Contradictory Claims |
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Advertisers, salesmen, bosses, preachers, proselytizers, attorneys will frequently say to you,
“Here’s the evidence. You decide.”
When they do that, you know that you are being tricked.
The evidence they present to you is incomplete, slanted, or faked, or perhaps it is all of that.
You cannot make an honest or informed decision about what is true and what is not
when you are presented only with contaminated evidence that has been
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So, what I say to you instead is,
“Here is the evidence.
Do not decide.
The evidence is fragmentary, unreliable, and contaminated.
So do not decide — unless, perchance, you have further evidence that would shed light on the matter.”
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Years. I don’t know how many years, but it was years. Years.
I thought I had finally pieced the story together properly.
I had not. I cannot. With the sources at my disposal, piecing this narrative together is impossible.
So, rather than piece it together for you, I shall present you with the fragments at hand.
If you can fill in the gaps and make sense of any of this,
please write to me and explain.
Please. Please. Please. I beg of you. Please.
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Here is a fragment. It comes from a little pamphlet put together by Don McGregor,
entitled Buster: The Early Years,
published by Eclipse Enterprises, 81 Delaware Street, Staten Island, NY, 10304, in 1982.
The cover announces it as “The Authorized BUSTER KEATON FILM FESTIVAL ALBUM
with scene by scene frame
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Time to pause for a reality check.
We need to keep in mind that Ray Rohauer was a pathological liar.
He often told the truth, unvarnished, unfiltered, raw. Often. Not always.
Other times he told outright fibs.
Other times he told the truth, but he massaged it to present himself in a better light.
Was he telling the truth about running The General with some regularity?
I do not know.
I cannot even guess.
The General was not commercially available in 1950.
The only legally circulating copy in the US at the time was a 16mm print from MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art in New York City),
but it was available only to educational institutions and museums and nonprofits.
Actually, MoMA might have had several 16mm prints of The General. I do not know.
How did Rohauer manage to book it?
Well, for one thing, he leased the Coronet under the rubric of a nonprofit called the Society of Cinema Arts.
The Coronet was not operated as a commercial concern and it did not announce its screenings in the newspapers.
It operated as a private club and was open only to paid members.
That was how Ray managed to book MoMA’s 16mm print;
yet there is still an ambiguity.
Various other distributors (I do not know who) had already pirated MoMA’s print and were booking it.
Did Ray book the MoMA print or some other distributor’s pirated print?
We’ll probably never know.
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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Let’s quote at length from the interview.
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Rohauer: ...By 1954, when I met Buster, I had a pretty
big reputation for running those kinds of
films. Keaton came into the Coronet with
his wife and asked to see me. I was in
the projection booth when he came in and
they called me from the booth and said
Buster Keaton was there to see me. I said
“C’mon, you’re pulling my leg.” They said,
“Well, he says he’s Buster Keaton.” I went
down and sure enough, Keaton was standing
there with his wife. He said, “I understand
you save a lot of old junk. I’ve got a lot of
stuff in my garage, if you want to take a look
at it.” I said, “I’d be glad to,” and we met the
next day at his house. He was living on Victoria
Avenue in Los Ángeles at the time with
his mother, in the same house which he
bought for her when he was a top star. He
gave it to her as a gift and she had lived there
ever since. In 1954 Buster moved in with her
in that same house. Buster’s entire family was
living there, too; he always supported all of his
relatives.
So we struck up a deal. I said, “Look, if I
save these films, if I transfer them to safety
stock and this and that, do we have a deal?”
He said, “Sure, but I don’t own them.” So I
had to start working on the legal rights. This
continued for a number of years following
that — establishing the legal rights to these
films. And then pursuing, getting copies of all
the films which he didn’t have.
McGregor: Did he have a lot of the films the first day you went there?
Rohauer: A number of them, not a lot.
Three Ages,
College,
Sherlock Jr.,
Navigator.
McGregor: When you first walked in there,
you didn’t have any idea of what you were
seeing. They were just reels of old films. Nobody had ever seen...
Rohauer: No, nobody had seen these films.
They were in nitrate form, you couldn’t show
them anyway.
McGregor: The first film you saved was The Three Ages.
It was in such a combustable
state at the time you discovered it...
Rohauer: In going through all the films, I
noticed that The Three Ages was in the worst
shape. Every reel had hypo — that is where
the emulsion starts to erode due to a chemical
reaction on the film. It’s highly dangerous
when it gets to that stage. The film either
turns into jelly or it could be explosive if not
properly stored because nitrate has a
McGregor: So even though Buster had
these films, he didn’t show them.
Rohauer: No, he just had them. They were
remnants of the past.
McGregor: He never showed them to Mrs.
Keaton?
Rohauer: No. But the bulk of the (restoration
of his) films came from the worldwide
pursuit that followed that.
McGregor: Back to The Three Ages...
Rohauer: Well, I said to Keaton, “We’ve got
to do this one immediately. This won’t last.”
he said, “Okay, if you want to waste your
money on it,” because he never believed for
one minute that these would be worth anything.
Or that there was an audience for it.
So we put the cans of film in Keaton’s trunk
and he drove the car and we went over together
to the General Film Laboratory in
Hollywood.
[NOTE: General Film Laboratories Corporation,
1546 Argyle Avenue, Hollywood 28, tel.
McGregor: What did Buster say when this
was going on?
Rohauer: Nothing. He never spoke
much... at any time. I’m not talking about
when we were alone, but when there were
strange people around he never got into the
conversation.
So, they went through the film and
cleaned it up and tried to get it through the
printer. They gave me a room and Buster
went home. For several days I worked on the
film, cutting out maybe a couple of frames
here and there.
McGregor: The film was all stuck together?
Rohauer: Yes, it had to be peeled apart.
And it had to be respliced wherever there
were splices so that it wouldn’t come apart in
the printer. Finally they put the film through
the printer.
McGregor: Did you have any idea when
you were going through the film what was
going to be in there?
Rohauer: No. I hadn’t seen the picture yet.
When the entire process was done, the lab
said I had ruined their printer. The emulsion
had come off the film and they were going to
charge me $15,000 extra for the printer.
They dropped that because all they had to
do was change the plates in which the film
was running through in the printer, which
they finally did. But now I couldn’t do any
more lab work there. They didn’t want to
touch the other Keaton prints. So I had to
find other places.
McGregor: Once you had the film restored,
did you immediately run it?
Rohauer: No, because making the print
from the new negative didn’t come until
later. It was a matter of just saving the film, all
the films. You must understand that there
was no commercial attitude there. No compelling
reason to make a print and look at it
right away. The other films had to be saved.
Keaton kept saying, ̴You’re throwing your
money away.” But it didn’t make any difference
what he said. I had to do it. It’s a
compulsion.
