Buster Keaton Was At The Height Of His Powers In 1928, Then He Made An Awful Mistake

During the ’20s Keaton had become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He hit the heights with remarkable speed, too, rising to the level of worldwide fame only a few years after his first full-length movie was released. His combination of hilarious physical comedy and death-defying stunts made him a beloved marquee name.

Keaton’s defining period between 1920 and 1929 is now seen as one of the most golden that any Hollywood star has ever experienced. In 2002 famed movie critic Roger Ebert heaped praise upon Keaton’s greatest decade. He wrote that, during this run “he worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest-actor-director in the history of the movies.”

The innovative star reaped the benefits of his success at the time. In 1924 Keaton had a house built in Beverly Hills for himself and his wife, at the cost of $33,000. After she decided it was too small, he simply built a bigger one. This $300,000 mansion had 20 rooms, including billiards and screening rooms, as well as an outdoor swimming pool. He named it the “Italian Villa.”

Yet as it turned out the 1920s would prove to be the height of Keaton’s fame. In the following decade several factors conspired which saw him experience an alarming decline in both his personal and professional lives. In fact, by the time an emotional Keaton was honored by retrospectives at several 1960s film festivals, he admitted to the (mistaken) belief that his work had been relegated to the forgotten corners of Hollywood history.

Emerging from the vaudeville scene of the early 20th century, Keaton had begun performing on stage with his parents Myra and Joe aged only three. He would later describe their show as “the roughest knockabout act that was ever in the history of the theater.” This wasn’t meant metaphorically: they would hurl him around the stage and even into the orchestra pit. These days, there is no way such treatment of a child would be allowed.

Back then, though, it simply gave the young Keaton experience “taking a fall.” This talent would be a huge boon to his movie career. The vaudeville stage was also where he developed the famed deadpan expression that would lead to his nickname “The Great Stone Face.” His father discovered that audiences always found it funnier if his son wore a solemn expression after a stunt, rather than a smile. Go figure.

This stony visage worked perfectly for Keaton when he became a pioneer of silent cinema in the 1920s. It all began a few years earlier, though, when he met comedian and performer Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in 1917. The two immediately teamed up on some two-reel comedy films which made full use of Keaton’s aptitude for slapstick humor.

Between 1917 and 1920 Keaton starred alongside Arbuckle in 14 short films. He was then given his first starring role in a feature-length production in 1920. Following this, Arbuckle’s producer Joseph Schenck rewarded Keaton with his own production company, unimaginatively dubbed Buster Keaton Productions. It was under this umbrella that Keaton would develop most of his classic movies of the ’20s.

Sherlock Jr., released in 1924, would be Keaton’s first bona fide masterwork. It gave audiences the first taste of the incredible stunts he was able to pull off, which somehow remained funny despite their obvious danger. Unlike in modern movies, there were no stunt doubles involved in any of his feats of hilarious derring-do. He truly put himself at risk for his art.

For instance, during a scene in which he was hit by a barrage of water, Keaton hurt his neck. Historian David MacLeod explained to The Sunday Post newspaper in 2020, “He grabbed the waterspout, it slowly came down, and the force of the water knocked him down onto the railway line.” Keaton walked away from the stunt but suffered awful headaches for the following three weeks.

Three decades later, while his doctor looked at some X-rays, Keaton got a nasty shock. MacLeod claimed the doctor asked, “Oh Buster, when did you break your neck?” to which Keaton responded, “I’ve never broken my neck.” The doctor then revealed the X-rays showed a bone in his neck hadn’t fused correctly after a break. Suddenly all those headaches 30 years ago started making a lot more sense.

Arguably Keaton’s most famous, and most dangerous, stunt came in 1928’s classic Steamboat Bill, Jr.. In the sequence, following some impressive scenes in which the deadpan genius is blown around by cyclone winds, he manages to come to a standstill in the middle of the street. As he looks unwittingly into the camera lens, the 4,000-pound front wall of the house behind falls forward towards him.

