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Oh mercy!
This confuses me so much!
David Pierce
tells us to take a look at Joseph Kennedy’s volume,
The Story of the Films:
As Told by Leaders of the Industry to the Students of the Graduate School of Business Administration,
George F. Baker Foundation, Harvard University
(Chicago and NY: A.W. Shaw, 1927).
Every January, a committee consisting of Harvard faculty would select among the made-in-the-USA films of the previous twelve months
“those films which are deemed worthy of preservation as works of art.”
The selections would be announced each March.
If possible, “two positives of every film selected” would be deposited at the new Harvard Film Library.
Among the 13 films selected that first year was The General.
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I assume that at least one of each pair of positives was actually a lavender.
Just an assumption.
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Then, after that first batch of donations, nothing further was forthcoming.
Why?
Well, university politics.
Dana Polan, in his book Scenes of Instruction:
The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film
(Berkeley and Los Ángeles: University of California Press, 2007),
devotes a chapter to the Harvard venture,
and it aroused a great deal of controversy,
since it espoused the idea that business for profit was a good thing.
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When we watch various video editions of The General,
we notice that some of them open thus:
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“Acquired through the courtesy of Harvard University Film Foundation.”
Acquired by whom?
The Museum of Modern Art.
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Marion Mack and her husband Louis Lewyn got Buster some work directing three shorts for MGM:
Hollywood Handicap,
Streamlined Swing, and
Life in Sometown, U.S.A.
You can see two of them on YouTube, and they ain’t bad.
You would never guess from watching them that Buster was involved in any way at all,
and so his credit at the beginning comes as a bit of a surprise.
Buster just lined up shots and called out Action and Cut, and that was his job.
But it was work, it paid, he was working with friends, and he was in a good mood.
Here he is working on Hollywood Handicap,
an image I stole from Vanewimsey’s Pinterest page.
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