logic.
00:19:05
Speaker
right so you get it's not just that he jumps through the woman's stomach the next time we see him he's dressed as a woman himself right because then he gets chased by the cops and he eventually has to you know throw the woman's clothing that he's wearing at the cop that was a nice stunt actually yeah so his his man servant has brought along this special contraption yeah but that they put in the window and there's a woman's dress and wig on it And so he jumps when he things go badly with the with the criminals, he jumps to the window and comes out of the window in full woman's garb. It's hilarious. It's actually quite funny. Yeah. yeah
00:19:44
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And how much thought had to have gone into these gags? I mean, like, I know that kind of gag was... ah de rigueur in that era. Like a lot of the the lots were, you know, they employed writers specifically to come up with these gags. and know Frank Capper earlier and in his career was employed to help come up with gags.
00:20:06
Speaker
So it was less a question of, you know, complex storylines or narratives and and more just a string of gags in a lot of these films, which I think is reflected and in this film and yet there is the more complex storyline layered on top of it when did okay so i'm trying to put this into perspective um there's a very famous story about the first film of the of the train arriving out of at film house and and everyone freaks out because they think it's an actual train how long before this movie was that like 20 years or so
00:20:42
Speaker
a Yeah, I'm pretty sure that happened in the, actually towards the end of the 19th century. Okay, so it's maybe more like 30 years then. Something like that, yeah. That's quite a Yeah, I don't know. That should be enough time for people to catch up. I mean, well, that's 1995 to 2025 in terms of our. Yeah. So like we would be are we freaked out by things that are happening in the media right now? Maybe not, but it's probably not a fair comparison because we've experienced so many changes in media, maybe.
00:21:16
Speaker
And my people weren't going to the cinema every not every day anyway, maybe every week. Well, see, like, you know, 100 years from now, people are going to be looking back at us and going, gee, what a naive response to AI, you know? Yeah.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, especially from the bunkers where they're protecting themselves from it. Yeah, for sure. yeah I'm sure that the jumping through the stomach has got to be some kind of just magic trick, right?
00:21:44
Speaker
Actually, no it was physical. it was Oh, was it? a Well, a lot most magic tricks are. The song you want to have, that's a physical illusion. The thing about the thing about Keaton...
00:21:55
Speaker
is that he had this he did have this one theory or this one idea that he always worked on where um what the audience sees on the screen has to be what was filmed in front of the camera.
00:22:11
Speaker
Oh, wow. So for instance, in the ah in the original scene where he jumps into the film, you might notice that there are no... shadows around his character right um those shadows were like part of the green screen effect for decades and decades and decades it took a long time to get rid of those but there are none in what he did because he refused to do effects in you know in post in post production everything yeah yeah everything that you see was in the screen so what happens what happens in that instance is there is a trap door
00:22:52
Speaker
in the wall behind the woman. Okay. The trap door goes up and the actors, the actor who is playing the the the valet, his legs are strapped to the door. Okay. Okay.
00:23:11
Speaker
yeah So the legs that you see, the woman's legs are dummy's legs. They're not actual legs. okay got you Which leaves a hole in the stomach area that Keaton jumps through.
00:23:26
Speaker
After Keaton jumps through it, the door slams down, his legs are freed, and he walks away.
00:23:35
Speaker
yeah Creating that amazing illusion. That's a great illusion. It's really great. Very practical. Wow. It works. how did so how did he do the ghost stuff? because that that I was also surprised by that because that was very sophisticated.
00:23:51
Speaker
ah The ghost stuff is is pretty straightforward. Double exposure. Double exposure of the film. Oh, okay. Oh my God.
00:24:03
Speaker
Jumping into the screen itself, that is a fairly sophisticated thing that actually has two parts to it. The first part is probably pretty easy to guess.
00:24:15
Speaker
When he runs through the movie theater and jumps into the screen for the first time, he's actually jumping onto a stage recreation of the set in the movie within the movie.