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The above seems rather straightforward, yes?
Shall we complicate matters?
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Edward Watz, Raymond Rohauer on saving Buster Keaton’s THREE AGES, posted on Jun 6, 2023 When YouTube disappears this video, download it. |
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As you noticed, Ray gave a few more details.
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...I obtained, uh, uh, Keaton’s cutting copies,
which, you see, Buster, uh, uh, edited his own films,
and, uh, and he was very fussy at how how how it was put together. Uh.
Well, luckily, I, I was able to get, uh, from
Keaton’s garage a, uh, the only print
we’ve ever found
of The Three Ages.
And The Three Ages, of course, was made in
1923, and it was Keaton’s first starring
feature,
and, for his own company.
And, uh, the
material was decomposing and was on the
dangerous nitrate stock, you know, which is a
gunpowder base,
and, uh, the emulsion was running on the
film, which was, uh, was stuck together and so
forth.
Um, you know, I, I thought at first it was
going to be hopeless to save it, you know.
And, uh, so after I, uh, made my, uh, arrangement with
Buster to, uh, to take this film over and
to transfer it to safety stock, well the
first picture that was saved was The
Three Ages.
And I made arrangements with the laboratory
to, uh, to restore this.
And, uh, of course the minute they looked at
it they, they yelled, you know. The, uh, “Well, we
can’t print this! The, the, the emulstion is
running! It’s sticky! It’s going to blow up!
It’s, you know, the whole place is going
to go up!” You know this is what
everybody’s idea about nitrate film is,
which is a little bit exaggerated.
Uh, so I went into the, uh, uh,
office of the vice president General
Film Laboratory, who I met on several
occasions, and I said, “But we have to save
this film! We have to this film! And, you, we
have to find a way!” And, uh, well he says, “But
we can’t endanger our laboratory for one picture.”
And, uh, so after a long discussion, um, he said,
“Well look,” he said, “Why don’t you cut out
the bad parts?
And we’ll print the rest.”
I said, uh, “Okay, I, I’ll do that.” He said, “We” —.
“Could you, could you give me your cutting
room here?”
He said, “Yes,” and so I, I did a very deceptive thing.
And, uh,
I thought that I was justified in doing
this.
So when they left me alone in the
room, you see,
uh, instead of cutting out the bad parts,
y’see, I, uh, I, uh, uh, took the solution, uh, this
chemical, and, uh, wiped off all the
stickiness on the film. And maybe I would
cut a little frame or so, you know, just where a
sprocket hole, uh, or three or four
sprocket holes was missing, and cut it so
that you wouldn’t notice much of a jump.
Anyway, I actually took out the film only
maybe a total of maybe two feet, see?
And. But I, I, dress it up in such a way with
new leaders and everything that they
had thought, you know, that it was all
cut, but.
So when I took it back to the lab
man, and he said, “Now, all the bad parts
are cut out?” I said, “Yes.”
So he’d run it right through the printer. So.
Hmm. This is what they did. Well, what happened when
they ran it through, of course, the
emulsion was coming off as, on the
printer, on the, uh, uh, on the gate, and, uh,
after they were through they claimed
that I ruined a fifteen-thousand-dollar printer.
Well, I saved the film but they wouldn’t
do any more work for me.
But anyway. So, on the, uh, on the other
films, it wasn’t quite the same story.
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So, you have now encountered two different tellings of the same tale, told by the same person,
and it seems perfectly reasonable and believable. Right?
Let’s pay attention to another telling of this tale.
(What the chemical solution was, I do not know, unless perchance it was
Vitafilm?
But I do not know when Vitafilm was first put on the market.
Vitafilm is great stuff, but oh my heavens do you have to be careful!
Ventilate like mad, and do not let even one drop get on your skin.
One drop, and twenty years later, TWENTY YEARS LATER,
you will have a severe case of psoriasis that will baffle you and your doctors.
If it wasn’t Vitafilm, then maybe it was
Filmrenew?
But I don’t know when that was first put on the market, either.
Or perhaps trichloroethane 1,1,1?
Or maybe perchloroethylene?
I wish I knew.)
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With this telling of the tale, there is a major problem,
but only those who have steeped themselves in Buster’s life would be able to detect it.
Yes, Buster could be depressed, no two ways about it.
He was depressed from about the time he married Natalie until about the time he started dating Eleanor.
For a few years, he
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There is another problem with the above story, and you caught it, didn’t you?
To Don McGregor in 1981, Rohauer claimed that there was not much film in Buster’s garage,
only four features, all rotted.
Yet to Sidney Fields in 1970, he claimed that there was indeed a lot, ten features and four shorts!
So, which story is true?
Could it be simply that Fields garbled some of what Ray told him?
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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One more telling of the tale:
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There we go again. Ten features and four shorts.
It’s beginning to look like Sidney Fields of the Daily News had not garbled his words after all.
Likewise, neither did Phil Thomas of the Associated Press.
Ray really did tell them that he had found ten features and four shorts in Buster’s garage.
It is not possible to square this with his 1981 claim to Don McGregor that there were only four features in the garage.
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The best book about Buster, the best book of all, is an unofficial, unlicensed volume
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Few probs with Rohauer’s
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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Ray repeatedly insisted that this happened in 1954.
Eleanor’s story, as she told it to Oliver,
is incompatible with Ray’s usual narrative of Buster wandering in simply to offer his garage full of junk to Ray.
So what do we do?
Well, we can turn to Jim Curtis’s new book, Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life (2022), pages 606–609:
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On an evening in 1958,
Buster took Eleanor to a screening of The General, a
picture she had heard much about but had never seen. The showing was at
a small theater in Beverly Hills known as the Coronet, the
“He came down,” recalled Eleanor, “and said, ‘Hi, I want to talk to you
after,’ and he went back up.–...
...With his move to the Coronet, Rohauer aggressively programmed
What Rohauer wanted to know that night was if Keaton had prints of
any of his pictures, but Buster had to tell him no. James Mason had transferred
all his personal prints to the Academy. Did Keaton own the rights?
Rohauer pressed. No, he told him, Joe Schenck owned them. It was, however,
a momentous meeting for both men. In Keaton, Rohauer would find
the vessel for his ambitions to become an owner and distributor of important
films. and in Rohauer, Keaton would find an obsessive champion for
his legacy as one of the world’s great filmmakers. Eleanor was dubious. To
her, Rohauer was the strangest man she had ever met.
What Keaton gave Rohauer that night was a target. The mother lode of
Keaton properties was close at hand — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences was within walking distance of the Coronet. All Rohauer, an
inveterate film collector, needed was access to those prints, presumably all
pristine 35mm originals. An association with Keaton himself would confer
legitimacy, but it wouldn’t go far enough toward Rohauer’s eventual goal,
which was a degree of ownership.
