Texas Public Radio's final 2022 Cinema Tuesdays screening was a double feature of "Sherlock Jr." and "Cops," two of the great silent comedian Buster Keaton's best films.
Following the screening, Dana Stevens, film critic for the online magazine Slate and author of the new biography "Camera Man," about Buster Keaton's life and early Hollywood, shared her insights on Keaton's life and work through a Q&A period with TPR's Nathan Cone and the audience at the Santikos Palladium.
Below the video clip is an edited transcript of their conversation. Audio is linked at the top of the page. (Apologia: audio was recorded from a hissy PA speaker, and isn't quite up to usual standards!)
Nathan Cone Thank you all for being here. Thanks for your support of Texas Public Radio. And thank you, Dana Stevens, for being here to talk about Buster Keaton. We're so glad that you took the time to be here.
Dana Stevens It's such a pleasure. I'm really happy to be here.
Nathan Cone The first thing I wanted to ask you right off the bat here, which just struck me at the end of “Sherlock Jr.” here, is that there's a very, very visual depiction right here at the end [of the movie] about how we learn things ourselves by watching the movies. This has been going on for decades of looking at entertainment [to learn] how we're supposed to act. That's really was just kind of a fun thing that really just hit me this time, looking at “Sherlock Jr.” right there, just right off the bat.
Dana Stevens This is one of my favorite endings to any Keaton movie, I think, because, like you say, it's such a beautiful little parable about how we watch movies and learn from them and how, as you say, that was always happening from the beginning of movies. And also it ties in so many themes from the film itself. You know, there's just so many things that come back that were there earlier in the movie from him giving her the ring earlier on, to just the idea of him climbing into the screen. I mean, that's all about learning from the movies. And maybe this is maybe more a movie about movies than anything he made. Even [more than] "The Cameraman," his last the second to last silent picture, which is about somebody who's making movies. This one is really more about being a viewer and a spectator of movies. And so it really brings in the audience in that way. And I was also thinking about how when he climbs into the screen, there's that moment before where he's just watching, he sits -- or his shadow self, rather, climbs out of his sleeping self, just sits there and watches the movie with the rest of the audience for a minute before he tries to climb it. You know, it's like a movie about spectatorship as much as anything, you know?
Nathan Cone So before we continue talking about Buster Keaton, you mentioned at the top right before coming here that you grew up here in San Antonio, and I'm wondering if you would share just a little bit about your growing up and your early moviegoing experience and what you liked to watch maybe when you were young? And if you were into old movies at all when you were younger, or if that came later on in life?
Dana Stevens Yeah, those are great questions. I mean, not [movies] this old, probably because when I was growing up in San Antonio... because I talk about this in the introduction to the book a little bit. There weren't probably silent movies in the seventies and eighties in San Antonio when I was growing up being screened on the big screen very often, although I do remember Abel Gance's "Napoleon," you know, the kind of great spectacle that he made that was made to be made, shown on three different screens at once, coming in a big revival when I was in my teens and going to see that. But this is certainly the place I got into movies because it's where I watched the first ones. But yeah, I mean, I remember Siskel and Ebert and being huge fans of them when I was in my pre-teens. I know by the time I was in middle school I was already a big movie nut. So I think it mainly came about from old movies that played on UHF TV and on Sunday afternoons. I remember seeing "The Abominable Dr. Phibes," the great Vincent Price horror movie and a horror movie called "Squirm" about worms that come from underground, the kind of seventies classic, that kind of thing that would show on UHF TV with tons of commercials and take about 3 hours, you know, to show a two hour movie. Yeah. I mean, I just watched anything I could get my hands on, but this kind of stuff, silent movies, I didn't get into it until much later, in my late twenties, probably.
Nathan Cone And what was it that clicked then that made you start enjoying silent pictures was, you know, was it the right one that came along?
Dana Stevens I mean, it was this guy, really. And that's exactly what the first three pages of the book, the intro recount is kind of my discovery of Keaton in 1996, when I was about 30 and he was just about 100, he had just turned 100, [he] had his centenary in 1995. And so there was a kind of big explosion of Keaton festivals and writing about him and coverage and things like that. And I wound up... I was studying at the time as a graduate student in France where they loved Buster Keaton and never stopped loving him, even when he was not so popular here. And so they had a great retrospective at a place near where I lived. And I ended up just going to every movie and reading everything I could find about him, and from there, really starting to get interested in that whole period and just how much you could learn from watching movies from that early first quarter century or so that cinema existed.
