My Old Kentucky Blog recently highlighted two of the films nominated for this year’s Oscar in the short-animations category. One of them really struck me, and I think it will really strike you as well — if you are someone who’s ever had a little jolt of excitement at opening a new book… or dreamt of adding one to the bookshelves yourself: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. (Note: it’s fifteen minutes long — fifteen well-spent minutes long.)
The filmmakers, Moonbot Studios, explicitly grant credit to their sources of inspiration: ”in equal measures… Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books.” (As MOKB notes, you can find traces of Up there, too.)
Is it OK to say this? I have a violent antipathy to Buster Keaton. I think he scared me, disturbed me as a very young child, and I’ve never been able to rid myself of that sense of… finding him just completely unlikeable and unfunny and very, very creepy.
I have over time learned to like a lot of his movies – especially The General, of course. But I’ve never been able to get over wishing that someone else was in them.
And so, when I find a perfectly nice little animated fable that adopts a Keaton-esque figure for its lead… my flesh is crawling a bit.
With Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin or even W.C. Fields I would have been just fine. But with this Keaton geek I had this constant sense of unease.
I can’t eat fish either. I was frightened by a mackerel at the age of four.
“I was frightened by a mackerel at the age of four” has to be one of the funniest comments I’ll ever get.
It may depend on what film you first saw him in. He had roles in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), for example, filmed when he was in his late 60s, and — in appearance, at least — a bit dour. Actually, now that I think about it, he really didn’t smile much at all, ever, did he? (Hmm… see snopes.com.)
[More later.]
I did see those two late Keaton appearances when I was young, but I don’t think I was bothered by them so much. In fact, I think I quite enjoyed them. Perhaps it was because he was an isolated element of those films – a throwaway reference, really, to his previous career – rather than a dominating presence. Or perhaps because he wasn’t so zombie-creepy in colour as he was in black-and-white.
I think what freaked me out was my early exposure to some of his 1920s shorts. It was probably in The Golden Silents, one of the first TV shows I can ever remember watching, in the late ’60s or early ’70s on BBC1: a roundup of excerpts from classic early cinema, hosted by Michael Bentine – one of the famous radio comedy troupe The Goons. I can’t now remember, but I assume it was all, or nearly all comedy stuff.
Back in those days, silent and black-and-white films were still considered respectable popular fodder, even good children’s entertainment in weekday late afternoon or Saturday morning slots. By the time I was 10, I’d seen very nearly all of Chaplin’s shorts, and a lot of Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle and so on as well. And lots and lots of Laurel & Hardy: their stuff was in constant rotation through the first half of the ’70s, and I must have seen The Music Box a dozen times at least – not that I’m complaining.
Some people say there is a fundamental split in the world between people who love Chaplin and those who hate him. There is a corollary thesis that Keaton is worthier of the near-universal adulation that Chaplin seems to get; and thus, perhaps, Chaplin-lovers more-or-less equate to Keaton-haters and vice versa. Rowan Atkinson is firmly in the Keaton camp. You might know that he devoted an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth to highlighting his scorn for Chaplin. He also once delivered a lecturette on Chaplin’s supposed shortcomings, and the superiority of Keaton (I think, as part of one of the biennial ‘Comedy Relief’ telethons). His argument, I dimly recall, was something to do with the ‘comic persona’ or ‘comic attitude’: he seemed to think that likeable people weren’t very interesting for comedy.
I wasn’t convinced then, and have become less and less so, the more I think about it. I see where the idea was coming from. I think another of his examples was WC Fields. I see how the curmudgeon, the cynic, the misanthropist is a meatier character than the shy, bumbling innocent, the perpetual put-upon good guy. I see how Chaplin is often too bland, too mawkish, and you’re half rooting for the bewhiskered villain who’s beating him up. I just don’t see how any of that applies to Keaton, whose screen persona did seem to be that bland, shy, bumbling innocent – but without any of the charm.
I don’t think you can make deadpan your whole shtick (Steven Wright might be a lone counter-example; but I think there’s a lot more range and subtlety to what he does). If your character is permanently emotionally unresponsive: a) no audience empathy/identification is generated; and b) there’s no clear sense of motivation for anything he does.
I happened to see a snippet of a Keaton film in a US diner place in Beijing just recently, and he was even worse than I remembered: getting into violent confrontations and exacerbating potentially lethal situations without any apparent reason, through sheer dumb stupidity, and with little or no apparent recognition of or response to how bad things were getting. I found it painful to watch
With this ghost-faced geek, I’m afraid I simply never care what’s going to happen to him, I find almost everyone else on the screen more interesting to look at, and I resent the fact that he’s supposed to be my focus of attention throughout the film.
And, also, he frightens me. It’s that zombie thing, I suppose.
Although, in fact, I was creeped out by him long before I had any conception of zombies. When I first saw Night Of The Living Dead, I think I wailed, “Oh NO – they’re being besieged by an army of Buster Keatons! This is my worst nightmare!!”
Harold Lloyd, on the other hand, I love. He’s my favourite screen comedy star of the silent era.