Amazingly, he avoids being crushed to death thanks to the open second-story window of the house. As the heavy masonry smashes to the ground around him, his deadpan expression never changes. It was a bravura stunt, and one that required Keaton to trust implicitly in precise measurements. He simply put a nail in the ground to mark his position, and hoped his math was correct.

With only 2 inches of space on either side of Keaton’s body, it was important that he didn’t move a muscle. He later said that crew members had been seen praying before the shot, and the camera operator had turned around whenever “Action” was called. Keaton later admitted, “I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing.”

All in all, Keaton made 12 full-length movies and 19 shorts between 1920 and 1928. They established him as a major star, although he didn’t quite reach the same levels of popularity as other silent-film icons such as Charlie Chaplin. Still, he was doing very well for himself and had complete autonomy over his work.

When it came to that work, Keaton was in full control of his unique comedy style. He made extremely clever use of both his talents and the technology of the day. For example, if he had wanted to, he could have included lots of title cards in his films. These were mostly used to help advance plot, as the filmmakers didn’t have the luxury of audible dialogue in the silent era.

But Keaton kept usage of these cards to a bare minimum. He once said, “The average picture used 240 titles. And the most I ever used was 56.” Instead, he passionately believed in letting the gags at which he excelled tell the story as much as possible. He wanted to convey everything the audience needed to know through his pantomime physical movements.

Throughout the 1920s, Keaton’s movies were financed and released outside the Hollywood studio system. They were funded by Schenck, an executive who had entered the movie business when he opened a series of theaters with his brother Nicholas and business impresario Marcus Loew. After the films were complete, Schenck made deals with studios to distribute them.

In 1926, though, Schenck joined the United Artists studio full-time, as its president. During this period, three independently made Keaton pictures were distributed by U.A. But even though these films were all released by the same studio, Keaton still had full artistic control over them. No one told him how to make his films; they just sold them.

Unfortunately, while College, Steamboat Bill Jr. and The General were all minor successes for United Artists, they were by no means runaway hits. Due to Keaton’s desire for the most impressive stunts, and the elaborate sets needed to fulfil his vision, his films were expensive to produce. With this in mind, Schenck decided Keaton needed a more stable foundation to his career.

Schenck proposed an idea to Keaton that would mean the end of his independent status. But, as a trade-off, he would have the resources of a major studio at his disposal. Schenck’s brother Nicholas was running Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios at the time, and it was a simple matter of suggesting they sign Keaton to a contract guaranteeing a weekly wage and a percentage of his film’s takings at the box office.

Schenck was keen for Keaton to take this deal, but the star would take some convincing. By this point, Schenck was Keaton’s brother-in-law; despite this development, he’d been adamant that it would change nothing regarding how they worked. The star was worried that he would become lost in the shuffle at a big studio like MGM, though, so he consulted some of his silent film friends.

Chaplin reportedly told Keaton, “They’ll ruin you helping you,” and Harold Lloyd also advised him against making the move. They both valued their independence to the utmost, and so did Keaton. Schenck kept pushing for him to accept the deal, though, against the counsel of his peers. And the money was seemingly too good to turn down.

Keaton believed, in his heart of hearts, that Schenck was looking out for his best interests. He therefore took the deal in 1928, but in later years would call it the “worst mistake of my career.” In his autobiography, he reasoned that his business partner and family member had “never steered me wrong in his life until then. I do not think he meant to that time, either. In the end, I gave in.”

Prior to working for MGM, Keaton had made movies his way. He never worked with a full script, instead preferring to roughly envision the beginning and the end of the picture, before finding the middle over the course of the shoot. He had a crew with whom he always worked, and they were able to roll with his approach, which involved a lot of on-the-day improvising.

MGM head of production Irving Thalberg was both a friend and a fan of Keaton, but even he struggled to understand The Great Stone Face’s methods. Keaton wrote that Thalberg’s mind “was too orderly for our harum-scarum, catch-as-catch-can, gag-grabbing method. Our way of operating would have seemed hopelessly mad to him. But, believe me, it was the only way.”