“The first thing I did was send Buster over to see Joe Schenck, to get
Schenck to help Buster get the rights to Buster Keaton Productions,”
Rohauer told Edward Watz, a business associate, in 1977. “Buster knew
that Schenck had a stroke, but I told him he recovered. Schenck lived at the
Beverly Hilton in the penthouse, so we went there and I waited in the lobby.
Buster came down and said, ‘I don’t know if he recognized me.’ So I had to
find another way to get somebody on our side.”
Said Eleanor, “Raymond knew Joe Schenck was in bad shape, but he
lied to Buster. He said, ‘He’s fine! He wants to help.’ When Buster came
home he was still upset. He felt like he was tricked into botherins his sick
old friend. We didn’t talk to Raymond for a while after that happened. He
knew to leave us alone.”
If the man behind Buster Keaton Productions was an invalid, Rohauer
assumed there would be no opposition to a newly created entity also called
Buster Keaton Productions. On
September 24, 1958,
papers were filed establishing
it as a California Domestic Corporation. This time, Keaton would
be the president, Rohauer vice president, and Eleanor secretary. Now that
he was formally in business with the Keatons, Rohauer could approach the
Academy on something other than bended knee. What he didn’t know was
that the surviving trustee in the liquidation of the original company, Leopold
Friedman, was breathing new life into the old, original entity....
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Jim Curtis continues his story in his next chapter, pages 611–612.
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[Buster’s agent Ben] Pearson said... “And
he made that deal with Raymond Rohauer without consulting me. I didn’t
get any money out of that, and that’s all right, but Rohauer is one awful
guy.”
In September 1959, Rohauer persuaded Keaton to sign over any rights he
might still retain to his old pictures in exchange for a half share of the profits.
In turn, Rohauer assigned those rights to Buster Keaton Productions,
Inc. “What I don’t understand,” Keaton said to James Karen, “is what the
hell’s all this about these films? Who the hell wants to see a picture that’s
forty years old?”
It took a year, but now Rohauer was ready to make his move with the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On
October 26, 1959,
he met
with assistant executive director Sam E. Brown as a representative of Keaton
Productions. The following day, Benjamin D. Brown, a Los Ángeles-based
attorney representing the newly established corporation, wrote to the Academy
to confirm that Sam Brown had agreed to loan their print of Cops for
screening purposes. The Academy cautioned that no such oral agreement
had been reached, so the next day, October 28, a formal request for the loan
was made in writing by the attorney. On October 30, executive director
Margaret Herrick recommended the loan be made, but with the stipulation
that the print be accompanied by an Academy employee “to get out of a
difficult situation.”
Cops, of course, was copied, and it became the first 35mm Keaton subject
in Rohauer’s inventory.
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Whoops. Whoops. Whoops. Whoops. Whoops.
Let’s stop right there.
The reason I highlighted some of the dates in the above passages was to draw attention to them.
Nowhere did Eleanor state that their visit to the Coronet was in 1958.
It is fascinating to learn that it was on that night in what may or may not have been 1958
that Buster told Ray that James Mason had given his personal prints to the Academy.
We turn to the notes and discover that there is no citation, no source, no reference.
Where did Jim Curtis find any information about this conversation?
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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My guess is that Jim Curtis guessed the same way I guessed,
but what I guessed was just a guess, and my guess was based upon Jim’s guess.
Ray’s lawyer(s) filed the papers for the new Buster Keaton Productions on September 24, 1958.
That is why Jim guessed that Buster and Eleanor met Ray just prior to that.
Reasonable guess.
I read that and I said to myself, “Hey, that’s a reasonable guess! I buy it. Completely.”
What I did not notice was the problem, the problem that becomes just a little bit apparent a few pages later.
If Cops “became the first 35mm Keaton subject in Rohauer’s inventory” at about the end of October 1959,
then how does that explain what Ray was showing to Robert Smith, Sidney Sheldon, and Donald O’Connor
more than three years earlier, in 1956?????
Well, maybe that’s not a problem, maybe not, maybe not, maybe not, maybe not, maybe not.
Could it have been merely that Ray knew where to borrow materials to show Smith/Sheldon/O’Connor? Maybe.
Hold that thought.
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While you are holding that thought, let’s return to Jim’s narrative, pages 611–612:
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Two months later, on December 31, attorney
Brown wrote again to indicate that Keaton wanted to borrow The General
and Our Hospitality, also for screening, and that the prints would be picked
up on January 6, 1960. New 35mm negatives of Cops, The General, and
Our Hospitality would give the corporation three of Keaton’s most important
titles. This time, however, the process didn’t go quite so smoothly. On
January 29, Rohauer advised the Academy that Our Hospitality had “deteriorated
considerably” and that it was impossible to run all the reels. Both
it and The General would be returned the following week, at which time
Keaton Productions wished to borrow The Saphead, The Navigator, and
Sherlock Jr.
In order to cover the fact that all the loaned prints were being duplicated,
Rohauer conceived the fiction that Keaton had prints of many of his old
pictures stored in the garage of his old house on Victoria. It was, he maintained,
these prints that were being copied, not the prints that had come
to the Academy from James Mason. He also made the claim that he met
Keaton in 1954, and that he first examined the films, at Keaton’s invitation,
before the Mason prints ever came to light. Shrewdly, Rohauer never made
an outright claim to the copyrights of the films he was borrowing, trusting
that the name of the new corporation and Keaton himself would give him
all the credibility he needed. When the films were returned to the Academy
in late February, Rohauer told them that The Navigator and Sherlock Jr. were
each missing a reel, which was consistent with the records the Academy kept
as to which reels had been lost to decomposition. Not knowing this though,
Rohauer hopefully added that he was sure the missing reel to The Navigator
had simply been misplaced in the Academy’s vault.
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When we turn to Jim Curtis’s book and flip to page 745, we find this endnote
pertaining to page 612:
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In a 1976 interview with Keaton biographer Tom Dardis,
Harold Goodwin was asked about the films Keaton supposedly kept in his garage.
“What?” Goodwin responded. “Oh no, he didn’t have any of those.” Dardis: “Really?
No nitrate copies of The General, Cameraman, Navigator, The Three Ages, all the shorts?”
Goodwin: “No, none of that. He had a 16mm projector, so he might’ve rented some of
the old films from a camera store, but he didn’t own any.”
Edward Watz once asked Eleanor Keaton if Rohauer’s account of how he and Buster
took Keaton’s personal print of Three Ages to a lab to be copied was true. “She sort of
twinkled her eyes, smiled, and said, ‘Well, it makes a good story, doesn’t it?’”