He went through a big revival back in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
I think my first exposure was through an exquisite 13-part ITV series called Hollywood, reappraising the artistry of the silent cinema with a lot of recently rediscovered and/or restored footage. That was the work of David Gill and Kevin Brownlow, who’ve been instrumental in restoring and reissuing a number of great ‘lost’ classics, like Abel Gance’s Napoleon. I was completely enraptured by that series on early Hollywood (when I was 14, 15?), and I would love to be able to find it again on DVD. The score by Carl Davis was gorgeous (I had it – have it, somewhere – on vinyl), and would probably cause dampening of the eyes if I heard it again. The series closed with a quote from Douglas Fairbanks Snr on the arrival of sound technology: “The romance of motion picture making ends here.” After those thirteen magical weeks, I could completely see what he meant. I believe I cried just a little bit at that moment – for the end of the series at least, if not for the end of the silent era.
Gill and Brownlow went on to do shorter series analysing the work of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. I think they got to Harold last, and called his series The Third Genius, to emphasise that, despite being long overlooked, almost forgotten, he deserved to be honoured right up alongside those two household names of the genre.
Very shortly after the Hollywood series, a bunch of Lloyd’s material was re-issued in a 15 or 20-minute format ideal for TV filler; not even complete shorts, but just anthologies of random scenes from his various films. That was a teatime treat on BBC2 for a year or so. And it seemed to have been such a success, that the channel then acquired rights to his feature-length films and started showing those too.
His character was more normal, more relatable than either Chaplin or Keaton, I found: less desperately eager-to-please than Charlie, less lobotomized than Buster. The physical stunts were at a whole other level, too. And he seemed to make more use of the cinematic medium than those other two: lots of very clever edits and sight gags and so on.
Oh yes, I’m a big fan. That classic image of him hanging off the clockface: I had a poster of that on my bedroom wall at college.
That Hollywood mini-series, alas, apparently was never REALLY released on DVD. (Wikipedia says it was briefly released that way in the UK, but they had to pull it from distribution because of the tangle of rights associated with all those names…)
That said, you may be in luck. Part 1, at least, is on YouTube.
I had a favorite film series something like that. Called Film Odyssey, it ran on US public TV in the 1970s and was hosted by Charles Champlin, a long-time critic for (I think) the L.A. Times. It wasn’t much about silents, at all; what it was about was international classics. My first viewing of Rules of the Game, The Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal… (Complete listing in a forum post here.) Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’d ever seen ANY of the films in the series before its broadcast.
And I still remember the violin music which opened and closed each episode, although I’ve forgotten the title and composer!
And it’s quite true about the fish.
A mackerel fishing excursion when I was a small child, in a very small boat off the south coast of England. I was both exhilarated and terrified about being sundered from the land for the first time (I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate fascination with the sea, perhaps even before this); and intrigued by this idea that we were looking for these strange elusive creatures hiding far below our feet.
But then we happened upon a shoal, and started landing them in numbers – using long, thick lines with multiple hooks on them. It hardly seemed fair: no actual skill involved. And I found fish very unsettling. I don’t think we ever ate them at home. And I’d probably never seen a live one, certainly not at close quarters – except maybe a tiny goldfish here or there.
So, when one of the mackerel squirmed off its hook just as it was being hauled onboard, it was quite a shock to me. It plopped right at my feet. And someone yelled at me to catch it, to pick it up – because, on this boat, there was quite a gap between the edge of the planking of the deck and the hull, and so this fairly small fish would easily slip through down into the bilges. It seemed to be wriggling in that direction for all it was worth.
Of course, knowing nothing about fish, I had no idea what their convulsive writhing would feel like in my little hand; or that they had such a distinctive odour, which no amount of washing would completely remove; or that they were so SLIMY, and that their translucent scales would come off all over your hand.
Yep, I was plenty freaked out enough by that moment. And further freaked out by my parents’ apparent unconcern or incomprehension of my trauma.
Then, that evening, I was woken up and frogmarched out of bed to join the dinner table to sample some of the fish that “I had helped to catch”. I was really not up for that, for so many reasons: being half asleep, being haunted by the fish’s dying wriggles in my hand, being wary of new food at the best of times. But I was forced – forced – to try a mouthfull. And I nearly choked to death on a bone.
Fish – all seafood – has made me vomit spectactularly whenever I’ve tried it since. I’m sure it’s psychosomatic, but….
Thanks John. I don’t know how you find these things, but I’m so grateful you do. Thanks for reminding me about the fact that even if I’m not writing, I’m surrounded by books that are just begging me to interact with them.
At first I tried to understand it logically, but it’s impossible and totally captivating and flies you away.
And clearly an author’s parable: if you write it – it will fly ( and help others to do so, too).
oh, yeah, and thanks, too.
I loved the moment when he sleepy-fell off the open book. I was reminded of Dick Van Dyke.
And books do fly off more than just shelves! Totally enchanting. :)
Saw that last week, too, but if I’d come here first, I would have seen it earlier. :) Love the “surgery” scene.
The video made me cry.