Soon enough, during production of his first MGM movie The Cameraman, Keaton found himself surrounded on all sides by staff writers. He claimed that 22 different writers all threw their ideas into the pot, although a biography of Louis B. Mayer put the actual number at five. Either way, it was a far cry from Keaton’s usual small group of collaborators.

Having so many cooks in the kitchen actually led Keaton to have a crisis of confidence. He wrote, “With so much talk going on, so many conferences, so many brains at work, I began to lose faith for the first time in my own ideas.” But despite MGM’s fundamentally different approach making its star uncomfortable, The Cameraman was a modest box-office success.

Keaton assumed, perhaps naively, that the film’s success would mean he’d be granted more creative freedom on the next picture. But on Spite Marriage the exact opposite happened, with the studio insisting on even more control. Keaton lamented, “What I couldn’t understand was why, after I proved my point, the big wheels at MGM would not allow me to have my own unit.”

In truth, MGM realized they could get the same box-office returns from scaled-down Keaton films as they could from the more ambitious projects he was making before. Gone were the truly mind-boggling stunts he performed in the likes of The General, replaced by more down-to-earth sight gags. After all, if the audience still loved Keaton in their films, why bother with dangerous stunts that only inflated the budget?

An example of how fundamentally MGM misunderstood Keaton and his talents can be found in the rumored original ending of The Cameraman. Executives wanted his character to smile, which went against the deadpan, stone-faced expression for which he was famed. His underreaction to the crazy things happening around him was an essential part of the gag. Thankfully, test audiences rejected this smiley ending, and it was scrapped.

In the early ’30s, MGM tried to force Keaton to make what he considered to be sub-par films. He also endured rough waters in his personal life in this period, including a divorce from wife Natalie Talmadge and the untimely death of his close friend Arbuckle. He was sued by the Inland Revenue Service for $28,000 in unpaid taxes, and in 1933 the star was fired by MGM for refusing to work on the projects it suggested.

On top of all this, Keaton was also battling the same demon that had afflicted his father – alcohol. He would reportedly black out after only a few drinks, yet this predisposition did not deter him. It meant he could barely remember what he did while drinking, leading to some unfortunate scenarios. For example, he was reportedly once found doing comedy pratfalls and acrobatics around a campfire for a group of the homeless.

In 1933 he was sent to an institution in an attempt to rid him of his drinking habit. As he put it, his nurse Mae Scriven was tasked with giving him the “correct amount” of hard liquor to prevent him losing his mind, along with injections of sedatives to help him sleep. Astonishingly, he and Scriven would end up eloping to Mexico, where they got hitched. He later admitted he couldn’t even remember the drunken ceremony.

There wasn’t any relief if Keaton got sober, though, because then he found himself plagued by terrible hallucinations. During a stint at another psychiatric facility during this dark period, he was put in a straitjacket in order to stifle his ability to drink. It’s said, though, that he had been taught how to escape such a predicament when he was a boy – by escape artist Harry Houdini himself. Crazy.

Keaton was eventually able to overcome his addiction with a combination of aversion therapy and his own resolve. In his autobiography, he recounted the day he quit drinking, which came straight after leaving a mental health facility. He wrote, “I walked to the bar and ordered two Manhattans. I drank them one after the other. I did not touch a drop of whiskey or any other alcoholic drink for five years.”

Even though his career didn’t end during this tumultuous period, it was undoubtedly derailing for Keaton. He would make comedy short features for Columbia Pictures, and eventually returned to MGM as a gag writer, working on material for the likes of the Marx Brothers. He also enjoyed an extensive career on television in the ’50s and ’60s.

But he never quite received the financial rewards enjoyed by his contemporaries Harold Lloyd and Chaplin, who had warned him against signing for MGM. They became millionaires, while he simply kept working in whatever diminished capacity he could, rather than dwelling on past mistakes. He died in 1966 when he was 70 years old, after a busy year of TV engagements.

It’s tempting to wonder what would have become of Keaton’s career if he’d never signed with MGM in 1928. Would he have been able to keep doing things his way? Would he have been swallowed up or destroyed by the studio system at some point anyway? Either way, as he once put it, “I don’t know if it was human nature, greed, or power, but the big companies were out to kill the independents.”