Clyde Adolf Bruckman
Clyde Bruckman (20 September 1894 – 4 January 1955, suicide)
was among the most highly sought-after gag men, comedy writers, and comedy directors,
but almost nothing is known about him, and nothing at all is known about his specific contributions.
Film historian Steve Massa supplied a brief sketch for a film program:
Bruckman came from a newspaper background and became a writer and gagman in 1919 for Eddie Lyons & Lee Moran and Monty Banks.
In 1921 he joined Keaton’s staff of ideamen and was one of his key collaborators until he began freelancing after Seven Chances (1925).
Besides being an important (and sometimes uncredited) collaborator to
Harold Lloyd
for almost fifteen years and directing
Laurel and Hardy
in some of their most important early comedies
(Putting Pants on Philip [1927], Battle of the Century [1927], The Finishing Touch [1928], etc.),
Bruckman also worked with Mack Sennett, Hal Roach, Max Davidson, W. C. Fields, Lloyd Hamilton, and the Three Stooges.
Bruckman’s fatal flaw was alcohol.
As the 1930s rolled around he would go on binges and disappear in the middle of shoots.
While this effectively ended his directing career, he was still in demand as a writer.
But he had a penchant for recycling material he had written for other people
and in the 1940s Harold Lloyd sued Universal and Columbia over material Bruckman revised —
leaving Bruckman pretty much unemployable.
In the early 1950s he managed to work on Keaton’s and Abbott and Costello’s television shows but not much else.
In 1955 he borrowed a pistol from Keaton and shot himself.
For the longest time, I was unable to find any news items about this, nor could I find obituaries,
but now I see that there were two items, one local and one syndicated by the Associated Press.
Not long before Bruckman’s death, Rudi Blesh interviewed him for his book, Keaton (pp. 148–152):
“I was with Warner Brothers,” Bruckman related. “Warners at that time consisted of Jack, Sam, and Harry Warner,
Monte Banks, and a few extras and props, in an old barn of a studio at Bronson and Sunset, where the big bowling alley now is.
“Then I ran into Harry Brand, an old friend of mine from newspaper days.
Now he was Buster’s publicity man.
“‘Why don’t you come over with Keaton?’ he asked.
“‘How do I know Keaton wants me?’
“Next day Brand phoned, said ‘Come over for lunch with us.’
“I did and was hired, to start the next Monday.
I went back and saw Jack Warner.
‘Jack, I have a chance to go with Keaton — better job, better opportunity.
I’d like to close Saturday.’
“‘Can you keep a little secret?’ said Jack.
‘We’re all closing Saturday.’
“And, by gosh, they did — for six months or more.
It took a German police dog called Rin Tin Tin to take them out of the red.”
Then Bruckman described the Keaton lot.
“I suppose writers should coin phrases, so here goes,” he said.
“We were one big happy family.
And that’s something you don’t know until — and if — you’ve been in one.
In such a situation, gags are never a problem.
You feel good.
Your mind’s at ease, and working.
Buster and Clyde
“I was at Buster’s house or he at mine four or five nights many a week —
playing cards, horsing around, dodging the issue.
Then, at midnight, to the kitchen, sit on the sink, eat hamburgers,
and work on gags until three in the morning.
And how we’d work!
“You can’t match that today, when you walk in on a supervised production, cut and dried,
every cough scripted and every sneeze timed, and the bigwigs all a pushbutton’s length from the set.
Joe Schenck was too big to be a bigwig.
He’s said — and I’ve heard him —
‘Tell me from nothing. Go ahead, what should I know about comedy?’
“Buster was a guy you worked with — not for.
Oh, sure, it’s a cliché, like the ‘happy family.’
But try it some time.
I even hate to mention the playing.
It sounds like a buildup.
But late afternoons we chose sides and had our ball game — fights, arguments.
Rainy days it was bridge in a dressing room — fights, arguments.
And we made pictures.”
Bruckman sighed.
“Harold Lloyd was wonderful to me,” he said.
“So was Bill Fields. But with Bus you belonged.
“Well, it’s all changed, anyway.
So organized and big a man can’t touch it.
It used to be our business.
We acted in scenes, set up scenery, spotted lights, moved furniture —
hell, today even the set dresser with paid-up dues can’t move a lousy bouquet.
He sits and waits until the ‘green man’ arrives.
An actor has to fight his way onto the set through technicians, supervisors, experts, and accountants.
And television has followed the same lines.
So....” He swallowed and looked up. “Other days, other ways, as Nero said.
“Oh, we’d get hung up on sequences.
Throw down your pencils, pick up the bats.
The second, maybe third, inning — with a runner on base —
Bus would throw his glove in the air, holler, ‘I got it!’ and back to work.
‘Nothing like
baseball,’ he always said, ‘to take your mind off your troubles.’
“With it all, you wouldn’t believe a comedian could be so serious.
He showed them all how to underact.
He could tell his story by lifting an eyebrow.
He could tell it by not lifting an eyebrow.
Buster was his own best gagman.
He had judgment, taste; never overdid it, and never offended.
He knew what was right for him.”
Clyde Bruckman paused, lit a cigarette, and went on.
“You seldom saw his name in the story credits.
But I can tell you — and so could Jean Havez if he were alive —
that those wonderful stories were ninety percent Buster’s.
I was often ashamed to take the money, much less the credit.
I would say so.
K27-87 (Margaret Herrick Library still # 31)
Frederick Vroom loses his patience.
“Bus would say, ‘Stick, I need a left fielder,’ and laugh.
But he never left you in left field.
We were all overpaid from the strict creative point of view.
Most of the direction was his, as Eddie Cline will tell you.
Keaton could have graduated into a top director —
of any kind of picture, short or long, high or low, sad or funny or both —
if Hollywood hadn’t pushed him down and then said
‘Look how Keaton has slipped!’
“Comedian, gagman, writer, director — then add technical innovator.
Camera work.
Look at his pictures to see beautiful shots, wide pans and long shots, unexpected close-ups,
and angles that were all new when he thought them up.
But each and every camera angle calculated to help tell the story —
without sound, remember, and with damn few subtitles.”
“...The guy’s honesty was impressive.
He wouldn’t fool his audience.
None of the easy camera tricks like cutting an action into several parts with a new camera angle for each,
then splicing it all together....
When he did use a camera trick, he did it deliberately,
to make an impossible statement.
Like multiple exposure.
Not double exposure, which is a picture on top of a picture, generally an amateur accident.
Multiple exposure is dividing up the picture frame into parts, taping the lens to correspond,
and photographing each part separately.
Keaton didn’t originate this idea.
It had been used for years to show an actor in two roles at once.
But it was a difficult technique.
It was hard to join the halves of the picture without a telltale line down the middle.
It was also hard to get the separate actions to synchronize —
like looking up at the exact moment that your alter ego, in the earlier exposure, said something to you.