Rohauer promulgated many falsehoods concerning his relationship with Keaton,
and key among them was his assertion that he and Keaton met in 1954.
“Rohauer slipped once,” said [Ed] Watz, who was employed by Rohauer for four years,
“and told me that he didn’t know Buster when The Buster Keaton Story was being made
‘or I would have worked on Paramount to make safety copies of all his films.’
I didn’t point out the discrepancy to him....”
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So, Hal’s story should put paid to any idea that Buster had copies of his movies.
(Yes, camera stores did offer 16mm prints for rent, usually condensations or excerpts.
Probably the only two Buster films available from camera stores at the time were
The Goat, which was shown at the Eaglet in Sacramento in
February 1954, and Roaring Rails, which was a pirated edition
of the
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Now, you read Ray’s account of Buster wandering in to the Coronet to offer Ray some junk.
You read Eleanor’s account that she and Buster walked in to see The General.
She said nothing about offering Ray some junk.
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Well, if you ask a question 20 different ways you’ll get 20 different answers.
Don McGregor asked Eleanor the same question that Oliver Scott asked her,
but he asked it in a different way and he got a different answer.
Here is what we read in his little pamphlet about Buster: The Early Years
when we turn to pages 24 and 26:
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McGregor: During the 1940s when you
were married, he never showed any of the
films. At that point you had never seen
any of his films?
Eleanor Keaton: Before we were married
he arranged to show Battling Butler so I
could see it. That was the first one I saw
and then gradually over a period of time I
saw others....
McGregor: What made Buster first go
down and meet Ray and tell him about the
films in the garage?
Eleanor Keaton: Ray had the Coronet
Theater in L.A. at the time, and we heard
about it, and that he was going to be showing
The General. So we went running to
see The General. In those days Ray was
up in the projection booth running the
films. Somebody went up and told him we
were there. After the film was over he
came down and met us and we talked to
him a little bit. And we told him about the
films we had.
McGregor: Buster had never shown these
films he had in the garage?
Eleanor Keaton: No.
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So there you go.
Buster had arranged a screening of Battling Butler.
Surely that was a vault print that was projected for them in an MGM screening room in Culver City.
Buster could arrange it since both he and Eleanor were employees at the time.
As for the films in the garage, they just corroded over time.
Buster took no care of them.
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If you are not yet exhausted by this story, then you have far more stamina than I.
It is a challenge to write this story in a way that can be easily understood.
It is downright impossible to write this story in a way that is delightfully engaging.
My apologies.
Sorry.
That is just the nature of the problem when we have a complicated narrative
that is riddled with corrupted sources.
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Let us continue.
Keep all this background in the back of your mind.
Let it hover around in there.
And while that information is quietly buzzing around,
carry on with the rest of this story.
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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Back to The Buster Keaton Story |
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MoMA, an internationally renowned art museum, was interested in Buster’s works,
and the Academy was interested, too.
When Buster saw that, he had a change of heart.
Now, for the first time in his life,
he was open to a request from those two foundations to seek out his old movies.
Helping influence him, perhaps, was his winning of the George Eastman Award in 1955.
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Is that what really happened?
My tentative reconstruction makes sense and it fits the known data,
but most stories that make sense and fit the known data turn out to be wrong.
I need more data, but I have no idea where to get more data, since all the people involved in that story are dead.
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Are you wondering what I’m wondering?
Normal practice has always been to edit films at the studio.
It was never standard practice to take the rushes and/or preliminary assemblies home to edit.
It was certainly not standard practice to perform this task inside a hidden subterranean concrete bunker,
locked closed with a safe door which in turn is hidden behind a false shelving wall in a gardening shed.
So, are you wondering what I’m wondering?
UA hated Buster almost from Day One and immediately sought to strip him of control of his films.
Buster was now protecting himself.
He did not want Joe Schenck or anybody from United Artists entering his editing room
to make alterations to his pictures, to make deletions, additions, revisions, or reinstatements.
He didn’t want to have any business suits breathing down his neck as he was sculpting his movies into shape.
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The print of The General that Buster filed away in his secret editing vault was a preview print,
certainly the print shown at the Alex in Glendale in November 1926.
The print of The Blacksmith was also a preview print, but not the final preview print.
It was an earlier rejected edition of the film.
That is why I would assume that everything in that hidden concrete bunker was a preview print, and not necessarily the final preview print.
(Meade, in one of her rare statements that is likely correct, wrote on p. 408, note to 256, that
“BK films in the cutting room shed were working copies, not release prints ready for distribution to theaters.”)
As far as I can make out, Sherman Kell would put together a preliminary assembly day by day as Buster was shooting.
Upon completion of shooting, Buster would edit the preliminary assembly, as Sherman madly tried to keep pace with him,
pulling the material he requested and winding the discards onto different reels.
The preferred takes would be printed again and assembled cleanly to make a preview print.
After a couple of test screenings, when the preview print proved satisfactory,
Sherman would cut the domestic negative to match,
and he would next cut the export negative to match.
Where were the negatives were cut?
That had to have been done at the studio.
Once Sherman was done cutting the negatives, he returned the preview prints to Buster.
The edited original camera negatives (OCN’s) were kept in the distributors’ vaults —
until the distributors decided they were of no further use or until they disintegrated.
(As others have pointed out, the bunker’s print of The Boat was the only one ever found.
Any time you see The Boat now, it is a copy of a copy of that single print.
The world would have been a much sadder place without The Boat.
One of the best gags in the movie is rotted through,
but enough of the image survives that a good digital technician would be able to reconstruct it perfectly.
I wish someone would do that someday. Soon.
Actually, no need.
A better print was recently discovered!)
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 I just found this GIF online but I accidentally closed the tab before I could jot down where I found it. |
 Interesting address. 959 Seward Street, just south of Romaine Street. Just four blocks east of the Buster Keaton Studio. |
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For what it’s worth (probably nothing), I’ll include an assertion made by Dardis on p. 250.
Here, again, I have to eat humble pie.
I had mocked Dardis for his first statement, and yet his first statement turns out to be true.
Here we go:
“Someone told Buster
in 1937 that a failure in the cooling system of the vaults where
the negatives of all his silent films had been stored had resulted
in their total destruction. Except for the films that he had personally
retained for his own collection, Buster believed for the
next decade that most of his best work had perished. Luckily this
was not true, for these negatives were actually just a block or two
from where he worked — at MGM.”
That first sentence appeared patently ridiculous to me.
Well, then I listened to George C. Pratt’s
lengthy interview with Buster conducted for the George Eastman House in 1958.
“I remember we had trouble one summer.
Uh, the Standard Lab had all our negatives and handled all our film work in the studio,
and, during the heat of one of our severest summers, the cooling system went out and it —.
All of those negatives just fell apart.