00:24:27
Speaker
Right. Right? Yeah. And so when the actor throws him out, it's literally the actor on the screen, on a state on the stage, throwing him out of the movie. Now, one of the questions I had when I was watching it was, was any of the film that was being projected actually filmed?
00:24:43
Speaker
Or was it all actually a stage pretending to be a film? But I gather from what you're saying is that so much of it was actually a film and then they recreated just parts of it to create that illusion.
00:24:57
Speaker
That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's really basically just setup and the ending where you get to see the film and the reality at the same time. Yeah. He's very impressive. He's an impressive athlete, I got to say.
00:25:13
Speaker
Like the stunts, they look so bloody dangerous too. Well, how old would he have been then? a yeah He would have been in his physical prime, I would imagine.
Keaton's Pioneering Physical Comedy
00:25:24
Speaker
30s, I would imagine. Yeah.
00:25:26
Speaker
Oh, so not quite as prime. See, because I yeah i now consider 60 prime. there is Joe, we can talk later about that. I got bad news for you, buddy.
00:25:40
Speaker
Yeah. There's a shot in... um in one of his ah one of his features called Steamboat Junior, where he's, the the climax of the film, he's running through a street, he's running through a town that's being hit by a tornado.
00:25:57
Speaker
And he runs down a street in front of a The brick facade of a building. um And it's no joke. This is a 10 ton facade of a building. It's it's huge and it's very substantial.
00:26:14
Speaker
And he does that thing where he just, in the middle of running like a madman, he stops. to think about what is happening around him just as the wall of the building collapses. And, oh my god you know, you've got to think that he's going to get crushed, except there's this one tiny window in the the facade of the building and it just happens to fall right where he's standing.
00:26:41
Speaker
Okay. Now, to give you an idea of just how dangerous it was, he had about a three inch ah leeway on his mark. If he hadn't hit his mark exactly where he needed to be, he would have been crushed.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my God. Did they have like a team of mathematicians and ah ah engineers working on this? Cause like just figuring out the, the fall and the angle and oh my God.
00:27:11
Speaker
It's weird. Cause I mean, Keaton throughout his life, he was like, you know, I'm not that brilliant. I'm not, uh, you know, any sort of genius. I just did what I thought would be funny. um but as far as anybody can tell, he worked out all of the routines, everything he did, he worked out himself.
00:27:33
Speaker
So did he have a death wish or was he just supremely confident or, you know, how much of this was left to chance? I mean, like when, you know, so Tom Cruise these days doing his stunts. Yeah. I was thinking of Tom Cruise. Yeah. Like I have the impression that everything is worked out with within an absolute, like there is no margin for error.
00:27:54
Speaker
like right Except when there is. Well, yeah. I mean, they work everything out as much as possible. you know Was it done with the same rigor with Buster Keaton or was he just lucky?
00:28:07
Speaker
um I don't know that he was necessarily lucky. There's a shot in um Sherlock Jr. where um Keaton, trying to be a hapless detective, is following his rival because he's sure that the rival has ah ah is responsible for stealing the pocket watch. And he gets...
00:28:29
Speaker
stuck in a railway car so he climbs up to the top of the car and then the railway starts the railway car starts oh yeah that was good that's good stuff um and he's running you know to try and stay on it and eventually he gets hit with a water spout because trains needed water at the time and the water starts pouring out of the spout and and thrusts him down onto the rails he jumps up and he runs away end of scene For several days afterwards, he suffered from blinding headaches, but eventually they went away. So he was like, okay, I'm fine.
00:29:06
Speaker
Years later, he was having a medical exam and the doctor asked him, when did you break your neck? What? Oh my God. So apparently the pressure of the water yeah throwing him down onto the rail, um he did himself serious damage.
00:29:25
Speaker
Right. But, so you know, so a little lucky there. Cause I mean, very much that that breaks into their way. Then yeah, you're, you're dead or paralyzed. Yeah. But again, this goes back to Keaton's idea of the purity of film, right? He wanted everything,
00:29:40
Speaker
that appears on the screen to be what happened in front of the camera. And part of that is he has to do his own stunts. There is only one point at which he doesn't do his own stunts.
