Slapstick on Slapstick: Mack Sennett's Metamovies Revisit the
Keystone Film
Company
Author(s): Hilde D'haeyere
Source: Film History, Vol. 26, No. 2, “Early Hollywood and the Archive” (2014), pp. 82-111
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.26.2.82 .
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HILDE D’HAEYERE
Slapstick on Slapstick: Mack Sennett’s Metamovies
Revisit the Keystone Film Company
ABSTRACT: This article examines slapstick comedies about moviemaking produced by
the Mack Sennett Comedies studio (1917–33) and studies the model of filmmaking that
these metamovies advance. Mack Sennett Comedies’ movies on moviemaking, this essay
suggests, repeat founding facts, icons, and technology associated with the Keystone era
and, through their constant replay, elevate those motifs to the status of myth. In so doing,
Mack Sennett Comedies not only built its corporate identity as a slapstick universe of
play, leisure, and fun but also contributed to the imagination of Hollywood filmmaking,
advancing slapstick practices as a model for the way in which the film industry represented
its early years. As an addendum, this essay also reprints and examines a postcard from
a booklet entitled Making the “Movies”: A Peep into Filmland, issued by the California
Postcard Company in 1922.
KEYWORDS: Mack Sennett Comedies, Keystone Film Company, metamovies, slapstick
comedy, film technology
Several movies produced by the Mack Sennett Comedies studio between 1917
and 1933 show a sense of documentary integrity in the shooting of Los Angeles
locations and the exploitation of real-life events. The penchant to ground comedy in local reality is also visible in the slapstick films that take filmmaking
as their subject, picturing the multifaceted process of film production. These
metamovies are truly “home-made” films: they use the studio grounds that are
not dressed as sets as filming locations; they display the operation of movie
machinery in full view of the cameras; they demonstrate methods of rehearsing,
acting, and directing; and they present comedians as regular people behind the
scenes. Or do they? This essay examines the process of filmmaking as it was
pictured in Mack Sennett’s slapstick movies about moviemaking and explores
the impact of these visualizations on the idea of Hollywood as a place and style
of film production.
Film History, Volume 26, Issue 2, pp. 82–111, 2014. Copyright © 2014 Trustees of Indiana University
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83
Slapstick cinema frequently revisits the subject of making movies,
nowhere more visibly than in the film catalogue of comedy king Mack Sennett.
At least twenty-nine of the approximately 460 comedies released by Mack Sennett Comedies are constructed around some aspect of the movie world, such as
building sets, acting and rehearsing, breaking into the movies, moviegoing, photography, and fandom. When we count the sixteen Keystone movies-on-movies
made between 1912 and 1917, this adds up to a total of forty-five motion pictures
that visualize some aspect of their own creation process (see appendix). The
majority of these films are silent, two-reel, black-and-white shorts, but some
feature-length films, sound shorts, and a sound-and-color comedy also fit the
description. Clearly, studio boss Mack Sennett considered the job of filmmaker
a bottomless source of inspiration. This essay focuses on the specific motif of
making movies; that is, slapstick scenes that show actors, directors, and film
crews at work. No complete overview of these fictional onscreen film sets yet
exists. The extensive scholarship on metamovies most commonly deals with
so-called Hollywood-on-Hollywood portrayals of the movie world in such feature-length sound films as What Price Hollywood? (1932), A Star Is Born (1937,
1954, 1976), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952).1 Rather than providing a revealing
look behind the scenes, these metamovies are generally found to promote the
idea of the Hollywood studio system as “dream machine.” With all the aspects
of production in full view, the film industry initially seems stripped of its mystery. However, most Hollywood-on-Hollywood films prove that self-conscious
and overt depictions of the techniques that create cinematic illusion are just as
glamorizing as the seamless and hidden operation of the same mechanisms. The
peek into the kitchen of cinema, in fact, reinforces the illusion, since it shows
the studios’ capacity to compose flawless fabrications at work. In addition,
rubbernecking film fans welcome these films’ focus on stars, while the films
profit from extradiegetic information hinted at in promotional campaigns, and
the filmmaking industry gains respect for its illusory powers. Everybody wins.
Studying movies on moviemaking produced by the Mack Sennett Comedies studio prompts the question of whether a similar mechanism applied
for silent shorts that depict the process of filmmaking.2 What model of moviemaking is advanced in slapstick comedies made during the consolidation of
the film world into a strictly organized studio system and produced by a film
studio with a reputation for parody? When the Mack Sennett Comedies studio
depicts its own production methods, enacted by its stock company, employing
its actual film machinery, and filmed on the site of its own studio facilities,
multiple levels of interpretation interact in a mirror-like maze of citations. Slapstick movies that burlesque the making of movies not only lay bare the devices
of cinema, but they also point back to themselves—offering comments on the
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medium of film, the techniques of filmmaking, the conventions of comedy, and
the specifics of the producing studio from within. This brings an opportunity
for self-reference—a strategy of taking bits of studio information and recontextualizing them in new constellations, serving new purposes. Thus, in addition
to hovering between documentation and fiction, and shifting tones between
drama and comedy, these movies-on-movies also have the potential to rewrite
their own history. By recreating the settings by which the “fun factory” wishes
to be remembered, these reconstructions actually polish the studio’s desired
corporate identity. My study of slapstick-on-slapstick movies produced by Mack
Sennett Comedies between 1917 and 1933 suggests that this public image is
based on creation myths about the Keystone Film Company, as Sennett’s studio
was called between 1912 and 1917. Put more clearly, Mack Sennett Comedies’
metamovies work to perpetuate the supposed casual and off-the-cuff filmmaking practices that were advertised for the Keystone comedies a decade earlier.
An analysis of the technical and material aspects of moviemaking can shed
light on the reasons for the temporal lag between source and retelling. This
article, then, examines which components of film sets are pictured in Sennett’s
metamovies, what model of moviemaking they advance, how the films reflect
the studio’s organization, and how they evoke the larger film world. Surely,
Sennett did not revisit the subject of metamovies merely because they were
cheap, fast, and easy to produce. An analysis of the mechanics of moviemaking
in slapstick-on-slapstick movies can clarify the corporate concerns that guided
these reenactments.
Keystone Movies on Moviemaking
Most of the sixteen Keystone comedies that portray filmmaking were made
within the limited time span of two years—1914 and 1915—and Charlie Chaplin acts in the majority of them, paralleling his own newfound explorations of
the medium. However, after the Keystone Film Company was reorganized as
the Mack Sennett Comedies studio in 1917, the subject attained a position of
sustained fascination. Between 1918 and 1933, the motif pops up steadily in one
or two shorts every year, building up to peaks in 1924, 1927, and 1932—years
in which no less than four movies portray the making of movies, including the
ambitious four-reel featurette The Girl from Everywhere (1927) with sequences
printed in two-color Technicolor.3 This is an impressive list. In order to understand the significance of these Mack Sennett comedies, it is useful to look for
some points of reference in the earlier Keystone comedies.
An oft-cited example, suggested as the first comic look at the process of
making movies, is the Keystone short Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913).4 Mabel
Normand plays the role of a kitchen maid who leaves the countryside with a
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broken heart. Upon her arrival in the city, she presents herself at a film studio
as a dramatic actress, only to find that she actually has more potential as a
pratfalling comedienne. When Mabel happens upon the street sign of a film
studio and steps in to audition, we are shown a glimpse of the Keystone Film
Company at work. Strangely, the street view that introduces the studio scene
does not establish the actual Edendale location of the Keystone Film Company’s facilities. Instead, a row of stately Georgian-style mansions in a residential
neighborhood carries a placard that reads “Kinometograph Keystone Studio”
[sic].5 In appropriating a classy facade and pasting it to the authentic interior of
the studio, the production portrays the film studio as an imagined place: a location marked by documentary realism—a true look behind the scenes—as well
as a site of cinematic construction. Once inside, Mabel acts out her test amid
the Keystone film studio’s daily operations. In the middle and background of the
scene, several units are shown rehearsing, shooting scenes, and constructing
sets. Earlier research stresses the haphazard working methods in the Edendale
lot, pictured as “a space of comic disorder and chaos.”6 However, visual analysis
shows that the studio is not, in fact, governed by an atmosphere of disorder.
