The most well-known clip from Buster Keaton’s long career comes from the final act of his 1928 feature Steamboat Bill, Jr. In the midst of hurricane-force winds, Keaton stands with his back to a house. The home’s two-ton façade falls away, and Keaton—surely to be crushed—is spared by an open second-floor window that seems impossibly small for his frame. The clip, equally hilarious and terrifying, is everywhere. It’s part of every silent-movie highlight reel. It’s a smart-phone GIF. It’s a Simpsons’ couch gag.
The stunt is executed with such equanimity and aplomb, it’s difficult, nearly a century later, to appreciate its inherent danger. Co-director Charles Reisner “prayed off in a corner” with a fellow Christian Science practitioner rather than watch the scene be filmed. The on-set camera operators cranked out the film with their backs turned. Keaton’s wife Eleanor would later describe his state of mind that day as “quasi-suicidal.”
“I was mad at the time,” Keaton later confessed, “or I never would have done the thing.”
What Dana Stevens’ new book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (Atria Books) adds to this familiar image is a rich context. The day before the stunt was filmed, Keaton learned that his independent studio was about to be shut down. He was wrapping up the final feature on which he would have complete creative control. “There is a fateful rightness,” Stevens writes, “about the convergence of Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s hallucinatory finale, in which the falling façade is only one of many disintegrating shelters, and the storm that is about to rip through Keaton’s professional and personal life.”
What followed for Keaton was a famously insulting stint as a contract player at MGM, where he withered under Louis B. Mayer’s growing scrutiny and antipathy. Rather than writing and directing his own films, the creator of such classics as Sherlock Jr. and The General was obliged to defer to lesser talents—including Zion Myers and Jules White (Sidewalks of New York) whose only prior experience was directing trained canines in MGM’s All Barkie Dogville Comedies.
After a few years of passive-aggressive, alcohol-fueled antics—and the failing health of Irving Thalberg, the only MGM executive who had an inkling of his wasted talent—Keaton was fired by Louis B. Mayer in an impersonal memo. Keaton drank excessively. He burned through a marriage or two.
That sort of backgrounding, I think, is Stevens’ great strength as a writer and critic, and it’s what makes Camera Man so beguiling. Chapter after chapter, she provides crucial context and playful sidelights that affix a whole new resonance to much of the familiar Keaton lore. Camera Man is a work of ravenous curiosity, which feels—and this is intended as high praise—like an unhurried afternoon of spelunking Wikipedia rabbit holes. The book returns again and again to Keaton and his work, but the telling is seasoned with savory asides—Samuel Goldwin’s birth surname was Goldfish; Allen Ginsburg once watched Keaton on-location and mentioned the experience in a poem—and wonderfully engaging deeper dives into such sundry subjects as child labor law, the creation of the studio system, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the history of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Equally refreshing is the way Stevens gently recasts Keaton’s lifetime arc. Unlike many previous biographies, she argues that Keaton’s story may not be the familiar one of early brilliance followed by years of failure and self-destruction. She reframes his story as a tale of tireless, prescient reinvention. As a child, Keaton’s brilliance as an innovator and performer elevated his family act to the heights of vaudeville success. As a young man he achieved the same dizzying mastery in the nascent world of film. Finally, while many of his peers shunned the new medium of television, Keaton immediately grasped its potential as “the coming thing in entertainment.” Lucille Ball credited him as her mentor, and he thrived doing guest spots in everything from Candid Camera to The Twilight Zone.
“His life,” Stevens writes, “with miraculous elegance, happened to coincide with the invention of a technology that records the very thing he was unsurpassed at: movement. And so he is out there to be seen, streaming past us on every conceivable platform, still and always ahead of his time.”
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