00:29:53
Speaker
And that's a film he made in the 1960s called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. right Oh, yeah. um He plays a guy who's just running around the seven hills of Rome. Right. And he must be in his 70s at that point. And at that point, he's willing to allow a stunt double to do some stuff for him. But otherwise, it was all him.
00:30:15
Speaker
All Keaton. So there's a little bit, an element of Jackie Chan in this. Yeah. I thought of Jackie Chan a lot. Like some of the, some of the stunts just seem like Jackie Chan.
00:30:27
Speaker
there' Yeah. The other way around Jackie Chan is coffee. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. But ah one of the things I read about Jackie Chan, somebody invited him to go skiing at one point and and he told them, he said, well, I don't, I don't do that. And they're like, what you're Jackie Chan. How do you not ski? And he's like,
00:30:47
Speaker
whenever I do something dangerous, I, I only do it if I'm paid. ah so bar And I wondered if Buster Keaton was the same, you know, did, did he have this same daredevil attitude throughout his whole life or was it just strictly with his films?
00:31:05
Speaker
I'm pretty sure it was strictly with his films. Yeah. Though yeah I had a dark thought about the um you were saying just as you're describing the house falling on top of him seen how he he he was playing everything he was for a laugh like he's doing it for a laugh. And maybe that was somewhere in the back of it said, Well, if I did die, that would be pretty funny.
00:31:29
Speaker
It's dark, but it's funny. It certainly would have contributed to his his legend. yeah on ah On a happier note, so ah just to finish the idea of the opening scene of the film within the film.
00:31:45
Speaker
So what they did was this. Keaton ah shot the scene where he runs into the screen. Then they went to the first location.
00:32:00
Speaker
And what Keaton did was he set up the camera and then he took the last frame from the previous scene that they'd shot, put it in front of the camera and had somebody actually tell him, direct him on exactly how he needed to stand.
00:32:15
Speaker
So he was in the exact position that he had been in at the end of that scene. Great. Start shooting. cut, end that scene, and then do it again for all of the other scenes until he gets like just a perfect string of of shots.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's very clever. it's very yeah it's very clever. Yeah, i maybe I'm just a simple man, but the the scene the scene where he's riding on the front of the motorcycle and you know his his buddy is driving and then his buddy falls off. i can't remember how his buddy falls off, but then he's just – They drive over a bump and oh he found the buddy flies off, right? So his buddy's – not driving anymore. And he's just, it's this crazy long, not even a chase. Really. He's just going through all this traffic. He's like, Hey, be careful, be careful. You're going to kill him He's sitting on the handlebars. He's just sitting on the handlebars. I'm not sure how the motorcycle is still running, but, and then it just finally ends with him hitting the wall.
00:33:17
Speaker
and flying through the window and knocking over the guy that's kidnapped his girl and i don't know why but that just made me laugh so hard it's the unexpected right it was just so absurd we're not expecting the the scene to end with him saving the girl right yeah no we're expecting him to eventually fall over or something or die yeah Oh, well, no, this is the thing that that I admire so much about Buster Keaton. I mean, keep in mind, silent film comedy was then at the stage of ah like ah pie fights and, um you know, Keystone cops getting thrown off the the the cop car because there are too many of them, right? He takes physical comedy to just a whole, whole different level than than anything that was being done at that point. There is a ah story, possibly apocryphal, that when Keaton Chaplin were coming up, when they were trying to break into film, the the biggest film comedian at the time was somebody who is completely forgotten now, a guy named ah Roscoe Arbuckle, who was sometimes known as Fatty, but he didn't like...
00:34:28
Speaker
being referred to that way. He was the king of comedy. And if you wanted to start making your own short films, you had to apprentice with Arbuckle before you could um start, before Senate would allow you to start making your own films.
