BUSTER KEATON: I did that picture [The Butcher Boy in 1917], and I was fascinated by everything there was about motion pictures. The first thing I did, I wanted to get in the cutting room, see how they put the scenes together, in the projecting room, and tear a camera to pieces, and everything else.
TONY THOMAS: It was love at first sight with pictures?
BUSTER KEATON: Yes.
1960
“A month later Butcher Boy is released at Loew’s American down on Eighth Avenue. I don’t tell anyone, but I’m personally far from sure that I’ll do in the movies. So I buy a ticket, go in alone, and get an aisle seat.
Comes that scene; the sack is in the air; I stand half up in my excitement and suddenly - pow! - I - that’s me myself, not me on the screen - I’m flat on my neck in the theatre aisle. Now hear this: I got up and sat down in my seat again, honestly, without realizing what had happened. Then I heard Arbuckle laugh. That bastard had slipped in the theatre and sat down behind me. He waited for that scene. At the very second that sack landed on the screen, he bopped me in the back of the neck. I was bruised a bit because I wasn’t set for the fall, but it did one thing: it pounded it into my head that I would do in pix.”
- Buster Keaton
wow why were you so devastatingly gorgeous • The Saphead Edition
~ Annie Wu
This one is making me especially jealous of her skills.
October 12, 1965: Buster Keaton is piggybacked by a construction worker in Toronto, where he appeared in an industrial safety film short (The Scribe, released in 1966) commissioned by the Construction Safety Association of Ontario. The Scribe would be the last film to ever feature Keaton, who died almost four months later on February 1, 1966.
The Navigator
Buster Keaton finds himself at the mercy of a tiny cannon in The Navigator (1924)
(Source: haroldlloyds)