Nathan Cone One of the really cool things about your book is that it's as much about Buster Keaton and his life as it is about that early cinema period and about the development of cinema as an art form and as a business at the same time. Could you talk a little bit about how the book is structured in that way?
Dana Stevens Oh, yeah. This is almost like a PSA or an advisory for anybody who's interested in reading the book, is that it isn't only about Keaton, and in fact, there are whole chapters in it that aren't really about him at all directly. Although hopefully this is the idea that they're all about things that weave in and out of his life story in ways that illuminate the work that he made. But what really, really fascinated me was not writing a biography. I never set out to write a traditional biography because there already exist many good biographies. And I knew another one was in progress that in fact just came out this year, by James Curtis, that's a really excellent traditional kind of soup to nuts person's life story, right? It starts with their ancestry and where they were born and it lets you know essentially every bit of archival research that can be found about that person during their life until they died. And that wasn't something that I wanted to do because I felt like someone else could do it better. And what I'm really interested in is sort of zigzagging in and out of someone's life story and tying it in with cultural history. And like you say, business history, the history of the industry that he grew up with. And it's often said about Keaton, it's been said many times because it's an obvious observation to make, that he was born the same year as cinema. He was born in 1895, and that's the same year just a couple of months after he was born, that the first moving pictures were screened for an audience. And so there's many different ways to say, what is the first movie, right? There were already other ways of watching pictures move, but it's in 1895 that the Lumiere brothers screen movies in France for a paying audience. And that's always kind of traditionally celebrated as the birthday of movies. And if you think about that, that the two of them were born alongside each other, that also means they grew up together, you know, and quite literally so, because he grew up, as I said earlier, as a member of a vaudeville family act on the stage, almost always with some kind of movie playing on the bill along with them. So he really did grow up watching the earliest movies. And by the time he got into the movies in 1917, both he and the movies were kind of going from teenagerhood to adulthood, you know? And it was a moment that the industry was starting to take off in a bigger way. And he got in right on the ground floor of that. So I kind of try to trace how he and various kind of cultural institutions in America, vaudeville, the movies, later television kind of grew up together.
Nathan Cone The vaudeville stage makes me think and remember these these early moments in the book when you're describing the family act, basically, of the Keatons, and how he was basically thrown about the stage, you know, and this kind of like in a very physical way, paved the way for what he would be doing on his own later on. And I was wondering if you would just kind of get into it a little bit about his the how their family act worked and and how that, you know, besides his film career.
Dana Stevens Yeah, that's something that really drew me to writing the book in the first place was this fascinating fascination with his childhood and how that gets replayed later in his movies. In fact, you see his father, Joe Keaton, in “Sherlock Jr.” He plays the father of the girlfriend and they don't really get into it with the physical comedy because Joe Keaton was older then. But the way their act worked when when Buster was growing up, it was a three person act most of the time that he was growing up. His mother and his father were in the act, but his mother mainly did musical interludes. She played the saxophone, and she'd come on and sometimes do a little sort of extra work or kind of augment their jokes a bit. But the main body of the act was Joe Keaton, the dad, and Buster Keaton, the son, coming on and just doing this really brutal slapstick act together. The essential idea of it was that Joe Keaton would come on and start doing some bit of business upstage. And meanwhile, down way in the back, Buster Keaton would be distracting in some way with some funny piece of business, usually something that was mischievously provoking his dad. And then when his dad sort of realized what his son was up to, he would wheel around and grab him and throw him across the stage and sometimes throw him into the scenery or throw him into the orchestra pit or into the audience. At one point, there's a famous story that their act was being heckled by some people in the audience, and Joe Keaton got mad and threw his son at the hecklers and broke one of their ribs!
