Manhattan’s Forgotten Film Studio
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| Buster Keaton (left), Fatty Arbuckle (center), and Al St. John, circa 1917 |
Here, briefly, is the story. In March, 1917, while walking on
Broadway, Buster Keaton bumped into a friend from vaudeville who
happened to know Fatty Arbuckle, the famous silent movie comedian and
Chaplin’s rival. Asked if he had ever acted in motion pictures, Keaton
said no, and was invited to drop by Arbuckle’s studio on 48th Street the
following Monday. Keaton first declined, because Arbuckle had stolen
one of his vaudeville routines in the past, but then changed his mind
because his curiosity was piqued by the opportunity to see how movies
are made and especially how the gags are filmed.
The Comique Film Studio was located in a warehouse at 318-320 East
48th Street, in the tough neighborhood west of the elevated subway
tracks on First Avenue. On the first floor, the Norma Talmadge Film
Corporation was in full swing filming
Poppy. Near the
precariously built sets, a violinist was attempting to put Norma in the
proper mood for a love scene with her leading man. On the second floor,
Norma’s sister Constance, who first gained attention in D.W. Griffith’s
Intolerance,
was making a new comedy. On the third floor Fatty Arbuckle, who was the
first of the silent movie comics to also direct, was at work on a film
called
The Butcher Boy. There was no script. The director, the
actors, and the crew talked over what they were going to do in the next
scene and then did it. Keaton with his elegant, laid-back air improvised
a routine with a broom and was instantly hired.
Keaton
had grown up in show business. His father, Joe, worked in a traveling
show with Harry Houdini called the “Mohawk Indian Medicine Company,”
which in addition to entertaining rubes, sold patent medicine on the
side. Keaton became a part of his parents’ comedy act when he was three.
His mom played the saxophone while he goaded his father, who would
respond by grabbing the boy by the suitcase handle they had sewn to the
back of his jacket and throwing him against the scenery, into the
orchestra pit, and at times even at the hecklers in the audience. So one
might say he had a professional interest in seeing how Arbuckle dealt
with the various acrobatic feats that were the staple of silent comedy.
On April 23, 1917,
The Butcher Boy opened in two hundred
theaters across the country, including the Strand in Times Square, and
soon became a big box office success. Following that, Arbuckle and
Keaton made, I believe, two other films in the same building—
A Reckless Romeo and
Rough House,
the first of which no longer survives as far as I know. The company
then moved to the Biograph Studio on East 175th Street where
Coney Island,
His Wedding Night,
and a couple of others films were made before it relocated to Long
Beach, California in October 1917.
Roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes
long, these shorts, which can be seen on YouTube, are still very funny.
Along with Arbuckle and Keaton, they feature Al St. John, Arbuckle’s
second banana (and nephew), a gangly, loose-limbed acrobat dressed like a
scarecrow who played country bumpkins and various kinds of villains.
Beyond the slapstick and roughhouse typical of the times, the number of
thoroughly original and brilliant comic ideas found in these shorts is
staggering. (See, for instance, the marvelous clip on YouTube of the
boys eating spaghetti in the 1918 film
The Cook.)
Keaton once said that making funny pictures is like assembling a watch;
you have to be sober or it won’t tick. He also said afterward that
everything he knew about film comedy he learned from Fatty Arbuckle, who
by the time they met had already been in some twenty films.
Part of Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle's 48th Street movie studio, now a parking garage
I know a bit about the subject because years ago, I read everything I could find on
Buster Keaton,
and collected his movies and those of other silent movie comedians.
Still, if my son had not lived for a time on First Avenue and 48th
Street and I had not started parking my car at the 20th Century PARKING
GARAGE, which turned out to have been part of the old Comique Film
studio, I would not have made the connection.
Just recently I took a
look at a documentary on Keaton made years ago, which to my shock placed
Arbuckle’s studio in California, though it did not move there till the
fall of 1917. Regardless, I was astonished that the building that held
the studio run by Joseph Schenk was still there. It would be interesting
to find out its history and that of the neighborhood over the decades. I
love the idea that the garage was just three blocks from the United
Nations and that over the years many world leaders and high diplomatic
officials must have ridden past it in their bullet-proof limousines,
throwing a casual glance at the entrance through which, almost a century
earlier, Fatty, Keaton, and St. John went, if they were not already in
the studio whacking each other over the heads with pillows, making
feathers fly out of windows.
A few days ago, I took a stroll during the lunch hour past nail
salons, stores selling cell phones, and pizza joints to take another
look at the building, thinking the only
familiar establishments
in the neighborhood that the members of the Comique Film Corporation
would still recognize are the Irish pub and the funeral parlor. The
garage was still there, but to my surprise and horror I discovered that
the wing of the old warehouse that contained the studio had recently
been torn down and the government of Singapore was raising some kind of
building in its place.
December 7, 2012, 12:18 p.m.