The comic content of the scene instead lies entirely within the performance of
Normand’s character who transforms the audition into a slapstick routine. The
ladies and gents of the cast and crew who flock to catch a glimpse of the action
actually form quite a disciplined on-site audience. Women look well groomed
in simply decorated dresses and sensible shoes; men work in dark costumes,
white shirts, dark ties, and straw hats. All react with restrained amusement
to the comedians’ broad buffoonery, with an occasional in-camera glance. By
contrast, the comedy team—consisting of Normand as the aspiring actress,
Charles Inslee as the onscreen director, and Ford Sterling as the mustachioed
villain—are clad in comedy costumes and makeup. The opposing registers of
broad acting and comedy makeup versus natural curiosity and street wear
make the comedy bits stand out in the professional context of a film studio at
work. The film pictures the labor of working in a motion-picture studio as quite
a conventional business, livened up by Mabel’s slapstick intervention. Shooting
in the actual studio location grounds the slapstick performance in the everyday
working environment—a balance not unlike the real-life events and on-site
crowds that offset comedians’ interventions in numerous other slapstick movies
filmed on location.
One such real-life spectacle became the site of a most remarkable slapstick movie on moviemaking. The short Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. (1914)
shows a wonderful mix of “making a fiction film” and “documenting an actual
event,” with Charlie Chaplin working to obstruct both (fig. 1).7 The opening
title states the confusion clearly: “In picturing this event an odd character
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Fig. 1: Frank Williams and Charles Chaplin in a publicity shot for Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal.
(1914)
discovered that motion pictures were being taken and it became impossible to
keep him away from the camera.” The film’s metafictional setup becomes clear
when we study the individual shots more closely. In a total of sixteen shots that
constitute the split-reeler, only four shots document the actual races from a
straightforward camera position on the pavement.8 In six other shots, Chaplin’s
character steps into the frame and obstructs the camera’s view of the race event.
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These shots can easily be read as footage captured by the supposed newsreel
camera, due to the flat style of reportage, the ongoing street races in the background, and the crowd’s on-camera reactions, ranging from amusement to
bewilderment. In six more shots, however, a larger frame reveals a small film
crew with a director and cameraman cranking a box-type camera mounted on a
tripod. Most interestingly, even in the shots in which Chaplin is shown clowning
around with the onscreen camera and director, the star actually eyes the hot
camera (the extradiegetic recording camera behind the onscreen camera), even
though this means turning his back on the camera and crew that are diegetically
pictured in the frame. The tramp poses and charms in a direct address to his
largest audience at the other end of the lens, overruling the newsreel narrative
of the short.
Both Keystone shorts reveal a pattern that also pertains to the other
Keystone movies on moviemaking: comedians serve as wild elements in a context that is otherwise well organized and professionally structured. While the
comic disruptions are the reason for and subject of the scenes, they serve more
to offset, rather than to overthrow, the conventional workflow and everyday
organization. Slapstick movies that picture moviemaking, then, act as hosts for
a dual message: they document the discipline and division of labor on a professional film set, while also treating that workplace as a space for play. “Indeed,”
Rob King writes, “from the studio’s earliest days, Sennett’s publicity department worked hard to depict the Keystone lot as a zany counterweight to the
rationalization of American industry, a place where the lines separating work
and play, productive labor and dynamic disorder, became hopelessly tangled.”9
The films most suited to broadcast this entanglement are those that blend the
documentation of moviemaking with the subjects, film style, and technology
of slapstick comedy.
Candid Cameras
A closer look at technical equipment elucidates the transition from the Keystone
Film Company to Mack Sennett Comedies. In Keystone films, the camera of
the onscreen crew is usually a wood-cased 35mm motion-picture camera with
internal film magazines, most commonly an Empire or Moy & Bastie camera
mounted on a wooden tripod. This box type of camera required hand-cranking,
which enabled precise control over the recorded pace, and it offered a second
screw hole on the top side, which allowed the camera to be mounted upside
down for reverse motion effects. These assets and the cameras’ robust construction made them basic equipment for trick comedies and location shooting in the early to mid-1910s, marking the shared technical requirements for
slapstick comedy and nonfictional film. However, even by 1914, the Keystone
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Film Company occasionally used the then-recent Bell & Howell cine camera for
studio filming, as film frames of A Film Johnnie (1914) and set photos of He Did
and He Didn’t (1915) show. The Bell & Howell 2709 camera, highly recognizable
by its external film magazines in a shape prefiguring Mickey Mouse, offered
superior film registration and rock-steady image stability. It was a workhorse of
a camera, perfect for complex trick photography and multiple-exposure work,
and was personally endorsed by Mack Sennett in a 1927 advertisement for Bell
& Howell when the camera’s popularity started to wane.10 Yet, remarkably, it is
the outmoded box camera that keeps turning up in slapstick movies on moviemaking well into the 1920s.11 In Home-made Movies (1922), The Dare-Devil
(1923), The Hollywood Kid (1924), Hot Cakes for Two (1926), Crazy to Act (1927),
and The Girl from Everywhere (1927), the box camera sits side by side with a Pathé
Professional, a similarly low-cost camera resembling two piled-up boxes. It thus
appears that professional motion-picture cameras of the 1910s were sent in front
of the cameras for movies on moviemaking in the 1920s. In a way, this is a natural evolution that speaks favorably to the studio’s sense of economy and recycling.12 Since cameras were the occasional butts of destructive pranks, it made
sense to put the older ones in the line of fire. Moreover, their box-like shapes
were simplest to build as props for total-loss gags. So, just as mustaches and
silk hats on screen characters facilitated fast audience recognition in frenzied
comedy contexts, the slim-standing wooden boxes became stereotypical images
of motion-picture recording devices in the eye of the storm. These cartoon-like
cameras surely registered as comic with an expert audience that could follow
the evolution of motion-picture equipment on the pages of fan magazines.13
It is remarkable that Sennett movies on moviemaking did not flaunt the
latest technical equipment and professional studio facilities that they had at
their disposal—as, for instance, Chaplin did in his post-Sennett movies on filmmaking, such as His New Job (1915) or How to Make Movies (1918, unreleased).14
The Sennett studio’s prosperous financial situation in the early to mid-1920s
certainly would have permitted it. Moreover, constructing the corporate identity of a comedy studio by attacking its very production tools would have been
perfectly in line with slapstick’s attitude of disregard for objects of wealth,
authority, and industry. Nevertheless, Sennett movies on making movies choose
their models from earlier slapstick practices and stress continuity with Keystone-era technology. In a confusing twist, set photos of Keystone films—that
is, reference photographs that show the entire setup of a film scene, including
offscreen information such as camera and lighting equipment—bear many similarities to production stills that picture the onscreen cast, crew, and dummy
equipment in later Sennett movies on moviemaking (fig. 2), since they picture
matching equipment. In a similar vein of quaintness, the film set shown in the
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Fig. 2: Screen shot of The Dare-Devil
(1923)
sound short Dream House (1932) depicts silent-film equipment: hand-cranked
cameras, a megaphone for the director, and no microphone or sound equipment
on the set. In doing so, Sennett’s movies on moviemaking persistently present
slapstick comedy as a thing of the past that holds onto older methods and
technologies of filming.
