Joe would then give both the audience and his son a more practical tutorial on day-to-day parenting by seizing the suitcase handle Myra had sewed to the back of her son’s costume and flinging the boy against whatever backdrop, curtain, or piece of scenery was available. ![]() (“Father hates to be rough,” went a common opening line.) In what became the template for their act for years to come, Buster’s continued interruptions-sometimes verbal, but most often taking the form of some prop-based provocation or audience-distracting piece of upstage business-would cause Joe to wheel around and witness his authority being flouted. Just nine months later, during the family’s first paid engagement as a trio at the Wonderland Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, Buster got laughs by bouncing that ball off his father’s head as the old man stood downstage, holding forth on the importance of patience and gentleness to proper child rearing. ![]() ![]() The basketball would have a long life as a Keaton prop. The answer: after Joe and Myra’s acrobatics-and-cornet duo act had flopped hard at Tony Pastor’s continuous-vaudeville house in early December (as Joe himself would later concede in one of the columns he occasionally contributed to the New York Dramatic Mirror, “the act didn’t go… ’twas bad”), 1 he had somehow wrangled them a year-end week of bookings at the prestigious Proctor’s chain, earning the cash to buy the ball for his boy. Of course, Buster was still too young to grasp what it meant for one century to turn into the next, or for that matter what it meant that his parents-who had struggled so hard to find work in New York that winter that the three Keatons had at times gone cold and hungry-were suddenly flush enough to buy him such a lavish present. New Year’s Eve 1899 must have felt momentous even if you weren’t a four-year-old backstage at Proctor’s Twenty-Third Street Theater, still buzzing from last week’s Christmas gift: a big brown stitched-leather ball meant for playing an American game less than a decade old, which was just beginning to organize into professional leagues. (Photo courtesy of Bob and Minako Borgen) ExcerptĬhapter 1: They Were Calling It the Twentieth Century 1 They Were Calling It the Twentieth Century Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton’s life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman.Įven through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton’s life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton’s unique creative genius in the context of his time.īorn the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and NPR
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