The emulsion just ran right off of ’em with that heat, see.
So we lost pert near all o’ our negatives.
So the only thing that would be in existence would be
the, uh, what prints were out and hadn’t been run to death and all chewed up.”
Oh how I wish I knew the exact date of that interview.
I bet it was before September.
Yes, there was a massive heat wave in 1937 that clobbered all of North America
and that resulted in numerous deaths from heatstroke.
Yet I wonder how a vault’s cooling system could fail so spectacularly
and long enough to cause the destruction of its contents without being noticed.
That seems very strange to me,
especially when we look at the illustration of the building above.
The Standard Film Laboratories was not a megaplex covering a few hundred acres,
with an unmonitored warehouse a mile away from the action;
it was a single building on a small lot.
How could nobody have noticed?
If the personnel did notice, why did they not take emergency measures to rescue the collection,
which consisted of countless millions of dollars’ worth of property
belonging to various studios, for which they were being paid
and for which they were solely responsible?
Standard Film Laboratories surely had a backup power supply and a backup cooling system.
Los Ángeles is in the desert and it occasionally gets blisteringly hot and sometimes suffocatingly humid.
A heat wave should not have been a surprise and backup systems should have been in place.
A mechanical/electrical failure of this magnitude should have gotten them sued to a fate worse than oblivion.
Terribly puzzling.
Curtis (p. 551) quotes Walter Kerr’s “Last Call for a Clown” in
Harper’s Bazaar vol. 85 no. 2886 (May 1952), pp. 156–157:
“A lot of Keaton is already gone for good.
A laboratory fire wiped out his two-reelers and some of the early features.”
Where on earth did Walter get that information?
Destruction by fire is not the same as destruction by emulsion melting off.
So, was there a fire or was there a failure in the cooling system that melted off the emulsion?
What’s more, if a fire destroyed the camera negatives,
was there a second fire that destroyed the lavenders,
and a third fire that destroyed the release prints?
These should all have been stored separately, yes?
Dardis got his information from the printed edition of Pratt’s interview with Buster,
published in Image, vol. 17, no. 4 (1974), pp. 19–29.
This interview, interestingly, was conducted in response to the recently released Paramount picture,
The Buster Keaton Story,
and also in response to James Mason’s donation to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
of several of Buster’s films, which were then duplicated for MoMA.
It was also in response to the recent acquisition by the George Eastman House of The Cameraman.
Though this interview was conducted at some unspecified time in 1958, it was not published for another 16 years.
I suppose the original recording was not available to Dardis.
The tape has now been digitized and posted to
SoundCloud,
and we can hear the
Pratt: “Some people think that, uh, these,
a good many of these early
Buster: “Some of ’em.
Uh, none of these have ever been on television.”
Pratt: “Where would they be?”
Buster: “I don’t know.
I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Dardis above maintained that Buster had kept some of his films for his own collection.
When we listen to the Pratt interview, though,
we witness no such hint of such a private collection.
Buster had kept some preview prints at his Italian Villa,
but when he moved out in 1932, he left them behind.
When he said that “some of ’em” were still around,
he referred to the preview prints that Mason had found at the Italian Villa and donated to the Academy.
Ed Watz posted a remarkable statement on
“What Keaton Shorts Work Best?” Greenbriar Picture Shows,
Friday, 26 January 2018:
“The original nitrate negatives of most of Buster’s initial shorts released through Metro
survived in pristine condition:
THE HIGH SIGN, ONE WEEK, THE SCARECROW, NEIGHBORS, THE HAUNTED HOUSE and THE GOAT were
‘already there’ in glorious 35mm prints when Rohauer debuted the BK Festival in the US in 1970.”
Were those negatives a block or two from where Buster worked?
I don’t know.
I don’t know where on earth they were.
Did Dardis know?
I really doubt it.
Of the feature films distributed by Metro and MGM, only an incomplete negative of Battling Butler survived,
together with a complete negative of Spite Marriage (see Curtis p. 578).
Keep reading, because I have a guess about where these original camera negatives were.
My guess is that they were at Standard Film Laboratories, in fine condition.
My guess is that the personnel at Standard just assumed they had been ruined in the heat wave
and so sent them out for silver reclamation.
That is when there was a
Where on earth did Dardis get these ideas?
We turn to his endnotes, only to discover that there are no endnotes for page 250.
Am I making it clear that Dardis is absolutely not to be trusted?
NOTHING he wrote can be trusted. NOTHING.
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Now do you understand why it took me two weeks to read that two-page passage from Curtis’s book?
His book is over 700 pages, and at my rate of progress,
it would take me 700 weeks, thirteen and a half years, to complete a reading of his book,
which is why I put it back on the shelf.
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So, that’s the story as best as I can figure it out right now.
A few parts are verified, most is hypothetical, but it’s the best I can do for now.
As more information is revealed or discovered, my story will change, I’m sure.
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Now that we have brought up Walter Kerr, let’s bring up Walter Kerr.
(Walter, by the way, pronounced his surname cur, not car.)
I just spent too much money on Harper’s Bazaar vol. 85 no. 2886 (May 1952),
and there it is, on pp. 102–103, 156–157.
Opening paragraph:
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This is a love letter, some years late. But if I don’t get it
off now, it may come altogether too late to do anyone much
good. The curator of the Museum of Modern Art film library
will tell you that the print of Buster Keaton’s The Navigator
is wearing out. Unless another print can be discovered
in some unlikely vault, no one is ever going to see
one of the two or three best films Keaton ever made. No one
is ever again going to see one of the funniest — albeit one of
the shortest — sustained shots in the history of films.
Keaton is the object of this love letter.
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Is that not confusing?
If the print was wearing out, the solution would be to send the copy negative to the lab to make a new print.
If the copy negative was worn out, the solution would be to send the lavender to the lab to make a new copy negative.
Are we to take it that the lavender and the copy negative were worn out or missing?
Walter then went on and on and on with opinions, and then he closed with this paragraph:
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A lot of Keaton is already lost for
good. A laboratory fire wiped out the
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Is that not confusing, too?
Vault fires were numberless.
Which vault fire was this?
When?
Where?
If Walter included that information in his typescript,
then a
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Buster Keaton Rare Interview Recording
Regarding The Buster Keaton Story (1957)  Sold on 14 November 2010 for $298.75. Had I only known about this, I would have placed a bid. Who has this tape? I would happily pay to get a copy. |
Happy Coincidences |
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Let’s continue this story of The Buster Keaton Story
and James Mason’s discovery of the bunker.
I am not completely convinced that the two stories are interweaved as I have reconstructed them above,
but I am nearly convinced.
What about you?
Do you agree with me?
If they were connected, and I’m pretty sure they were,
then we can tie them in with other events.