The reference to Keystone-era iconography perpetuates precisely those
myths in which the labor of making movies is presented as carnivalesque play,
and the film studio’s strict organization is countered by fooling around with
modest material. These preprofessional touches craft the corporate identity of
the Mack Sennett Comedies studio as a site of lively resistance to the firm grip
of the industrialized, rationalized, and efficient producer-centered system that
governed the Hollywood film industry—of which Mack Sennett’s studio was
actually an early exponent, as Simon Joyce and Jennifer Putzi have detailed in
their account of the division of labor in the Keystone Film Company.15 Movies
that picture moviemaking offer the perfect format to replay the improvised
freedom and undiscriminating chaos that was said to have reigned in the earliest days of the Keystone Film Company, and through their sustained replay
in movies on moviemaking, the anecdotes that support this claim acquire the
power of myth.
Movies on Moviemaking as Myth Makers
The Dare-Devil reenacts one such reframing from disciplined labor to playful
intervention. This 1923 short reworks a small anecdote on its way toward legendary fame as a cherished chapter of studio history, recounted in countless
studio-issued press releases and ultimately cemented as a foundational tale in
Sennett biographies. The anecdote itself remains unauthenticated.
The tale starts in January 1912, when the (in fact, not yet founded) Keystone Film Company is said to have shot its first motion picture a mere thirty
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minutes after its arrival in Los Angeles. The four members of the company—
Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling, and Fred Mace—happened upon
a parade in the city streets and decided to use it as a setting for their first
comedy. The parade inspired a plot in which Normand plays an unwed mother
who is looking for the father of her child among the participants. To fit the part,
she is equipped with a doll wrapped in a piece of cloth while she messes up the
orderly lines of the march.16 As supposed testimony to unrelenting working
conditions (in which there was no time to rest or freshen up after a four-day
train trip), complemented by the fun of improvised mischief at the expense of
serious society, this incident was constantly repeated as a key element in the
story of the studio’s inception.
The Mack Sennett Weekly was the choice medium to rerun such fabricated
or misremembered stories. The Weekly was a publicity paper issued by the Keystone-Sennett company in the difficult period when it was withdrawing from its
distribution deal with the Triangle Film Corporation in the winter of 1916–17.
In the legal chaos that ensued, the film company lost the right to the fabled
Keystone name. Sennett, confident in that second most famous name in the
world of screen comedy, renamed the studio Mack Sennett Comedies. To divert
patronage from “Keystone shorts”—still issued by the Triangle Film Corporation
after Sennett’s departure—to “Mack Sennett Comedies,” the publicity department launched a promotional campaign with the publication of a weekly paper
as its main channel. One of the attractions spotlighted to engage audiences was
the allure of Bathing Girls (as discussed in a later section). Another strategy to
bolster audience loyalty was to guarantee the continuation of Keystone’s legacy
in Mack Sennett Comedies by referencing their shared roots. For this, the Mack
Sennett Weekly carried a series of articles that retold Keystone’s studio history
under the title “The Rise of the Keystone.” In five installments, the studio’s history was bent to the rules of scriptwriting, resulting in “one of the most dramatic
and interesting stories of the modern business world.”17 The writing dramatizes
the history of Keystone’s clumsy beginnings, based on memories whipped up
into promotional tools for the Mack Sennett Comedies studio. Gene Fowler consulted these questionable sources when he prepared his fantastical biography of
Mack Sennett, Father Goose, published in 1934. Some passages later resurfaced,
only slightly rewritten, in Sennett’s 1954 autobiography King of Comedy, in which
he linked the parade episode to the creation of the Keystone Cops, when actual
police supposedly moved in to see what the commotion was all about and proved
to be the funniest thing onscreen.18 The constant repetition and reworking of
the anecdote eventually enshrined the tale in film history as a telling example
of how working for the Keystone company was a matter of playfully interacting
with serious matters and actual events.
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Fig. 3: Production still of The Dare-Devil (1923). (Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences)
Back to Sennett movies on moviemaking: The Dare-Devil fictionalizes
the very same incident. This two-reel short depicts the methods of an insensitive film director who goes to any lengths to get a shot, regardless of the safety
of cast and crew. When the daredevil played by Ben Turpin—a stuntman by
accident rather than by talent, as in his role in A Small Town Idol (1921)—doubles for the star in a dangerous scene, he is tied to a pole in a flooding cellar. A
minute later, the director is alerted to an actual fire in a nearby tenement and
the whole film crew immediately rushes out—to what is nonetheless comically
obvious as just a backlot set with smoke pots suggesting a fire (fig. 3). The title
card that commands the exodus in The Dare-Devil reads “Come On! There’s
a real fire, let’s grab some scenes!” It echoes the title card “A Fire! Just what
we need to finish the picture!” used in the Keystone short A Film Johnnie that
established the gag nine years earlier. In The Dare-Devil, the female lead is given
a doll hastily wrapped in a rag and is sent into the burning building, dragging
her poor “baby” along. The sequence shows a parodic reworking of several Keystone components: the off-the-cuff shooting with ramshackle equipment, the
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exploitation of actual local disasters, directors who film on artistic inspiration
rather than productive planning, stuntmen performing life-threatening tricks,
and improvisations with costumes and props, in addition to a literal remake
of the Keystone-era anecdote. In Sennett movies on moviemaking, then, these
references are scripted, prepared on the studio backlot, and fictionalized into
story subjects that revive the vintage days of the company.
Movie Machinery: From Tool to Attraction
The picturing of labor as improvisation and play, and the subsequent reenacting of play in scripted fiction films, also influenced the films’ attitude toward
movie machinery. Indeed, the extradiegetic camera that sits behind the dummy
camera inevitably exposes a whole setup of film machines and auxiliary devices
ordinarily kept hidden. In slapstick movies on moviemaking, the purpose of
trick machinery reaches a metalevel, from a tool to visualize tricks to a trick
attraction in itself. The Dare-Devil opens with a sequence that showcases exactly
that process. First, a wide shot establishes the hurried run of a rider on a galloping horse. Then the camera cuts to a medium shot of the rider bouncing up and
down against a passing landscape. The expert audience takes hardly a second
to recognize the aesthetics of a trick shot in which the actor is performing the
action in front of a moving backdrop. Yet, before a round of knowing laughter
can roll into the aisles, a new surprise is introduced: the wide frame of the next
shot reveals the whole setup as a movie scene handled by a film crew on the
backlot of a film studio. The panorama’s entire construction is pictured in operation: a twenty-foot-wide wooden structure with two rollers on the ends and a
canvas stretched between them; the painted background revolves horizontally
from one roller to the other, operated by two prop men. In front of it stands the
trick horse, which consists of a wooden seesaw system dressed with a saddle
and lead rope, tilted up and down by a stagehand. The panorama had been built
in 1915, during a period in which larger production budgets were increasingly
funneled into the purchase and construction of intricate technical tools to
facilitate trick photography.19 In revealing the panorama in its entirety in The
Dare-Devil, Sennett is again associating his studio’s filmmaking with an older,
Keystone-era technology for a situation in which professional work (stunt-riding
skills) is unmasked as clumsy play, or—from a different perspective—clumsy
work (obvious film trickery) unmasked as the operation of impressive movie
machinery.
