James Curtis - Buster Keaton: A Filmmakers Life

SEPTEMBER 23, 1964

T HE MAN IN THE PORK PIE HAT is unhappy. His head down, arms akimbo, he paces grimly as a documentary crew captures him on film.

What happened? he is asked from off camera. Didnt he tell you what he was going to do?

No, I didnt know he shifted gags on me.

What did you expect it was going to be?

Buster Keaton strikes a match, shielding it from the wind as he lights a cigarette. I thought I was going to be fouled up with the map cause I decided that last night. And he decided not to. I didnt know it.

The setting is a trestle spanning the Little Saskatchewan Valley, a bridge that, when it was built, was the longest of its kind in Western Canada. On its single track, Keaton, in his by-now-familiar costume of hat, coat, vest, and string tie, is to be piloting a speeder, a little two-cylinder track car that carries him along at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour. The question is what he should be doing as he crosses the trestle, which rises some ninety feet above the valley floor. His director, animator Gerald Potterton, has asked that he cross while doing his laundry, the idea being that he never leaves the moving vehicle from the time he boards it on the coast of Nova Scotia until he reaches Vancouver and the Pacific Ocean, a journey of more than 3,800 miles. Keaton, however, thinks he should be bunched up in a map so that his character isnt aware he is in danger.

The idea had taken form the previous day. Beautiful trestle bridge, said Potterton as he entered Keatons private car, a seven-compartment sleeper on loan from Canadian National Railways. Gerry Potterton and a company of nine were in the middle of making a twenty-four-minute color subject for the National Film Board called The Railrodder. Simultaneously, a 16mm documentary on the making of the film was being shot under the title Buster Keaton Rides Again. Potterton and his cameraman, Robert Humble, had made an advance trip in August in which the men identified likely settings for their breezy travelogue, and the historic trestle just outside Rivers offered the chance for any number of gags.

Keaton had an idea: Now, I get out the map. Once I get it pretty well open and the wind catches it, its going to wrap around me. So I cross that trestle wrapped up in a paper, standin up in the car, fightin the paper.

Potterton was apprehensive. Ill tell you the locality is fine he hedged, hoping to change the subject. Keaton was a master of physical comedy, and racing along a trestle in an open car didnt begin to approach some of the signature stunts he had done over his long career. But he was also just days from his sixty-ninth birthday and, though solidly built, in fragile health.

It might be the funniest way to do it, Keaton mused.

Theres another thing come along, said Potterton, pointing out the window. See those little houses over here?

Yeah.

Well, in those houses live little speeders, about six of them.

Oh, I see.

Imagine this: a long shot of the bridge, and suddenly, from left to right, three or four of these other little box speeders all come overch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch

Thats a single-track trestle?

Yeah, single track. Yeah. They go acrossch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chslight hold, and they all reverse, going like madch-ch-ch-chand youre there, waving them on.

You mean I chase them off.

Chase them off. Next shot, you cut to those little houses. The four guys come in very quickly, stop, take them off the tracks, and you justwhoosh!shoot through. And thats the sequence.

And they all look out at the same time.

Yes, exactly.

Keaton, though, was not easily dissuaded. I dont know why, he said, but I like thatcleaning house, I get out the map to look at it just as I hit the trestle. Gettin on it and gettin scared is not gonna mean anything.

Ill get my pad because I want to draw it, and Ill show you what were going to do. Potterton begins to sketch the scene. This is the shot with the bridge. We get the valley like that, this damn great big bridge

Why arent these two gags the same thing? wondered Keaton, acting it out. I dont know. I put my broom down and everything else. Now I wonder where I am? Out with the map, and once I get it opened, Im helpless. Well, now your shot goin across that trestle is all the funnierIm chasin em but fightin the paper at the same time.

Yeah.

Im fightin the paper and goin past, and four heads come out and look. I dont know Ive chased em out. I dont know Ive crossed a dangerous place either. They dont feel like bein run into, so itll all work out.

It was a test of wills between a fledgling director and a world-renowned comedian, the sort of match that in Hollywood wouldnt end well for a young man with just one live-action short to his credit. But Keaton was never one to throw his weight around, even at times when the quality of the picture was at stake. He would grouse, pace, complain, but in the end he would do what he was told, even when he knew it was wrong.

Buster Keaton was a gentle soul, so quiet and unassuming it was easy to forget he had been making the world laugh since the age of five. On-screen, he was a tabula rasa of emotionless energy onto which audiences could project their own aspirations, triumphs, and misfortunes. To James Agee, his unsmiling face ranked with Lincolns as an early American archetypehaunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny. The French called him Malec, the Poles Zbysco, and in Iceland he was known as Glo-Go. At some point the Great Stone Face ceased being a work of nature as defined by Nathaniel Hawthorne and attached itself to him so thoroughly it could easily have been his legal name.

Keatons authority on the set of The Railrodder comes not only from his stature as one of the screens great silent clownsin the opinion of many, greater even than Charlie Chaplinbut also as a world-class filmmaker with a string of nineteen short comedies and twelve masterful features to his credit. Just prior to the start of shooting, in fact, the