It was really an act that people went to -- and I talk about this a lot in the book -- they went to laugh, but they went to gasp, and be horrified as well, because it was like on the edge kind of stunts that they would do together. So they were known as the roughest act in vaudeville. And regularly during Keaton's childhood, there were officials from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that would try to shut down the act that sometimes did shut down the act or tried to put Joe Keaton in jail. And I feel like “Cops,” in a way, is in part a commentary on that. I think Buster always had this relationship to the law and to, you know, obeying the rules and having the law come down on you. That was sort of he was going to mischievously escape, you know, and get out from under or hide in a chest that he finds in the street with no bottom in it or things like that. I think all come from the basic idea of the Three Keatons act, which was escape authority at all times. Whether that authority is your father, the cops, you know, or the various heavies that appear in Keaton movies.
Nathan Cone Throughout his career he was be getting injured. You know, I mean, like I think in “Sherlock Jr.,” if I remember correctly, that when the water comes down on him, he actually fractured his neck during that stunt, is that correct?
Dana Stevens Apparently, 15 years or so after that, after he was no longer working in film at that time, a doctor said to him, giving him an X-ray, "When did you break your neck?" And he realized that it must have been when the water pushed him down on the tracks in “Sherlock Jr.” Yeah.
Nathan Cone And there are tons of things throughout his pictures that are, you know, very dangerous. You know, the do not try this at home kids type thing. The most famous one, of course, being the house that falls down around him, as you know, from the famous, you know, image online of him just standing there and then the window of the house precisely measured out. How did he measure out and do these... Like how did he put these things together? I mean, was there math involved?
Dana Stevens Well, yeah, there was engineering involved, really! There's there's an interview he did when he was older when somebody asked him, what would you like to do if you weren't a comedian, if you weren't born into a vaudeville family and almost became an entertainer without asking to be? And he had a great answer. He said, I think I would have liked to be a civil engineer. And in a way, that's what he became in these movies, you know, because he was building whole cities in order to tear them down, as he did in "Steamboat Bill Jr.," which is where the house falls on him. But he wasn't working alone. You know, he he was conceiving a lot of these things on his own. But he also had a great production designer who worked on “Sherlock Jr.,” named Fred Gabourie, who helped design all these crazy things and figure out exactly how the physics of it would work, measure everything out. And he had a great cameraman who really understood what he wanted to do. Elgin Lessley, who came up with really the idea for that central moment in “Sherlock Jr.” when he steps into the screen. The whole movie was conceived around this idea that Elgin Lessley, the cinematographer, went to him and said, "Let's have something about you climbing into a movie screen." And they built the whole movie around that idea. And that scene is also technically extraordinary when he climbs into the screen because it's not done with a trick. You know, the way that they did it was just that the movie is actually a stage play, you know, that those people are really acting on stage and they just lit it and shot it to look very flat like a screen. So when he climbs in, you know, there's not a special effect. He's just walking into a stage.
Nathan Cone I wanted to ask you this question real quick, because you leaned over to me at one point [during the show] and said, "Ask me about the goat gland specialist sign in 'Cops,'" because we all kind of looked at that and kind of went, that's kind of weird, but what is that?
Dana Stevens Well, in part that was just a cue for you to ask me about current events in “Cops!” But I'll start with that one. Yeah, the goat glands, when he takes the horse to the goat gland specialist and then it gets all peppy, was a topical joke and one that was for Keaton a little bit racy, because he didn't like to do sort of blue material at all. He prided himself on never having dirty jokes. But that one is a faintly raunchy reference because at the time around the teens and twenties, the idea the idea was, I think, for impotence or just for men generally who wanted to sort of, you know, perk themselves up. You would go to this goat gland specialist. It was like a cult doctor, you know, and he would... I think it was actually goat testicles! They don't say that in the movie, but basically, yeah, men would, I don't know, drink some kind of elixir or something that came from goats. And the idea was that would make them young and perky again. So that's what the horse does. And then there's a little joke after that where he himself, Buster, starts to go into the goat gland specialist and you think, Oh, he's going to get some of the elixir. But then he's just getting his hat. He comes back out with his hat. So yeah, that was a reference to current events. And another reference to current events is the bomb. The anarchist who heaves the bomb, and [Keaton] uses it to light his cigarettes, was just a reference to the fact that, well, in 1920 there was a bombing on Wall Street that was by some sort of a left wing terrorist. And for years after that, there was, you know, there was the Sacco and Vanzetti case. There was in general a sort of Red Scare going on at the time, and this idea that there were anarchists lurking everywhere as bombs. So that would have been just a stock kind of villain figure, the bearded bomber who throws that bomb. And that's just one of those ways where “Cops,” even though it's so timeless and it's so funny to us now, all this time later and sort of seems like it stands outside of time, was also full of these little political topical references.