One year later in 1924, the concept is taken a step further; to show how
far technology and financial means had developed since the Keystone days, The
Hollywood Kid demonstrates the studio’s unique cyclorama. Here, my reading
of the Mack Sennett metamovies as formats in which Keystone-era motifs are
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Fig. 4: The cyclorama, ca. 1925. (Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
reenacted becomes more complex. The cyclorama was a 1919 addition to the
studio’s arsenal of movie machines. It was a huge contraption: a circular construction that stood twenty-five-feet high, measured 109 feet in diameter, had
a circumference of 321 feet, and was encircled by a platform twenty feet wide
(fig. 4).20 The cyclorama was definitely not a Keystone-era piece of machinery
but an investment rooted in the studio’s financial confidence at the turn of the
1920s when Mack Sennett Comedies released the most profitable pictures it
would ever make.21 However, what both machines have in common is that the
aesthetics of a chase filmed on the panorama and the cyclorama are recognizably different from those of a chase filmed on location. The cyclic repetition of
the background and the film frame cropped above feet or wheels are unmistakable clues for a chase faked on the studio lot. Both pieces of movie machinery
celebrate rather than hide the artificiality of the illusions they create. In addition, in movies that portray the filming of movies, both machines go beyond the
facilitation of trick effects and stunts and are showcased as huge props in their
own right. Entire scenes are devoted to the demonstration of the panorama and
cyclorama in The Dare-Devil, The Hollywood Kid, and Crazy to Act. The machines’
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operation is shown and some auxiliary devices are illustrated, such as a wind
machine built from an airplane propeller and prop men feeding paper into the
current for optimal effect of speed and movement.
Remarkably, movies on moviemaking thus expose inside information on
studio-specific tricks that used to be surrounded by secrecy. In the Keystone
years, a policy of “advertising the secrecy” was in force, which entailed acknowledging the use of tricks while carefully guarding the specific techniques and
machinery. “Sennett and his filmmakers knew that a well-publicized veil of
secrecy concerning production methods would . . . stimulate audience curiosity,”
King states.22 In 1920s movies on moviemaking, trick machinery is no longer
a set of secret tools used for the visualization of gags. The uncovering of trick
devices is demonstrated as the gag, marking a changed relation between technology and comedy. Not only is the work involved in making movies presented
as labor transformed into play, but the film studio itself is also portrayed as a
playground in which the demonstration of movie machines takes center stage,
like the flaunting of attractions at a funfair—what King terms “a carnivalesque
reflection of a mechanized world.”23 That funfair conception of technology is the
model for movies on moviemaking. “Fun with movie machinery” exposes the
exquisite artificiality of making movies, flaunts the studio’s production assets
(even the comically quaint ones), and structures stories of actors at work as
leisure activities in which comedians hop from attraction to attraction. In The
Dare-Devil, The Hollywood Kid, and Crazy to Act, every studio prop and movie
machine is exposed and toyed with—from flat sets to the studio’s water tank, a
breakaway cabin, a wind machine, a trick airplane, and moving backgrounds.
The cyclorama tops them all: it is the supreme machine for what Jennifer Bean,
in her analysis of the imagination of early Hollywood, calls the “utopic place”
where “the numbing effects of assembly line labor transform to a phenomenological realm of endlessly variegated metamorphosis and play.”24 The cyclorama
comments most poignantly on the effort: it pleasantly numbs dictates of efficiency, mechanization, and progress when it spins around at forty miles an hour
“without getting any place,” as the title card in Crazy to Act tells us.
Techniques of Recycling: Bathing Girl Photography
The continuity between Keystone imagery and Sennett’s later movies on moviemaking not only resides in the fictionalization of incidents and the onscreen
depiction of movie machinery but also extends to the material aspects of images,
and particularly the recycling of promotional photographs and film footage. An
interesting sample is the picture that activates the plot in A Small Town Idol,
released by Associated Producers in 1921, which is the first feature-length satire of the film industry made under the banner of Mack Sennett Comedies. The
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Fig. 5: Poster of Marie Prevost as Marcelle Mansfield in a production still of A Small Town Idol
(1921). (Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
seven-reel film stars Ben Turpin as a small-town hick who is thrown out of town
on account of his presumed two-timing of sweetheart Phyllis Haver. Heartbroken, cross-eyed, and consumed by suicide plans, he volunteers to perform as
a stuntman for the Super Art film company, in whose westerns he eventually
stars as a daredevil hailed on the screen of his former town. This prefiguration
of stardom and depiction of filmmaking call into play some samples of smart
recycling. While still a happy fellow in the small town, Turpin’s character Sam
Smith is caught in a ruse involving the picture postcard of a movie star. A love
rival intercepts the postcard and adds a message suggesting a compromising
love affair between Sam and the actress pictured on the card, Marcelle Mansfield. An enlargement of the same photograph is shown as a lobby display in
the local theater and as a man-sized poster, both featured prominently in the
production stills circulated for A Small Town Idol’s promotion (fig. 5).
The picture postcard is a typical item of cinema memorabilia collected by
film fans: a thick card featuring the portrait of a movie star but not necessarily
connected to a specific movie. Mack Sennett was an early advocate of licensing
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photographs of his performers for reproduction on mass-produced arcade cards,
postcards, and tobacco prints, particularly when he was looking to smooth the
transition from Keystone to Mack Sennett Comedies in 1917. A movie patron
in 1921 was certain to recognize the actress in this particular picture and the
type of photograph. It is an image of Marie Prevost, one of the best known and
most iconic of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Girls, photographed in full figure on the
beach. She wears a bathing suit and hat, typically—and daringly—showing her
legs bared between rolled-down stockings and costume. The photograph was
taken some time before the spring of 1918 by photographer Nelson H. Evans, then
head of the stills department in the Mack Sennett studio, where he developed
the visual style for the Bathing Girl pictures as lively images of fun-loving girls
playing around outdoors on a sunny beach.
However, in 1920–21, at the time of the filming and release of A Small
Town Idol, instead of Nelson Evans, James E. Abbe helmed the photo department
at Mack Sennett Comedies. This accomplished theatrical photographer had a
very different visual style. Abbe’s excellent reputation rested on portraits of
costumed performers in the photographer’s studio, rather than in the open air.
In Abbe’s photographs of Marie Prevost, the erstwhile bathing belle on the beach
was transformed into a glamorous stage beauty wrapped in lace, immobilized
on a stool and glorified in the glow of the spotlights. Yet, none of Abbe’s glorious
studio portraits were chosen for the picture postcard and lobby poster needed
in A Small Town Idol. Instead, an older photograph of Marie Prevost was reused,
which preserved her image as an outdoor girl and an accomplished athlete with
a streamlined body—exactly the screen persona established in Nelson Evans’s
1916–18 photographs. The reuse of Prevost in the iconic photographic style associated with an earlier type of bathing girl imagery indicates the desire to perpetuate a successful merchandising system. The Bathing Girls were important
instruments to ensure the continued interest of a mixed audience of men and
women in the transition from Keystone to Mack Sennett Comedies.25 Not only
did Bathing Girls tickle male interest with their physical beauty and undress
on the pages of the Mack Sennett Weekly, but they also addressed a female audience with endorsements of beauty products and fashion designs. Moreover, the
notion of playfulness, so central in Keystone Film Company discourse, linked
the efforts of Bathing Girls on the beach more to holiday fun and leisure activities than to labor, and their screen identities more to playful athletes than to
actresses at work. When, at the turn of the 1920s, Sennett started to dismantle
his battalion of Bathing Girls and market them instead as actresses with the
potential to carry leading roles in feature-length films and comedy-dramas,
the appearance of lighthearted bathing-girl images in a movie on moviemaking
inevitably seemed like a memento.26 The nostalgic tone of several fan magazine
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articles similarly mourns the loss. In articles such as “How They Grow Up!,”
Adela Rogers St. Johns compares a 1917 Evans photograph with a 1923 picture
of former Sennett player Gloria Swanson. She connects Swanson’s liveliness
and youth in the 1917 picture to the bygone “innocence” of the medium; both
the actress and the film industry are said to have graduated from teasers to
having a more serious and mature status in the early 1920s.27 Clearly, while
promotional portraiture circa 1920–21 worked to establish the female players as
beautiful professionals, Sennett’s movies on moviemaking more readily flashed
performers in an iconography that referenced informal snapshots. This recycling thereby established Mack Sennett Comedies as an archive that preserved
the fun-loving spirit and youthful innocence associated with the Keystone era
and, by extension, with the pioneering years of the film industry.