As we saw above, several stories collided.
There was the Sidney Sheldon movie, the research needed for it, and the James Mason discovery,
but there was more, as well.
As far as I can make out, six stories collided.
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Story # 1, Downswing.
Buster, beginning in the early 1930’s, was a fifth-tier character actor.
He was busy pretty constantly, appearing in cheapo shorts, in cheapo movies, occasionally on stage,
and sometimes he was hired to write gags for lesser comics.
Beginning in about 1949, he popped up on all manner of TV shows and TV commercials,
but only as an aging parody of his younger self.
Despite that, he loved television work; he found it rejuvenating.
By no means was he prominent.
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 Buster enjoying life in 1950. I do not know where this was published. |
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Ah! I found it! I found it! I found it!
A Russian fan site published this photo, and we see it is a candid taken a little before transmission of an episode of the first season of “The Buster Keaton Show”:  The series was pretty darned lousy, but Buster was so happy to be performing again. Television gave him the opportunity to put on the makeup and get on stage and do his stuff again, often in front of a live audience. He found the experience restorative, regenerative. |
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Story # 2, Monetization.
Then Paramount Pictures changed his life, literally and metaphorically.
As presaged above, Robert Smith and Sidney Sheldon
formed an independent company to produce a movie called
The Buster Keaton Story.
Once Paramount Pictures purchased shares in the venture in August(???) 1955, it was a go.
Donald O’Connor was hired to portray Buster.
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Story # 3, Research.
Robert Smith, Sidney Sheldon, and Donald O’Connor
needed to watch some Buster movies, but how? Where?
The Museum of Modern Art had one 16mm print of each of
Sherlock Jr.,
The Navigator, and
The General,
which meandered around to various high schools and public libraries,
but how was one to see those unless the prints happened to come to town?
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Story # 4, Recovery.
This is the vague and confusing James Mason story, related above.
Jim Curtis’s book, on pages 577 and 578, goes into some detail about what was recovered,
as well as what was recovered from other sources at about that same time.
That is what should occupy us here.
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Now, suddenly, fortuitously, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had Buster’s prints!
Better yet, a few of them were still viewable!
Might it be that Smith, Sheldon, and O’Connor arranged to have Paramount
make safety dupe negatives of
Cops,
The Boat,
The Balloonatic, and
College so that the trio could study them on a flatbed editor, or perhaps even in a screening room?
If so, those few movies were not sufficient.
What else could they possibly find?
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The following three paragraphs I wrote some time ago, but now I present them in a different font.
I have polished them a little bit, but I have not corrected them.
You’ll see why.
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Somehow, they knew about or learned about a repertory house on La Ciénega Boulevard called the
Coronet, and they knew or knew about or learned about its owner/operator, Raymond Rohauer.
Somehow they knew or learned that this Raymond Rohauer was always on the hunt for lost movies
and had gathered an interesting collection.
How the Smith-Sheldon-O’Connor trio knew to make an inquiry of Rohauer remains a mystery.
Or was it Ray Rohauer who knew to let the trio know about his little treasures?
You see, by this time, Ray had dug up at least two Buster movies
and he showed them to the Sheldon gang.
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That had to have been sometime in 1956, probably at the beginning of that year.
The movies must have been
Day Dreams and
The Frozen North.
Ray had found bootlegs of those two movies in Prague.
Maybe.
Maybe it was Henri Langlois and/or someone else associated with the Cinémathèque Française
who found bootlegs of those two movies in Prague.
If so, Ray managed to arrange to purchase copies.
Day Dreams was abridged and The Frozen North was badly censored.
To this day, nobody has found all the missing sequences.
Both films looked (and still look) dreadful — dark, flickery,
with
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That was probably it.
I think it only seven Buster movies are represented in The Buster Keaton Story.
Yes, I could verify that by watching the movie again, but I would rather jump off of a cliff.
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Well, that’s what I wrote before I made a discovery on Tuesday, 5 March 2024.
This discovery, which cannot be refuted or even doubted, changes my story.
Ready?
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Okay, that settles it.
Ray did not arrange to borrow these materials.
These were Ray’s personal prints from his personal collection,
and most or all were nitrate.
It was likely Paramount that paid for the new safety dupe negatives,
and it looks like Ray would never gain access to those dupe negatives.
I wonder what ever became of them.
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That was not my only discovery.
Brace yourselves.
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You want more?
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Those three tiny tiny tiny little ministories from The Hollywood Reporter
serve to destroy any narratives we have so far pieced together.
By no later than September 1955, Ray Rohauer already had a large collection of Buster’s silent films.
Buster had starred or costarred in 46 silent films, 1917 through 1929, and Ray had 35 of them.
By no later than March 1956, Ray agreed to have his nitrate materials printed onto safety dupe negatives
through General Film Laboratories Corporation of Hollywood,
the very lab that he would later allege had by then refused to accept his business anymore.
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What is the true story?
What really happened? When? How?
I do not know.
I can guess, but I guarantee you that my guess is wrong.
Nonetheless, I shall supply you with my guess
simply because it might get your imagination flowing,
and something in your head might click and suddenly you’ll know where to look for better info.
And if you find better info, please, I beg of you, I implore you,
PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!!!! Thanks!
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• My guess is that Ray had collected his
• My guess is that some were original nitrate release prints that he had scooped up from disused film exchanges
or possibly from reclamation centers, but that others were preprint materials.
• My guess is that he probably got most of the films in a single day, from a single exchange or a single reclamation center,
and that he was charged by the pound, at the going silver-reclamation rate plus an under-the-table conspirator’s fee.
• My guess is that many of these were materials that Standard Lab had written off as destroyed by a malfunctioning cooling system,
but that actually were still quite usable.
• My guess is that Ray engaged in some underhanded dealings in order to acquire these items.
• My guess is that once he acquired the bulk of his collection in a single day,
he filled in the gaps by copying further films from MoMA’s archive.
• My guess is that he managed to purchase safety dupes of a few more films from the Cinémathèque Française.
• My guess is that, apart from the public-domain properties, he had no rights to any of this material.
• My guess is that he agreed to make new safety dupe negatives for Sheldon & Smith and/or Paramount
on condition that they would indemnify him for any copyright breaches, and on condition that he would acquire some shares in the production.
• My guess is that Paramount paid for the lab costs and kept the safety dupe negatives.
• My guess is that Ray did not meet Buster until August or September 1958.
• My guess is that Buster had only a few films, which he turned over to Ray at that time.
• My guess is that Ray did not dare confess to Buster that he already had a nearly complete collection of his films.
• We hear in the
1958 interview conducted by Eastman House’s George Pratt
that Buster was under the impression that most of his films had vanished.