00:34:44
Speaker
It's said that Chaplin made 40 films with Arbuckle. None of them with his iconic character of the Tramp. they were all He was experimenting with different characters to see if any of them would stick. Keaton, on the other hand, he made seven.
00:34:59
Speaker
And if you watch any of the Arbuckle shorts, you can already see Keaton's mind kind of going in other directions then um than anything that anybody else was doing on the screen.
00:35:13
Speaker
He just, he had a very unique sort of take. So then what happened to Buster
Keaton's Hollywood Challenges and 1960s Revival
00:35:20
Speaker
Keaton? Was it the advent of sound that did him in? or did he you mentioned You alluded to a drinking problem. Did that come after he had kind of wound up in obscurity? Or did was it the chicken and the egg there? That's a whole whole story, my friend.
00:35:39
Speaker
I will answer that. Actually, I'll answer that first, then ill I'll get to the point I would like to make. If you've ever seen Keaton in a sound film, you will know that Keaton had actually quite a lovely baritone voice. A lot of the silent film stars, their careers died with sound because...
00:36:00
Speaker
their voice didn't match the persona that they had on screen and there was no way around it. Errol Flynn, I think was the classic example of somebody who had a high squeaky voice, ah which just was at so at odds with his heroic characters that he he couldn't sustain a sound career. Keaton was not like that. Several things happened to him towards the end of his time in Hollywood. He married, and I forget her name, but a female actor who was also the daughter of a studio head.
00:36:32
Speaker
And the studio head gave him his next contract, but did not allow him to write or direct. And there's actually towards the end of his time in Hollywood, he was playing second fiddle, if you can imagine this, to ah the studio's up and coming star, comedy star, Jimmy Durante. They made about a half a dozen films together.
00:36:57
Speaker
yeah which was just about the death knell of of his career in America. So what does he do? He goes to Europe and continues to make films when he can there. i One of my first memories of Keaton actually was seeing him in and an Italian film, which I think now was probably called War Italian Style.
00:37:20
Speaker
And I remember very vividly this one scene where Keaton and the two stars of the film are sitting in a ah one-room house while bombs are falling all around them. And the house is shaking and horrible things are happening And the two Italian actors are mugging mercilessly for the camera. And Keaton is just sitting there sipping tea, right? There's one point where half of the roof falls in and he gets a piece of plaster in his tea and he just calmly plucks it out and keeps drinking.
00:37:54
Speaker
So, I mean, he kept making films. Up until the 1960s, when a guy named Raymond Rohauer, who was a film historian, decides that Keaton needs a revival.
00:38:08
Speaker
He put together a series of Keaton shorts and features that went from rep house to rep house. In my 20s, that's where I got my first major sort of taste of Keaton. I was there practically every night. watching Keaton films, right? And so he popularizes Keaton and Keaton, you know, several things come of that.
00:38:30
Speaker
He gets into American films again, like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And he gets other films that are just mind boggling.
00:38:40
Speaker
Have you ever seen film No, no, no, i haven't no. It's a short film called Film. It is the only film ever written and directed by Samuel Beckett and it stars Buster Keaton.
00:38:56
Speaker
Oh my God. I have to see that. Wow. And there is, oh find it. I mean, it's, it's really short and it's kind of Beckettian for lack of a better term. Keaton has said that he didn't have a clue what the film was about. He just did what Beckett told him to do.
00:39:15
Speaker
That sounds entirely right. Yeah, that's that's that's right. There is a rumor. I don't know if this is true, but I mean, i've I heard this many, many years ago that when Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, his dream cast was Chaplin and Keaton for the two tramps.
00:39:36
Speaker
that would be That would be, yeah. Amazing. That would have been amazing. so Now, is is film any good?
00:39:47
Speaker
I like Beckett, so I liked it. um Okay. If you don't like Beckett, it's probably terrible. I don't know. So yeah, ah Keaton has a late life renaissance, right? The last couple of years of his life, he finally sort of got ah the attention that he deserved. I'll also mention just in that time period, there is a film called The Comic starring Dick Van Dyke.