Techniques of Recycling: Reused Footage
Even after Marie Prevost left the studio in 1921—A Small Town Idol was one of
her last performances in a Sennett film—moving images recycled from earlier
sources kept drawing upon her iconic status. The 1924 movie on moviemaking
The Hollywood Kid makes the best case in point. In it, reused footage of Marie
Prevost is part of a larger montage sequence that pictures a visitor, played by
Charles Murray, gazing at the actors at work in a film studio. Murray points out
certain people to hostess Madeline Hurlock, who then identifies the actors by
name with images that establish their fame. The sequence cuts back and forth
between shots of the onscreen onlookers Hurlock and Murray, recycled footage
as reverse angle shots, and title cards for identification. Ben Turpin—“not Valentino” assures the intertitle—is encircled by Bathing Girls and impersonates
the cross-eyed lover he played in The Shriek of Araby (1923). The composition of
beautiful girls decoratively arranged around a male comedian recalls the earliest design of Bathing Girl pictures, in which the girls were positioned “so that
the comedians could not be cut out.”28 The recycled footage of Marie Prevost
again freezes her into the iconography of Bathing Girls from the 1916–18 era:
she poses full figure in a body-clinging dark leotard, getting ready to dive from
some rocks. Phyllis Haver—who had, in fact, parted company with Sennett in
the spring of 1923—reappears as a beauty queen attended to by makeup and
wardrobe personnel, and Billy Bevan is the dance director who rehearses a
troupe of ballerinas in a huge palatial set. This last material was notably sourced
from the 1921 movie on moviemaking, A Small Town Idol. This reuse of footage
from a metamovie in another metamovie is definitely the epitome of all Sennett’s
self-referential, recycled in-jokes. Furthermore, the actors are identified by their
real names on the title cards, even while they are clearly playing characters and
not their private, offscreen selves. At first glance, the montage sequence simply
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capitalizes on the added stardust of cameo performances for the inexpensive
boosting of production values. However, the flashing of the actors’ names primarily builds on the performers’ iconic renown as recognizable components
of Sennett’s established brand of comedy, so these cameo performances serve
as nostalgic figures linking earlier performances to new movies. In addition,
the montage sequence in The Hollywood Kid presents the film studio as a place
where starring roles are replayed for the delight of visiting outsiders. The studio space is increasingly structured as a play-on-demand zone, a place to gaze
at exhibits and attractions, a stock company where famous comedians are
reanimated in their most remembered poses, roles, costumes, sets, or activities.
Hollywoodland
A further step in the recycling of Keystone’s legacy is taken in Movie-Town
(1931), the sole sound-and-color short to deal with moviemaking released by
the Mack Sennett Comedies studio. It was filmed in the short-lived two-color
Sennett-Color process and boasts Sennett’s fourth cameo role in a movie on
moviemaking.29 In the opening scenes, the impressive dimensions of the thennew state-of-the-art studio facilities in Studio City are laid out in aerial shots
that prominently picture the studio name. The camera then cuts to an interior
film set where shooting is delayed because the onscreen director finds himself
stuck on a plot point about a wife and her lover. Marjorie Beebe suggests that
they “bring in the husband.” “Gee, that is a new idea,” the onscreen director
sneers and gives her the rest of the day off. When Beebe steps off the stage, she
is greeted by Mack Sennett and Luis Alberni, playing Baron Gonzola. The baron
is the only character throughout the film who is not addressed by his real name.
Mack Sennett and Marjorie Beebe are called “Mr. Sennett” and “Miss Beebe”
or “Marge,” respectively, thus marking their roles as celebrity cameos. Sennett
acts as host, in charge of greeting the visitor and presenting him to the players
on the set. Some elements of the scene are uncannily like Mabel Normand’s
performance for Mabel’s Dramatic Career in 1913: Beebe similarly pratfalls in
the studio, inviting the mirth of the onscreen crew. Throughout, the short is
infused with celebrity-selling material. When Beebe takes the visiting baron
on a tour of the hot spots in movie town, she starts at a swimming pool where
Larry “Buster” Crabbe performs a cameo swim. Crabbe was then a champion
swimmer, just prior to his gold medal for four-hundred-meter freestyle in the
1932 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles. Over images of his swimming underwater, an offscreen voice dryly sums up Crabbe’s titles to make sure his renown
hits home. On a technological level the submarine shots filmed in natural color
make this 1931 musical comedy quite an exceptional treat.30 Beebe and Gonzola
continue the tour with a dinner at George Olsen’s supper club (fig. 6). The club
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Fig. 6: Production still of Movie-Town (1931). (Courtesy Robert S. Birchard Collection)
is crowded with familiar faces, such as Skeets Gallagher, Jimmy Starr, and Ben
Turpin with his wife Babette.31 Extant production files advise on techniques to
augment the concentration of star appeal on the dance floor. “Ask important
people to dance near cameras . . . have our own people dancing to edge them over
to get into camera positions,” they suggest.32 Movie-Town ends with the image
of a train driving out to the tune of the hit song “Beyond the Blue Horizon,”
performed live by the George Olsen band.
Although the work on set is linked to the big, brand-name studio in the
opening shot, the portrait of filmmaking in Movie-Town greatly stretches the
type of facilities conventionally associated with a film studio. “Movie town” is
pictured as a zone better equipped for leisure than for labor. Showing the audience places to gaze at celebrities, sports stars, and bathing girls, as well as touring the famous hot spots of the cinema city’s nightlife, the short is almost a guide
for movie-struck tourists. Indeed, Movie-Town is structured as a tourist trip to
the attractions of movie land. The accumulation of entertainments recalls the
revue structure of film magazines like Screen Snapshots (Screen Snapshots,
Inc., later Columbia, 1919–58), or the Hollywood On Parade shorts (Paramount,
1932–34) that mix behind-the-scenes glimpses of Hollywood places, events,
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and actors’ homes with comedy numbers and songs performed by studio stars.
Filmed in the Sennett-Color process that was particularly suited for location
work, Sennett’s sound-and-color movie on moviemaking no longer portrays the
film industry as a set of locations, equipment, and facilities that connect to the
studio floor. The pictured movie town is a sunny and colorful place where film
studios are organized as holiday resorts, their work spaces expanding to include
nightclubs for casting, dance floors to show off famous acquaintances, and
swimming pools for sports champions with promising careers in cinema. Strikingly, the very same components—train, swimming pool, night club—introduce
Janet Gaynor’s movie-land character during a montage sequence in A Star Is
Born (1937), fixing the elements that had become vital to Hollywood’s identity.
Remarkably, the place of the action is called movie-town rather than Hollywood, the term generally accepted by 1931 which had been carried over from
the name of a locality on the outskirts of Los Angeles to become a synonym for
the whole film industry in the early 1920s.33 Whereas A Small Town Idol in 1921
still uses a title card saying “Los Angeles” to announce Ben Turpin’s arrival in
movie town, the 1923 film The Extra Girl has the title “Hollywood, Any Day” to
establish movie land in the form of frantic filming activities on the streets in
front of the Sennett studio gate in Edendale. The name stands in for both the
location of a local industry and the global interest it generated, thus inviting
a blending of the two components’ assets and intertwining the splendors of
the movie world with the splendors of the greater Los Angeles area. One such
entanglement is exemplified in the erection of the Hollywoodland sign. And
here again, Mack Sennett emerges as an important figure who played a part in
shaping the imagination of early Hollywood. Together with Los Angeles Times
publisher David Chandler, Sennett was responsible for erecting the huge sign
on a tract of land he owned in the Hollywood Hills in 1923. The sign, initially
meant to promote a real-estate opportunity, eventually became an icon fixing a
geographical spot for the elusive film industry spread out in Southern California.