Nathan Cone At one point as I'm reading through your book, there comes a point where Buster has moved into the MGM era, he's no longer directing his own pictures, and he's in the sound era and he's in kind of a low period in his life. And as I was reading this, I had a visceral moment where when Buster was at his lowest moment in his life, I really started to feel for him. And I was kind of getting emotional reading about him. And I'm wondering, you know, even though you had to do all this research and really kind of put all these pieces together, in putting a book together, do you have that same kind of reaction going through a man's life and following him throughout his career? Do you get emotional in writing about him?
Dana Stevens I mean, to me, the answer is, of course! Why would you want to write about someone if you didn't care about them? I already had that feeling before starting the book. I wanted to understand this person because I sort of loved him from the art that he'd given the world. But certainly researching it made me feel even more that way. And that was the hardest few chapters to research by far, this dark period in the middle of his life, when he becomes an alcoholic, as his father had been before him, and his first marriage falls apart and he gets fired from MGM, and he's not making anything that he wants to make. It's just a miserable, miserable time in his life. And those movies are so hard to watch. And in fact, that was sort of my dirty secret as I was researching the book is I kept putting off watching those movies, the ones from the early thirties at MGM, when you can just really see his depression and alcoholism onscreen screen. And I kept thinking, I'm getting to that part of the book. I've really got to watch those movies. I was reading all about them and everything, but the idea that I would actually kind of see him suffering in real time on screen was so hard. And in fact, I shouldn't have put it off so long because they were hard to watch. But the fact is, and the book talks about this a lot, the last third of his life was, I think, really happy. And it's not at all the case that he simply went into a decline and lost his ability to make his own movies and then was miserable for the rest of his life. Not at all! His story is really a story of resilience and recovery, I think.
Nathan Cone Absolutely. Because he starts working in television, he's doing steady work, you know, helping out others in their stuff. Then he, I guess, winds up in a in a marriage also that, you know, is finally clicking at towards the end with Eleanor as well, too, yeah?
Dana Stevens Yeah. Eleanor used to say this, his third wife would say this when she was interviewed about his dark years, that there's probably only a period of 3 to 4 years that he was in a really, really dark space. And after that, toward the end of his life, he was turning down offers. I mean, he had way more work than he could do on television and on stage and at the circus in Europe, which is something he loved doing. So even though he never got to have the kind of control he did in these movies we're seeing tonight, you know, because that era of filmmaking was just over and nobody was doing that where they were their own director, their own editor, because he edited his own films, you know, starring, doing all the stunts. I mean, that era was over, but he never stopped being somebody who wanted to make people laugh and was able to find ways to do that.
Nathan Cone And I love that you put an emphasis on.. when you say, oh, he's doing the circus in Europe. The circus in Europe was a big deal back then, too.
Dana Stevens And he was at sort of the premium, you know, the most... They called it the "Temple of Clowns," you know, the circus that that really respected clowns more than any other art form. So, in fact, I interview in the book, this is one of my favorite people I talked to, this clown who's now in his, I guess, late sixties who became a clown because when he was nine years old -- he's a French guy -- when he was nine years old, he went with his father to the circus in Paris and he saw Buster Keaton perform. And he decided, that's what I'm doing. And a few years later, he was volunteering at that circus and became a clown at that circus and is now a clown teacher. So that kind of tradition that existed in Keaton's body, you know, from the 19th century on, is still being passed on to people that are performing today.
Nathan Cone Knowing what you know about is his life and his career and the turns it take. There must be also lots of what-ifs in your head as well about like, well, what if he would have lived longer? What would he be doing? What if this would have happened? What are some of those what ifs, perhaps, that you you've wondered about?
Dana Stevens Yeah. I mean, it's a very speculative book in that way. That's another way. Where it's not just a strict history is that there's a lot of "could have been" moments in there. For example, I mean, just in the sound era, what if his career had gone a different way and he'd been given a little bit more creative control at MGM, either on the directorial side or just as an actor, you know? I mean, for example, could you imagine him in his 1950s being in noir movies? You know, I mean, he he sort of developed from being this beautiful young boy almost, that you see in these movies to having this great mug is an older man where you could really see him and his the era would have coincided perfectly being, you know, the heavy in a noir movie.