By that time he knew about what James Mason had donated to AMPAS
and he knew about the few movies that Smith & Sheldon had referenced for their movie,
but he was absolutely unaware that Ray had supplied 35 movies to Smith & Sheldon.
• My guess is that Ray needed to get hold of the James Mason donations simply because he suspected they would be superior to his own materials
and might fill in some gaps in his collection.
• My guess is that it would be easier for Ray to stake legal claim to materials acquired through Buster’s signature
than to the materials that he had earlier collected by subterranean means.
• My guess is that after Ray made copies of the James Mason collection for Buster,
he immediately supplemented Buster’s collection with most of the remainder of his earlier collection,
and by then he did not feel the need to explain to Buster how he had managed to find all those films so quickly,
and Buster never bothered to ask.
• My guess is that, in order to help consolidate rights ownership,
Ray convinced Hans Andresen of KirchMedia/Atlas/Beta to clear the rights to issue the films in Europe.
• My guess is that my guess is mostly wrong.
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Why do I think I’m mostly wrong?
Because not everything fits.
If Smith, Sheldon, and O’Connor studied all 35 Buster flicks that were in Ray’s collection,
if they chose a dozen of them to show to college kids throughout Los Ángeles,
if Buster attended at least one of those screenings (he almost certainly did, as we shall discover),
and if Smith and Sheldon assembled a featurette consisting of routines from 17 of those 35 films,
then how could Buster not have known about any of this?
Yet he did not know about this, really, he did not, as we could hear in the interview conducted by George C. Pratt.
That is where my narrative breaks down, and I do not know how to repair it.
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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As you can so clearly see, I pretend to be absolutely perfect
because I want you to believe that I am infallible, that my every conjecture is
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Shall we ponder?
As we can see from the above, Ray certainly did not have a copy of
The Frozen North.
He also certainly did not have a copy of
The Boat, which James Mason had only recently discovered and donated to AMPAS.
Ray also certainly did not have copies of
The Rough House,
Oh! Doctor,
His Wedding Night,
The Cook,
Hard Luck, and
The Love Nest, which were not discovered until decades later.
To this day, nobody has found a copy of
A Country Hero.
Ray would not locate a print of
Three Ages until 1958.
The Cameraman and
Spite Marriage were owned by MGM and were (and are) still under copyright.
That’s twelve films missing from his collection.
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It would be fascinating to learn, step by step, and in detail, precisely how each film was recovered.
Yet we’ll likely never know, because Rohauer performed so much of that recovery himself and he kept everything a secret.
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A researcher just refuted much of my argument concerning Mason and Sheldon and Rohauer and Meade.
Please allow me a week or so to make corrections.
Stay tuned!
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Curtis, on page 582, relates that the Sheldon trio also viewed
The General and
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Kevin Brownlow confirms that Donald O’Connor saw The General
and that he was so stunned by it that he called Buster “the D.W. Griffith of comedy.”
Perhaps they rented the MoMA print of The General, or perhaps not.
Both those films were by now with the Academy, and so perhaps they viewed safety dupes on one of the Academy’s flatbeds?
Or, perhaps, they got 35mm safety copies from Ray’s personal collection?
It is impossible to know.
Curtis suggests further that the budget did not allow for any recreations of the scenes contained in those two movies.
The General, if memory serves, is not even hinted at in The Buster Keaton Story,
and that’s a pretty profound omission.
Sorta like writing a tome on Dickens’s career without making a mention of David Copperfield.
(My particular fascination here is with Sidney Sheldon, who serves as a tenuous link between my two favorite filmmakers,
Buster Keaton and Tinto Brass. Odd how the world works.
Coincidentally, Buster and Tinto were both 14:1 directors!)
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Story # 5, Upswing.
Paramount Pictures previewed The Buster Keaton Story on
7 April 1957 and premièred it in NYC
ten days later.
Buster steeled himself against the pain and agreed to do his contracted promotional work for it.
Ironically, The Buster Keaton Story, a dreadful flick that
flopped and that has mercifully been forgotten,
put Buster back into the limelight.
The money he earned from that movie bought him the little ranch house he had dreamed of since his youth,
and he was now a hot commodity again.
Everybody wanted to hire Buster.
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Time for commentary.
The Buster Keaton Story was a work of purest fiction.
There is nothing wrong with a fictional work based on a real person’s life.
After all, The General is a fictional work inspired by an episode of William Fuller’s life.
More to the point, one of the world’s greatest movies is
a biopic of Franz Liszt that concludes with the composer piloting a rocket ship.
Fine.
My objection to The Buster Keaton Story is not that it was a work of fiction.
My objection is that it was a terrible work of terrible fiction, utterly puerile.
Had the script been written by an unintelligent eight-year-old it could not have been any worse.
Horrible movie.
Not as bad as The Deer Hunter, but no other movie is that bad.
It’s close, though.
It probably rates as a close second.
It’s worse than The Story of Mankind.
It’s worse than Sidewalks of New York.
It’s worse than Free and Easy.
Much worse.
It would have been better had it concluded with Buster piloting a rocket ship.
It’s freely available online, but I cannot bring myself to watch it again.
It caused me physical pain when I saw it on
Sunday, 11 July 1982, at 11:30am on KLKK Channel 23 in Albuquerque.
Everything about it horrified me; it was terrible in every way.
Downright embarrassing to watch. Dreadful movie.
The problem was that it takes weeks or months to write a script, but there was no such time.
They needed Donald O’Connor immediately or they’d lose him,
as he had only a short break between other assignments.
So, they had to write the script immediately.
That was a recipe for disaster.
As horrible as the movie was, it was nonetheless most instructive.
Donald O’Connor and others in the cast did the routines and they performed the gags to technical perfection,
but all the routines and gags fell flat.
The routines were not funny. They never had been.
The gags were not funny. They never had been.
The routines and the gags had just been frames upon which to hang irony and the characters’ attitudes.
Devoid of the contexts, the
Sidney Sheldon told his version of what happened
here and
here and
here.
He condensed the story tremendously, and it seems he misremembered some things.
The part of his story that is completely convincing is Buster’s behavior.
Buster, I am sure, did not even read the script, and he wanted to contribute nothing apart from some recreations.
Sidney asked if he would like to change the script.
He asked Buster for stories, anecdotes, incidents, corrections, but Buster declined to say a word.
Well, he did say one single word, only one, several times over: “Nope.”
I can understand why.
After MGM and Sidewalks of New York, Buster simply had no confidence in such a studio product.
He decided to let the bosses do whatever they wanted to do and he refused to get upset about it, so long as he got paid.
In my opinion, that was a bad decision.
Sidney Sheldon was a good guy and he would have fought for Buster had only Buster fought for himself.