In giving the film industry the icon with which it is forever associated, Sennett
placed himself at the core of movie land’s foundational tale. The term Hollywood,
then, finally reconnects the film industry to its luscious surroundings in movies
that visualize the movie world, picturing a paradise-like place with a leisurely
lifestyle for filmmakers, stars, residents, and visiting tourists.
Sennett Cameo Parts
To show how the idea of Hollywood filmmaking evolved during the 1920s, a
comparison between Sennett’s cameos in the 1924 The Hollywood Kid and the
1931 Movie-Town is particularly enlightening. The opening title card of the earlier film, “Where comedy is a serious business,” establishes the actual Mack
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Sennett Comedies studio in Edendale as seen from the air. In a bird’s-eye view,
we glide over a patchwork of stages, offices, dressing rooms, and shacks on the
back lots. The studio name, prominently painted on the roof of the main stage,
fills the frame, which then cuts to an interior shot. Sitting behind a desk in a busy
office, Mack Sennett listens to a scriptwriter who is pitching a story idea. The
pitch is constantly interrupted by the growing frenzy in the office: a wardrobe
mistress requires approval of the latest bathing suit designs modeled by a string
of Bathing Girls; a pile of film on two legs roams the room; two grotesque comedians quarrel over their sex appeal; Numa the studio lion jumps on Sennett’s
desk; and, to top all gags, Sennett’s mother calls him on the telephone. The film
then cuts to a film set on the backlot as two hands push down a detonator. The
following sequence alternates between newsreel footage of a mountain blasted
away in a cloud of dust and debris and the impact of the explosion in Sennett’s
office. “Don’t worry, mother. It’s just a little comedy scene,” he smiles.
Between the 1924 The Hollywood Kid and the 1931 Movie-Town, Sennett’s
on- and offscreen roles substantially changed. In The Hollywood Kid, Sennett
portrays the central figure who has a firm hand on every decision pertaining
to moviemaking, from costume designs, editing, scriptwriting, and casting,
to managing the studio lion. This is the image of an executive producer with a
desk job. He supervises the various departments headed by specialists who all
ultimately fall under his central command. Sennett’s presence was one of the
short’s selling points. The studio-issued press release reads: “Every exhibitor
should get it over to his patrons that Mack Sennett himself plays an important
part in this comedy. Hundreds of thousands of people, even though they know
of Mack Sennett, have never seen his likeness, and here he is in full figure and
close-up, right before you.”34 In contrast, in Movie-Town he is pictured as a visitor
on the set; no longer a working director or producer, he is now a middle-aged
man in a sharp suit who greets guests. He is never pictured at work, only spending leisure time. At night, he parties in a popular Culver City nightclub. Other
celebrities greet him with some mild in-jokes on his roving eye for female beauty.
They tease him with lines like “Hey, Mack, did you move your office to Olsen’s?”
or “Busy at the studio?”
Interestingly, Sennett is the actual director of Movie-Town. As the studio’s
financial situation grew very precarious after the stock market debacle of 1929,
Sennett more regularly had to take up functions for which he previously hired
others. His return to the director’s chair is another modus operandi that connects movies of the later period to early Keystone practices. However, while Sennett’s cameo parts in Keystone shorts like Mabel’s Dramatic Career and A Busy
Day (1914) confirm his multiple roles in Keystone’s studio organization—from
country-rube character actor to on- and offscreen director-producer—the fact
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that he was again directing comedies was not visible in 1930s movies on moviemaking. On the contrary, in the Depression-era short Movie-Town, he is pictured
as a retired director-general, wealthy enough to leave work to others while he
enjoys an existence as a celebrity in a movie land that covers all facilities for
these pleasant retirement activities.
Afterlife
As the above examples have shown, several strategies in Sennett movies on
moviemaking repeat key motifs from earlier practices, and thus not only perpetuate the legendary fame of Keystone shorts in Mack Sennett Comedies but also
define the slapstick elements that recur in the visualizations of early Hollywood
filmmaking.
In later years, several of Sennett’s movies were entirely dedicated to celebrating slapstick’s key motifs and iconic characters. Love in a Police Station
(1927) revives the corps of incompetent Keystone Cops after years of absence
from the screen; The Girl from Everywhere celebrates Sennett Bathing Girls,
freezing them into gorgeous, painterly tableaux scenes filmed in two-color Technicolor; and The Great Pie Mystery (1931) satirizes the presupposed importance
of custard pies in slapstick comedy. It is entirely fitting that the Sennett studio
itself was honored with a cameo role in MGM’s Show People (1928), when the
slapstick studio plays its designated character role as a training ground to break
in actors before they go on to tackle more serious and mature movie work. The
scenes of Peggy Pepper being trained in slapstick comedy by receiving pies in
the face and “taking it on the chin” were shot in the vacated Sennett studios in
Edendale, shortly after Sennett moved to the facilities in Studio City.
With their constant reworking of Keystone-era iconography and technology, Sennett’s movies on moviemaking set slapstick standards for the portrayal
of early Hollywood in the public imagination. Slapstick filmmaking increasingly
started to function as a model for the way that Hollywood chose to look back at
its early years. This image drew directly on slapstick metamovies by blending
historical with fictional components, comedians with their screen personas,
and outmoded equipment with novel technological display—thus painting a
convincing portrait of an industry that intended to represent its past in terms of
a well-organized labor context inhabited by fools with a playful mindset which
resisted that professionalism. The most notable post-Sennett revival films that
advance Keystone-like mayhem as a stand-in for early filmmaking are Keystone
Hotel (1935), a Vitaphone tribute film in which Keystone Cops intervene when
a bathing beauty contest results in a pie-throwing party, and Twentieth Century-Fox’s Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), offering a thinly veiled retelling of Mack
Sennett’s life, with Sennett in a cameo appearance. A silent black-and-white
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Fig. 7: Production still of Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Cops (1955). (Courtesy Royal
Belgian Film Archive)
sequence at the core of this Technicolor production honors the style of a Keystone race to the rescue, with Buster Keaton and several Keystone veterans as
cops. Directed by Sennett veteran Mal St. Clair under Mack Sennett’s technical
supervision, the sequence so convincingly replays silent slapstick routines that
it is frequently mistaken for original fare, and production stills of the sequence
are more often than not misdated back to the silent era.35 In addition, the coming of sound created the opportunity to re-release silent comedies either with
a soundtrack or projected at sound-film speed—which, in fact, turns all silent
movies into slapstick comedies. For instance, in 1939, the seven-reeler A Small
Town Idol was reissued by the Vitaphone Corporation as a two-reeler with sound
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and music effects and a silly voice-over narrator who merrily comments: “When
you’re cockeyed enough to break into the movies, even you can be a hero.” The
1955 Universal film Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops consolidates slapstick icons in a portrait of early filmmaking by showing Mack Sennett sitting
in the director’s chair, alongside a cameraman who points a box-type camera
at a bunch of Bathing Girls in incredibly old-fashioned bathing suits, and then
throwing a custard pie (fig. 7).
A close reading of the technical equipment, studio locales, recurring
motifs, and cameo parts in Sennett’s movies that portray the making of movies,
then, uncovers the slapstick elements that remained part of the model taken
up by the film industry for its visions of Hollywood filmmaking. As such, Mack
Sennett unmistakably played a key part in defining the place that Hollywood
occupies in the popular imaginary, a place that fuses connotations of factory,
playground, celebrity home, real-estate opportunity, and tourist destination.
Appendix
The following list includes all movies produced between 1912 and 1933 by the
Keystone Film Company and Mack Sennett Comedies that deal with film production, moviegoing, photography, television, fandom, breaking into the movies,
and film performance.