00:40:16
Speaker
a about a silent film star who, you know, is washed up when sound comes in. That was based on a number of different ah silent film comedians. There's bits of Harold Lloyd and Stan Laurel in it, but largely you can see a lot of Keaton in ah in Dick Van Dyke's portrayal of the silent film star. Yeah.
00:40:43
Speaker
So that also happens you know in the 60s, in the Keaton Renaissance, mini Renaissance. Now, when I asked you about what happened to Keaton, did I interrupt another thought that you were having that you were about to or something you wanted to express?
00:40:59
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to get really um pedantic about film theory for a bit because I really wanted to dive into this whole idea that Sherlock
Innovative Use of Cinema in Sherlock Jr.
00:41:08
Speaker
Jr. is about the nature of film reality versus ah the reality we live in every day. That sequence, that opening sequence where he jumps into the film and it cuts several times and he's kind of stuck in between, that actually...
00:41:26
Speaker
is an illustration of the difference between the way we experience space in the real world as opposed to the way space is dealt with in film. In the real world, if you want to go from point a to point B, you have to walk or move through all of the space in between those two points.
00:41:44
Speaker
In film, a cut does exactly the same thing. And it said, I forget which which theorist says it, but film basically annihilates space.
00:41:57
Speaker
You don't have to have all that space in between points A and point B. And Keaton just, you know, comes upon this. There is a wonderful scene at the end of the film.
00:42:08
Speaker
um The girlfriend has figured out the mystery. Everything seems to go right. She comes to the movie theater where Keaton is just um watching the film finally spool. He's woken up.
00:42:22
Speaker
And she tells him everything is great and he's happy, but he doesn't know what to do. So he looks to the screen and he sees that the the hero on the screen has a similar confrontation with the girl in the movie. And he puts his hands on her shoulders. So Keaton puts his hands on her shoulders. And then he the hero in the movie pulls the girl towards him. So Keaton pulls the girl towards him.
00:42:46
Speaker
The guy in the on the screen gives the girl a big kiss. Keaton gives her a peck on the cheek because Keaton's naive that way. But, you know, same sense.
00:42:57
Speaker
And then Keaton looks to see. So what's going to happen next? What happens next on the movie screen is that they cut to the the hero and the heroine surrounded by half a dozen babies.
00:43:10
Speaker
And the last shot of the film is Keaton looking at this going, how the hell do I do that? That's all up to your interpretation. I thought he was saying something else entirely. oh okay. What did you think he was saying? I thought the look on his face is like, hmm, maybe I don't want any more of this.
00:43:30
Speaker
but You know, that's totally in keeping with Keaton's um onscreen relationship with Will. It sort of looked that look on his face like, oh, my God, I didn't think it led to this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that one shot does for time what the original shot does for space, right? In time, we live forward in time one second by one second.
00:43:55
Speaker
In film, you can go backward or forward in time with a single cut, right? And so several years pass there. Again, just a um a masterclass in the difference between film reality and the way we actually experience real life, right? And again, he didn't claim to be an intellectual, unlike, say, Sergei Eisenstein. he wasn't writing you know books about film theory. He was just...
00:44:22
Speaker
you know, illustrating it um through his films. He he demonstrated to a deep understanding of the film medium. Yeah. At a time. he was creating the medium, really. I mean, we've already mentioned it, like half dozen people that have, you know, taken his ideas and used them to great success. So, yeah.
00:44:43
Speaker
I think, yeah, just some people, maybe it was more common than than we think, you know, because these are the surviving examples. But some people at that time just seemed to have a superior grasp of how to take ah best advantage of the medium of film, you know. And I'm thinking of like Frank Capra, I mentioned earlier, was coming up at that time, working with the same guys, getting the same kind of experience, and then just found themselves in a place where they could...
00:45:12
Speaker
employ their ideas to everyone's benefit today. Capra gets a bad rap these days for his sentimentality, that particularly of the sentimentality of his endings, which got labeled Capricorn, right? um But if you look at some of his films, if you look at um you know some of the Common Man trilogy, um Meet John Doe, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,
00:45:42
Speaker
there's real despair in those films. Like before you yeah get to that corny ending, there's real, real darkness in those films. um And even it happened. It's a wonderful life. It's a wonderful life. Yeah.
