When they began shooting The Butcher Boy on the morning of March 19, 1917, Buster had already worked out business for the first half of the film, which was to take place in the bustling interior of a general store. I plan out the pictures, and we rehearse them-that’s all.” “I wouldn’t know what to do with a manuscript in my hand. “Not a scrap of scenario paper in my studio,” Arbuckle said. Nevertheless, to writer Anita Loos it was “ramshackle to a degree,” a place seemingly thrown together on the fly. The cost of lighting gear alone was said to have run $35,000. The result was two vast stages, each 100 by 125 feet, reputedly making it the largest such facility in the East. Contemplating a production slate that called for six features a year from his wife and eight to twelve shorts from Arbuckle, Schenck secured a four-story plant on East 48th Street, the former home of the Paper Novelty Manufacturing Company, and poured $100,000 into equipping it for moviemaking. The result was his second picture, Panthea, which opened on Broadway at advanced prices and began Talmadge’s impressive climb to stardom.īy then, Schenck had married her and contracted with comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle to make a series of comedy shorts. He had the instincts of a gambler, though, and lured actress Norma Talmadge away from Triangle with the lavish promise of $1,000 a week, her own production company, and 25 percent of the profits. Schenck was new to the movie business, having produced his first film, a feature titled Lost Souls, the previous year. I took my gamble and cast my lot with the pictures.” I had been traveling on the road for over 20 years. “One feature of the films did appeal to me, and that was that it would mean staying in one place for a while. “I had no more idea than anyone else at the time what the growth of pictures was to be,” Buster said. Gradually, movies gained in importance, and in 1916 the Telegraph suggested the record business at Loew’s American Roof wasn’t due to the Keatons or the other live acts on the bill, but rather Charlie Chaplin’s The Floorwalker, which was shown at the conclusion of the program. Other brands proliferated-Lifeograph, Kinetograph, Casinograph, Cineomatograph-most offering thrilling scenes of fires, races, demolitions, beauty pageants, and occasional story pictures like The Great Train Robbery. Spoor’s Kinodrome was an attraction along the Orpheum trail. At Dockstader’s it was Siegmund Lubin’s Cineograph Keith’s had the large-format Biograph Tony Pastor’s longtime choice was the Vitagraph (which made its public debut there in 1896) and George K. Moving pictures, or “flickers,” as Joe Keaton dismissively called them, had been on the bills of vaudeville houses since the very beginning of Buster’s career. “He wanted to know,” said Buster, “if I wanted to try the movies.” Schenck, who had started producing his own movies, told Buster he was making some two-reel comedies. But in 1928, and again in 1930, he said it was Joseph Schenck, the booking manager for Marcus Loew and the man who introduced The Three Keatons to small-time vaudeville. In the early 1950s he told biographer Rudi Blesh it was an old vaudevillian named Lou Anger, and he repeated the claim in his 1960 autobiography. It was sometime in March, just prior to the start of rehearsals for The Passing Show, that Buster encountered someone he knew on the streets of Manhattan.
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