Keystone Film Company
Mabel’s Dramatic Career (Mack Sennett, one reel, 1913)
How Motion Pictures Are Made (unknown, one reel, 1914)
Making a Living (Henry Lehrman, one reel, 1914)
Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. (Henry Lehrman, half reel, 1914)
A Thief Catcher (Henry Lehrman, one reel, 1914)
A Film Johnnie (George Nichols, one reel, 1914)
The Star Boarder (George Nichols, one reel, 1914)
A Busy Day (Mack Sennett, half reel, 1914)
The Masquerader (Charles Chaplin, one reel, 1914)
Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Mack Sennett, six reels, 1914)
Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition (Roscoe Arbuckle, one reel, 1915)
A Glimpse at the San Diego Exposition (Mack Sennett, half reel, 1915)
Fatty’s Tintype Tangle (Roscoe Arbuckle, two reels, 1915)
Fatty and the Broadway Stars (Roscoe Arbuckle, two reels, 1915)
A Movie Star (Fred Fishback, two reels, 1916)
A Reckless Romeo (Roscoe Arbuckle, two reels, 1917)
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Mack Sennett Comedies
Her Screen Idol (Edward Cline, two reels, 1918)
Movie Fans (Erle C. Kenton, two reels, 1920)
The Unhappy Finish (James Davis, two reels, 1921)
A Small Town Idol (Erle C. Kenton, seven reels, 1921)
Home-made Movies (Ray Grey and Gus Meins, two reels, 1922)
The Extra Girl (F. Richard Jones, six reels, 1923)
The Dare-Devil (Del Lord, two reels, 1923)
Smile Please (Roy Del Ruth, two reels, 1924)
The Hollywood Kid (Roy Del Ruth, two reels, 1924)
The Lion and the Souse (Harry Edwards, two reels, 1924)
His New Mamma (Roy Del Ruth, two reels, 1924)
Bashful Jim (Edward Cline, two reels, 1925)
The Lion’s Whiskers (Del Lord, two reels, 1925)
Hot Cakes for Two (Alfred J. Goulding, two reels, 1926)
A Hollywood Hero (Harry Edwards, two reels, 1927)
A Small Town Princess (Edward Cline, two reels, 1927)
Crazy to Act (Earle Rodney, two reels, 1927)
The Girl from Everywhere (Edward Cline, four reels, 1927)
The Girl from Nowhere (Harry Edwards, two reels, 1928)
A Hollywood Star (Mack Sennett, two reels, 1929)
Hello Television (Leslie Pearce, two reels, 1930)
In Conference (Edward Cline, two reels, 1931)
Monkey Business in Africa (Mack Sennett, two reels, 1931)
Movie-Town (Mack Sennett, two reels, 1931)
Dream House (Del Lord, two reels, 1932)
The Candid Camera (Leslie Pearce, two reels, 1932)
Ma’s Pride and Joy (Leslie Pearce, two reels, 1932)
Bring ’Em Back Sober (Babe Stafford, two reels, 1932)
Doubling in the Quickies (Babe Stafford, two reels, 1932)
Notes
1. This list sums up the most important works: Christopher Ames, Movies about the Movies:
Hollywood Reflected (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Thom Anderson,
Los Angeles: A City on Film (Vienna: Viennale, Shüren Verlag, 2008); Alex Barris, Hollywood According to Hollywood: How the Cinema World Has Seen Itself in Its Films (South
Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1978); Rudy Behlmer and Tony Thomas, Hollywood’s
Hollywood: The Movies about the Movies (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975); and James
R. Parish and Michael R. Pitts, Hollywood on Hollywood (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, 1978).
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2. Specifically dealing with silent shorts on moviemaking, the following articles and book
chapters inspired my thinking: Jennifer M. Bean, “The Imagination of Early Hollywood:
Movie-Land and the Magic Cities, 1914–1916,” in Early Cinema and the “National,” ed.
Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2008),
332–41; Robert Eberwein, “Comedy and the Film within the Film,” Wide Angle 3, no. 2
(1979): 12–17; Simon Joyce and Jennifer Putzi, “ ‘The Greatest Combination in Motion
Pictures’: Film History and the Division of Labor in the New York Motion Picture Company,” Film History 21, no. 3 (2009): 189–207; Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone
Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), chap. 1; and Jan Olsson, Los Angeles before Hollywood: Journalism and
American Film Culture from 1905 to 1915 (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden,
2009), chap. 8.
3. The use of natural color processes in Mack Sennett Comedies is discussed in Hilde D’haeyere,
“Technicolor, Multicolor, Sennett-Color in Mack Sennett Comedies, 1926–1931,” in
Color and the Moving Image: History, Aesthetics, Archive, ed. Simon Brown, Sarah Street,
and Liz Watkins (New York: Routledge, 2012), 23–36.
4. Suggested by Parish and Pitts, Hollywood on Hollywood, 307. This short is also discussed by
Rob King in The Fun Factory, chap. 1; and Charlie Keil, “1913: Movies and the Beginning
of a New Era,” in American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations, ed. Charlie Keil
and Ben Singer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 105–7.
5. A similar sign positioned in a similar neighborhood is later used to the same effect in A Film
Johnnie (1914).
6. King, The Fun Factory, 36–37.
7. On the documentary aspects of this short, see Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1975), 22–23.
8. This shot analysis is based on the seven-minute version restored for the BFI’s 2010 Chaplin
at Keystone DVD.
9. King, The Fun Factory, 35.
10. “The World’s Leading Motion Picture Producers Standardize with Bell & Howell Cameras,”
American Cinematographer, April 1927, 14.
11. A notable exception is The Extra Girl (1923), in which Bell & Howell 2709 cameras are shown
shooting scenes. Not coincidentally, this is a comedy-drama feature film and a vehicle
for Mabel Normand, which sets it apart from the regular fare of slapstick shorts.
12. The inventory of photographic material in 1924 indicates that old equipment was donated
to the prop room, among which were some camera tripods. We can assume the same
for other motion-picture equipment (“Inventory of Still Room Camera Equipment,” 2
February 1924, folder 1257, George F. Cannons, Mack Sennett papers, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).
13. Even without focusing explicitly on motion-picture equipment, film cameras frequently
appear in set photos, behind-the-scenes pictures, portraits, and cartoons that illustrate
the articles in fan magazines like Photoplay or Picture-Play.
14. The latter film shows the construction of Chaplin’s new studio on La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, and how movies were made there. It was meant to be released by First National,
who refused to count the short among Chaplin’s contracted number of comedies,
after which it was shelved.
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15. Joyce and Putzi, “ ‘The Greatest Combination in Motion Pictures.’ ”
16. This scene is described in Gene Fowler, Father Goose (New York: Covici Friede, 1934), 151;
and in Mack Sennett with Cameron Shipp, King of Comedy (New York: Doubleday,
1954), 85–87. It takes twenty pages in Kalton Lahue’s history of Mack Sennett’s career
to more exactly unravel the stories and date the founding of the company, the trip to
Los Angeles, and the shooting of the first film. See Kalton C. Lahue, Mack Sennett: The
Man, the Myth, and the Comedies (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1971), 21–42. Brent
Walker has further demonstrated that no short in the Keystone filmography fits this
description exactly. The story could be referring to a parade of Shriners used in The
Would-be Shriner (1912), filmed in May and produced when Sennett was still working
for Biograph, or to a parade of Civil War veterans used for the Keystone-Mutual short
Stolen Glory (1912), filmed in September when the company already had been settled
in Los Angeles for a few months. See Brent Walker, Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2010), 23–24.
17. “The Rise of the Keystone,” Mack Sennett Weekly, January 1, 1917, 2. The installments are titled
“An Interesting History,” “Making the First Picture,” “Scoring the First Hit,” “Dogged by
Spies,” and “Established Success” and were published in the first five numbers of the
Mack Sennett Weekly between January 1 and 29, 1917.