00:45:57
Speaker
I mean, that goes to such a dark place before the, yeah before the final happy ending. Right. Yeah, no. I just saw that for the first time this year, actually.
00:46:08
Speaker
Oh, why are you serious? i have Okay, so I've seen bits of it, usually the ending. So I'm probably one of those people that would have thought that, yeah, this is just a corny filmmaker. But I finally thought, yeah I should watch the whole thing. so i watch the And it's it's dark. It's a dark alternate reality film, basically. Oh, it's the end my favorite Christmas movie. I love that movie. I get it. I see it. Yeah, I see it. And I and i have to just ah point out as well that it wasn't just Capra, it his writer you know that he collaborated with ah frequently, Robert Riskin. Yeah. you know
00:46:43
Speaker
We have to credit the writers. Yeah. but No argument. Yeah. Well, it sounds to me very much like we have a theme for the next show, if you want me back on again. yeah There we go. There we go.
00:46:58
Speaker
Yeah. Now, before we um part ways, the impact, a specific impact of of his work on on your work, is there any kind of a direct relation between Buster Keaton and the work of Ira Naiman?
00:47:15
Speaker
Oh, well, yes, I would i would think so. And a large part of it has to do with the surreal nature of a lot of his imagery, um which, yes, very clearly informs me when I go down those kind of surreal rabbit holes. Absolutely. There's, if if you'll indulge me for one minute, i' I'll give one more example from one of his shorts, because it's just, it's so delicious. There's a short, I think it's the high sign, where he plays a character who works in a a shooting gallery.
00:47:50
Speaker
And he comes to work the first day and he takes off his hat and notices there's no place to hang it. So he takes a pot that they use of ink that they use to um touch up the shooting, the things you shoot at, the targets.
00:48:04
Speaker
And he draws a hook onto the wall and puts his hat on it. Okay. Now that's good enough for most comedians, but Keaton always went kind of the extra distance. The next day, he comes back, you know, he it's he's on the job again. He takes off his hat, but this time he's distracted. So he puts his hat on the wall above the hook.
00:48:29
Speaker
And it slowly starts to drop down until just when the top brim is on the hook and it stops. And if you think about it for a moment, this is not possible.
00:48:42
Speaker
The hook can't be two-dimensional to allow the hat to to fall past it and three-dimensional to catch the hat at the same time, right? it's just It's those moments, those those bizarre surreal moments that um ah that I love and and hopefully you know I've been able to capture myself.
00:49:03
Speaker
And everyone can go watch Sherlock Jr. It's on YouTube. It's free. Everyone should watch it. It is the yeah amazing thing about the age that we live in that we do have access to this amazing material.
00:49:20
Speaker
Any final thoughts, guys?
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:49:24
Speaker
Capra next, I guess. Capra next. um Mr. Smith goes to Washington, man. You want to talk yeah politics? the movie Yeah, that's actually. Oh, o oh there you go. yeah that's There you go. it's it's That's a good one. Very timely and a good excuse to watch more of Capra's oeuvre. But now I want to go and watch that even more of ah Buster Keaton, who I just admire more and more.
00:49:48
Speaker
so There's amazing stuff in every one of his films, for sure. All right. Well, thank you for this, Ira. This was great. ah Yeah. Thanks for being on our podcast a third time.
00:50:00
Speaker
You're welcome. Thanks for putting up with me. pleasure. Thank you.
00:50:29
Speaker
You've been listening to Recreative, a podcast about creativity and the works that inspire it. Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney for Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Monkey Joy Press.
00:50:42
Speaker
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00:50:55
Speaker
You can find out more about each guest in all of our past episodes by visiting re-creative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. You can contact us by emailing joemahoney at donovanstreetpress.com.
00:51:09
Speaker
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