Nathan Cone And he had a great voice for it, too.
Dana Stevens Yeah, he had a voice that really went with his persona in a way, his older persona, very gravelly. The silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, who I talk about in the book, called it, described his voice as "an anchor chain running out," which I love that phrase! But yeah, it had that kind of gravelly, old fashioned sound where you could also, to me, I could even imagine him as a kind of mug in, you know, like sixties, seventies, "French Connection" kinds of movies, you know what I mean?
Nathan Cone Oh, yeah.
Dana Stevens Or a John Cassavetes movie, you know, a face, that kind of mug that would go in a film like that. And he almost overlapped with that era. That's another could-have-been, is what if he'd lived a little longer? You know, he only lived to 70. If he'd made it to 80 or a little bit older, he could have entered into the period of variety that started right after he died on TV, The Carol Burnett Show, or The Sonny and Cher Show or The Muppet Show, you know?
Nathan Cone Who has some questions in the audience? Just raise your hand and I'm going to try and record it. So I'm going to bring the microphone to you, and I'm going to hold it up to you.
Audience member What did he consider to be his greatest film?
Dana Stevens Oh, that's a good question. He answered that differently at different times, actually. But two that he cited a lot were “The General” was really special to him, I think, because it was about trains, which is one of his lifelong passions, and also because it was really made at a moment when he was at the height of his power. So he had a big budget to command and he could do whatever crazy thing he wanted to. So he loved “The General” and he liked “The Navigator” a lot too, I think for similar reasons, because it's set on a boat and he had this kind of giant toy that he could use. You know, there was this childlike side of him, I think, that like playing with big toys and those two movies really let him do that.
Audience member You know, I just appreciate what we're doing tonight. I was stationed here in 1972 in the Army. This is more of a comment right now, but it's a homage to you and TPR! Because I had never seen any of this. We first started talking about like, well, you know, when did you see we just did not have anything like this. I grew up in South Texas. Nothing like that was on TV. I'd never seen Buster Keaton. I'd never seen Harold Lloyd. I had heard Humphrey Bogart's name, I never saw a movie. We just didn't have it. And so what I'm saying is in the seventies, I think it was the Olmos Theater that had kind of a run of stuff that just opened up this kind of venue. And I mean, I was captivated. I still am. And so I guess the question I would have is, other than you guys, what you're doing, is there some other way? I mean, does it make sense that in a city of a million and a half that we could have, you know, more venues like this? I mean, I think that's why we missed Cinema Tuesdays so much. We've been coming for 20 something years because this is where you get this. If you don't have it, you don't have it.
Nathan Cone Thank you, Jay. And I'll let Dana comment on it. But also, I want to put a plug in for my good friends that run Slab Cinema. They do outdoor screenings and they do a lot of great classic films as part of that as well.
Dana Stevens So what I would just say is thank you, Nathan, for being the person who's making that happen, for whoever is the person that you were in 1972 who never saw this stuff. But in general, I mean, it's not just Keaton, but theatrical screenings, period. The theater, movie theater, is in danger right now, all over the world. So anytime anybody is going out to pay money to see a movie, especially an older movie, they're keeping that medium alive.
Audience member You've already taught me more than I ever knew about Buster Keaton. I did not know his family was in vaudeville. This is a plea to TPR to please show next year or the year after or some time before I die. Please show “The General” because that totally real bridge collapse and train wreck must be spectacular on the big screen.
Dana Stevens Oh yeah. I screened that for a few people, few groups this year since my book came out. And believe me, it always plays. There's always a gasp that runs to the theater when that train crashes through the bridge. So if you do have it, Nathan, you have to have me back down to talk about that!
Audience member What I wanted to ask you, the whole movie, I'm watching it and I'm thinking, this is [like] Bugs Bunny! Is there a direct lineage from Buster Keaton to Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner and all those kind of pratfalls and especially the the dynamite that they throw around in the cartoons?
Nathan Cone Yeah. That brings us to what we were talking about earlier today about where we can see Buster Keaton's influence in later pictures and even today.