18. Sennett, King of Comedy, 86–87.
19. King, The Fun Factory, 182–83.
20. “Facts about the Mack Sennett Studios,” n.d., and “Mack Sennett Studio Fact Sheet,” 20
January 1925, folder 1166, Mack Sennett papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
21. Walker, Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory, 109.
22. King, The Fun Factory, 186.
23. Ibid., 182–83.
24. Bean, “The Imagination of Early Hollywood,” 338.
25. See Hilde D’haeyere, “Splashes of Fun and Beauty: Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties,” in
Slapstick Comedy, ed. Tom Paulus and Rob King (New York: Routledge, 2010), 207–25.
26. The years 1920–21 marked the time when a number of comedians and slapstick producers
started to move into feature-length films. In 1920, four master comedians released
a first feature-length production: Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle played in The Round Up
(George Melford, 1920); Buster Keaton in The Saphead (Herbert Blaché, 1920); Charles
Chaplin produced, directed, and performed in The Kid (1921); and Harold Lloyd made
A Sailor-Made Man (Fred Newmeyer, 1921) for the Hal Roach Studios.
27. Adela Rogers St. Johns, “How They Grow Up!” Photoplay, October 1923, 38–39, 111; and
earlier in “Goodbye, Bathing Girl!” Photoplay, September 1921, 33, 107.
28. This composition of girls posted around a comedian to increase press attention was the
first motivation for the Bathing Girls displays, according to Sennett’s autobiography
(Sennett, King of Comedy, 167).
29. Sennett makes other cameo appearances in movies that portray moviemaking: namely, in
Mabel’s Dramatic Career as a country rube, in A Busy Day (1914) as a film director,
in The Hollywood Kid as a producer, and finally in Movie-Town as a retired celebrity.
On Sennett’s use of natural color processes, see D’haeyere, “Technicolor, Multicolor,
Sennett-Color.”
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30. The year 1931, in fact, marks an awkward low in the history of color cinematography. With
the huge success of Technicolor’s two-color sound process in 1929, the subsequent
flood of orders overloaded the capacity of Technicolor’s labs, which not only resulted
in a sharp decline in quality but also a frantic search for cheaper processes that allowed
more production freedom. Sennett-Color was one of many generic two-color processes
that developed in the early 1930s.
31. The people on the dance floor are identified in Walker, Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory, 195.
32. “Suggestions for Olsen Club Shots,” n.d., folder 455, Mack Sennett papers, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
33. Ken Wlaschin signals the first use of the word Hollywood in a film-related song from 1922.
See Ken Wlaschin, The Silent Cinema in Song, 1896–1928 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2009), 45.
34. “Note to Exhibitors,” n.d., folder 328, Mack Sennett papers, Margaret Herrick Library,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
35. For instance, in Daniel Blum’s A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen (Feltham, UK: Hamlyn
Publishing Group, 1981), a film still of the Hollywood Cavalcade scene is dated back to
1916 (109), while my own collection holds a print of the same photograph identified
as “Mack Sennet’s [sic] Keystone Cops 1926.”
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“ ‘Faking’ a Snow Scene in Tropical California, Mack Sennett Studios,
Edendale,” California Postcard Company, 1922
In 1922, the California Postcard Company issued a set of twenty picture postcards relating to Los Angeles motion-picture studios. The cards were 3.5 by 5.5
inches, featured black-and-white photographs printed on thick card stock and
enhanced by color, and were collected in a souvenir booklet titled Making the
“Movies”: A Peep into Filmland. The postcards picture the film studios of Charles
Ray, Goldwyn, Vitagraph, United, Charlie Chaplin, Universal, Metro, Garson,
Mack Sennett, Christie, Pickford-Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, William Fox, Hal
Roach, Fine Arts, Ince, and Paramount.
The distribution of movie-related postcards in the early 1920s indicates
the motion-picture industry’s growing importance in the booster campaigns
that advertised Los Angeles and Southern California as a paradise-like environment for living, working, and stargazing. Nonetheless, this particular set
of cards does not depict lush landscapes, scenic landmarks, or views of stars’
homes and studio buildings, but instead features inside information on the
labor involved in film production. Carpenters are shown constructing huge
sets at Metro Studios, Charles Ray and his staff are discussing a script, Rupert
Hughes is giving directions to his actors, and Constance Talmadge prepares for
shooting with the camera, lights, and crew in the foreground of the composition.
The audience is given a look at the technologies, skills, organization, and talent
needed to create screen realities.
The occasional use of the word Hollywood on the cards defines the locations of the studios regardless of their actual addresses. In 1922 the word was
just beginning to act as a stand-in name for the film industry itself—an evolution
to which postcards such as these inevitably contributed. The 1922 publication
date of the card set also corresponds nicely to the efforts of the motion-picture
industry to clean up its act. The cards’ wide distribution helped to construct the
image of “Filmland” as a community of professionals hard at work to visualize
the dreams and desires of moviegoing audiences—supplanting the image of a
decadent den of vice, as was etched in the public mind in the wake of raucous
sex, drug, and murder cases at the turn of the 1920s. In the clean-up campaign,
the motion-picture industry carefully advertised its seriousness. Accordingly,
most of the picture postcards draw back the curtains to uncover the hard labor
and professional equipment involved in the production of motion pictures.
However, from the series of twenty, four of the postcards strike a different
chord. Notably, these cards relate to the comedy studios. The postcards bear
images of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Ben Turpin and
do not grant a peep behind the scenes. On the contrary, they are production
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stills of comedy shorts; that is, promotional photographs taken at the time of
the filming from a viewpoint similar to that seen on the screen. While Chaplin’s,
Keaton’s, and Lloyd’s postcards present straightforward stills of their then-latest
motion pictures, Mack Sennett’s entry shows a more calculated coup. Sennett’s
postcard features a production still of Home-made Movies (1922), a comedy that
takes moviemaking as its subject. The illustration shows a mock film crew at
work, including an outmoded camera operated by a bogus camera cranker who
wears his cap backward as he films a high-hatted villain and a Sennett Bathing
Girl. The caption printed on the verso side lists the ingredients needed to fake a
snow scene in tropical California: salt flakes and icicles of cotton batting. Some
trick machinery, such as a propeller to make storm effects and a camera dolly,
is also visible in the image and named in the caption. Clearly, a photograph of a
working set did not provide interesting publicity for the Mack Sennett Comedies
studio. Laying bare the authentic devices of film production may very well have
worked as a marketing stunt and trust builder, but it was simply not in line with
this studio’s desired image. Instead, the studio chose to present the trials and
tribulations behind the scenes as a slapstick comedy situation: actors appear as
film crew, props appear as equipment, and stumbling comedians enact aspiring
(and failing) thespians. Under the guise of exposing an actual film set, the image
advertises key studio motifs such as Bathing Girls and trick effects. Moreover,
this production still ridicules the spectacle of putative authenticity proffered
by the more serious-minded motion-picture studios. Instead of highlighting
veracity, this card spotlights the fakery of making movies; instead of stressing
the professional labor of making movies, it presents a playful game of make-believe. In doing so, the souvenir postcard for Mack Sennett Comedies reveals
the importance of movies on moviemaking as models that shaped the studio’s
corporate identity, affirming the studio as a place where labor is treated as play
and equipment as toys. Sennett’s slapstick comedies on filmmaking paint a
picture of the film industry as unconsolidated business and, in so doing, polish
the image of Hollywood’s early years as playground, funfair, and vacation—as it
was retold in numerous other motion pictures in which the film industry looked
back at its past, such as Show People (1928), Keystone Hotel (1935), Hollywood
Cavalcade (1939), and Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955).
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