(I am reminded of Gore Vidal who inadvertently wrecked several of his own movies,
one after another after another, by his defeatist behavior.)
By another miracle, Buster’s bad decision paid some good dividends in the long run.
Had he made a good decision, he may well have had fewer lucky breaks afterwards.
     
Buster and Donald seem to have been genuinely fond of one another.
The publicity stills, even the ones that were staged and posed,
reveal a real playfulness underlying the pretended playfulness.
Importantly, the candids are invaluable documentation of how Buster trained himself and his actors.
As far as I know, though Buster really
seems to have detested the movie,
he never spoke ill of it — well, not until years later when he was in Germany, as we shall see.
He was grateful for the income it brought him
as well as for the renewed recognition it brought him.
I guess making the movie was like a trip to the dentist.
You don’t want to go, but after it’s over, you’re glad you went.
It would have been better to do not a biopic, but a story about a Donald O’Connor character
who solves a problem by emulating a Buster Keaton movie he had seen in his youth.
Buster should have been called in to direct it.
The result could have been incisive instead of sappy.
I really like Sidney Sheldon and
I really like Donald O’Connor, but
Holy Mother of Moo Moo, their movie was brutal.
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Brutal as it was, The Buster Keaton Story was a blessing in disguise.
Buster had lived through two decades of neglect.
Then, thanks mostly to this rotten movie, he entered a final decade of laudits —
laudits bordering on worship.
Eleanor hated Sidney Sheldon’s biopic.
Everybody hated Sidney Sheldon’s biopic.
But if it weren’t for that sickening movie, Buster would now be nothing more than a footnote.
That movie was the best thing that could have happened to him, because it opened endless doors
and accidentally unleashed an ever-quickening cascade of opportunities.
It benefitted not only Buster, but every connoisseur of comedy and cinema.
It was almost certainly the Sheldon trio’s need to find Buster’s movies
that directly led to the James Mason discovery.
MoMA and the Academy exhibited such enthusiasm about James Mason’s discovery and about Buster
that we can be nearly certain they changed Buster’s mind and convinced him that his films were still important.
I am certain that this must have touched him deeply.
The MoMA and Academy staffers almost certainly convinced Buster to locate any prints he possibly could, and they probably guaranteed his expenses.
It was certainly Buster’s recovery of several prints and the exhibition of those films by MoMA that directly led to Buster’s Academy Award.
As much as I detest Sidney Sheldon’s unwatchably offensive biopic, I am grateful to it.
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Story # 6, Unexpected Blessings.
Charles Samuels now interviewed Buster for a book-length biography.
That was in response to The Buster Keaton Story, for he wanted to refute that movie and set the record straight.
(Rudi Blesh did the same, in response to MoMA screenings, including screenings of recently discovered films,
but his work was published a mite too late.)
Bob Youngson, with a sense of humor even larger than his waistline,
edited together comical highlights of silent movies
into a Twentieth Century-Fox feature called
The Golden Age of Comedy,
released one month prior to The Buster Keaton Story.
It was a huge hit, though I don’t know why.
The left side was lopped off to make room for the narration and music,
and then cinemas, probably without exception, lopped off close to half of the height,
rendering the image and action meaningless.
Nonetheless, it was somehow a major hit, and it did much to get the public enthusiastic about silent comedy again.
There was not a frame of Buster in it, but still, it introduced 30-year-old comedy to people less than 30 years old,
who had never seen anything remotely like it before and who fell in love with it.
For his
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Rudi Blesh, in Keaton, p. xi, wrote that he had begun rewatching Buster’s movies at MoMA in 1954.
He named which ones he saw over the next few years:
Cops,
The Boat,
Our Hospitality,
The Navigator, and
The General.
Only the latter three were in the MoMA collection in 1954.
Cops and The Boat were from the editing shed and donated to the Academy,
which either made dupe negatives for MoMA or donated the materials outright.
That could not possibly have been any earlier than 1956.
Rohauer’s personal collection,
though known to Sheldon & Smith,
and though notated in a ledger sheet maintained by an accountant at Paramount,
was not generally known.
Rohauer did not donate his collection to museums.
Rohauer saw museums as sources to be plundered,
not as beneficiaries of his own nonexistent charity.
On 2 November 1959, a book called Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial History was published by Bramhall House of NYC.
Joe Franklin signed himself as author, but the copyright page states that the “research assistant” was one William K. Everson.
What I have heard for decades is that Bill Everson was actually the author of this book, not Joe Franklin.
Some of the text reads rather like Bill’s style, but by no means all, not even a little bit.
That’s not important.
What is important is page 186, in which the author wrote that the surviving Buster movies were:
The Haunted House,
The Balloonatic,
Cops,
Sherlock Jr., and
The General,
all available for viewing.
Also mentioned, with the implication that they still survived and were available for viewing, were
Our Hospitality,
The Navigator,
Steamboat Bill, Jr., and
The Cameraman.
A casual reader simply takes that as a statement of fact, namely, that those films were available as of November 1959.
I, on the other hand, am not a casual reader.
I see that statement and, when I eventually manage to pick myself up off of the floor,
I try to figure out how that could possibly have been the case.
Where were these films available for viewing?
That could only have been at MoMA, I think.
As we know,
The Balloonatic,
Cops, and
Steamboat Bill, Jr.,
had been recovered from James Mason’s property, and Mason donated them to the Academy.
MoMA, I guess, paid the Academy for duplicate negatives.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps the Academy donated them.
I assume that The Cameraman, or, rather, what was left of it, was donated by MGM
(to this day, there is a crucial three-minute segment that is missing).
So, we can conclude that
The Haunted House had been dug up after January 1956 and before November 1959,
and my guess is that Buster had been instrumental in locating it.
Why is that my guess?
Because there had been no discoveries from circa 1935 through 1955,
and then suddenly, once MoMA and Buster were in touch,
a bunch of movies just suddenly turned up out of nowhere.
That’s why.
The 35-title Rohauer/Keaton collection from circa 1954 complicates matters, though,
and I do not know how to reconcile the data.
Actually, I just now (October 2022) purchased Classics of the Silent Screen.
I had read it about twenty times back in 1973, when my mother borrowed it from the Hoffmantown branch of the Albuquerque Public Library.
This is the first time I have looked through that book in nearly half a century.
My heavens!
Now it comes together!
Now I can see where so many misinterpretations came from!
The idea that the characters of Buster’s leading ladies were all “dumb” comes from this book and was repeated everywhere.
Actually, they were all quite clever, not “dumb” in any way.
Ofttimes they found themselves in situations in which they were out of their element, but they came through, always.
This is the book that described Buster’s character as “unemotional” and “defeatist,”
which is absolutely contrary to the character he portrayed on camera.
It’s all so strange, isn’t it?
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