Dana Stevens Yeah, I think not just Bugs Bunny, certainly that as well, but just animated film in general seems like it takes a lot from silent film and in fact, a lot of the early animated movies. Well, for example, the very first sound Mickey Mouse movie, “Steamboat Willie,” came out, I think the year after or two years after “Steamboat Bill Jr.,” the Buster Keaton movie, and is in a way, a takeoff of it. You know, it's directly based on it. I mean, they're both based on the legend of Steamboat Bill that was a song, and things earlier. But there's definitely a lineage that goes from comic strips, which started right around the turn of the 20th century. You know, in fact, Buster Keaton would have grown up, along with comic strips in the funny papers, you know, that goes from comic strips to silent movies to, you know, animated movies without sound. And then with sound, I think better film historians than me could tell you exactly the connections that link them all. But there's no question that the early, you know, the Fleischman brothers and Disney and people that were drawing those early comics were thinking about Chaplin and Keaton and comics that could do those crazy physical pratfalls.
Nathan Cone I even saw in “Cops” this evening for the first time, the scene in "Star Wars" when Han Solo's running down the corridor, and then all of a sudden there's all those storm troopers waiting for him around the corner right there. I mean, that's it! You know, same type of gag.
Dana Stevens Yeah! It's the contrast between one lone figure and this group of identical figures, you know, and it seems impossible that anybody who's using that image after “Cops” couldn't be thinking of “Cops” because the way he does it is so elemental and so basic.
Audience member When Keaton was in his prime in the twenties, so was Chaplin. And both of them used the image of the little guy against the bigger world. I'm wondering if there was a reason for that, that this was such a common trope in in these kinds of films?
Dana Stevens Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, they both certainly in very different ways, they both certainly did use that. But it would just be speculation to say why then, why at that moment in history, the little guy. I mean, it's a very modernist kind of image, right? It's this idea which “Cops” is really full of images like this, that the government and the state and the law and anything that's kind of institutional is faceless. It's not to be trusted. It's going to it's going to deceive you. There's something really Kafkaesque about “Cops”. Even though Keaton couldn't possibly have known Kafka, who hadn't even been translated into English at the time, but he was writing at that exact same time with those exact same kind of images, like a lone little man who didn't do anything wrong, who finds himself suddenly chased by an entire police force. I mean, I think my very general response would just be it's a very modern, early 20th century kind of anxiety, you know, to be this this figure who's just being chased by the law in that way, out of nowhere.
Audience member You spent so much time researching and writing about him. I'm curious to know what Buster Keaton meant to you when you first discovered him versus what you think of him now after spending so much time with him.
Dana Stevens Oh, that's a great question. Well, I mean, read the introduction for the answer to the first part, like what he meant to me when I discovered him and sort of how he changed my feeling about film and what I wanted to pursue there. But how he's different to me now? I mean, one thing I'll certainly say is that now, after almost a year of going around promoting this book, I'm not tired of Buster Keaton at all! I mean, Nathan can attest that I was cracking up at every good part of those movies, and his art has certainly not gotten tiresome to me at all. Especially seeing it with an audience is just always fun and always fresh feeling. But I guess I would say that I understand his complexities more, but that makes me love him more. And he feels very alive to me. I talk at the very end of the book about going to visit his grave, which I did at one point during a research trip, and how that ended up being, in a strange way, this kind of amusing experience, because the driver who drove me to the cemetery in Hollywood where he's buried and helped me get out and look for his grave in this huge graveyard, was a huge Buster Keaton fan. He was this Armenian guy... and when I told him whose grave I was going to visit, on the whole drive over there, was remembering stories of growing up in Armenia. And it's true that in the in the Eastern Bloc, you know, the former Soviet Union, they love Keaton. And he so he grew up watching that stuff on TV. And he got out and was looking for the grave with me while telling these stories and laughing at at the memories of Buster Keaton. So I guess I would say Keaton feels really alive to me now. And so I feel very proud that, you know, in some small way I've made maybe more people discover him sometimes there's kids at these screenings that I go to and they're laughing. So being part of his legacy has been really an unexpected, great part of coming out with the book.
Nathan Cone Well, you certainly are keeping it alive with this book. Camera Man is wonderful. Dana, thank you so much for being here today. Appreciate your time.
Dana Stevens Thank y'all! Thank you, Nathan.
