This historical reprint was published in conjunction with the program of Roscoe Arbuckle short films—Fatty + Buster—at A Day of Silents 2019
“I make up my own plays. I don’t write them. I make them up as I go along. By the time I’m through I have about 15,000 feet of film—and all I need is 2,000 feet. I’ve got to skim the cream off that milk.”
“I don’t believe you can put a story over to an audience unless you have succeeded in first getting their complete sympathy. They must be quick to rejoice in your good fortune, and as quick to shed tears at your mishaps.”
“The same plot can be done over and over again in the so-called features but the comedy without new gags is a failure. That’s why most comedy directors, after a while in the business, go around talking to themselves instead of giving out interviews.”
“My first role was a ‘fat part!’ Salary? Fifty cents. When I asked for the job they told me to go home and get my shoes and stockings but I knew my mother wouldn’t let me come back. So they blacked my legs and feet, too. I knew I’d get a licking when I got home. From then till 1913 I was on the stage. I did everything from singing illustrated songs to clown and acrobatic acts. I was considered ‘fair,’ like the rest of them.”
“I was in dramatic, and principally musical, stock most of the time. My first real professional engagement was in 1904, singing illustrated songs for Sid Grauman at the Unique theater, San Jose, at $17.50 a week. I played character stuff in Morosco’s Burbank stock company here, and went all through China and Japan with Ferris Hartman in musical comedy. I played the Mikado, and Koko, and Katish—a female of the species.”
“I got my first movie job at $40 a week with Keystone. For a month I walked around out there without working. Every time I turned around, Sennett was looking at me. To this day I guess he doesn’t think I’m funny. I played mostly policemen in the two or three hundred pictures I was in at Keystone, but I played everything from cops to GRAND DAMES. Mabel Normand and Ford Sterling were there, and Sennett and Henry Lehrman were the directors. All my mechanical knowledge of pictures I learned under the direction of Lehrman.”
“How did I become a star? I don’t know how it happened. It just happened. When I look at my old pictures I can’t tell how it happened!”
“I’VE NEVER USED MY WEIGHT TO GET A LAUGH YET! You never saw me stuck in a doorway or stuck in a chair. Of course, the audience remarks about the agility on account of the weight.”
“I’d a heap rather make people laugh than make ’em cry. It’s a darned sight harder to do. Sometimes I think I’ve picked out the worst job in sight. If you don’t believe me, try to be funny for thirty solid minutes yourself. After that you’ll want to be a villain or a vampire just by way of a little relaxation.”
“You only star in movies from picture to picture. If two or three pictures are bad, you’re not a star any more. It’s a constant worry. That’s why movie people are temperamental. It’s a terrible strain!”
“I have all the money I want and at the conclusion of my present contract, I will stop making pictures myself. While I am east, I am having ‘Buster’ Keaton make a picture on his own. Let ’em all have a chance. I don’t want to be hoggish.”
“In the subdued light of the movies you can be by yourself. There is nobody paying attention to you whatsoever. Even if they could see you in the darkened auditorium, they wouldn’t look at you for fear of missing a scene. And when you laugh you laugh wholeheartedly and do not give a hang about the fellow across the aisle. And if your tear ducts are tapped by a bit of pathos you don’t have to hide your face behind a program and furtively wipe your eyes … The chances are the lady in the adjoining seat is weeping to her heart’s content, but you can’t see and you don’t care. After all, it is merely another triumph for the democracy of the screen over the autocracy of the stage.”
Excerpted from stories that appeared 1917–1919 in the New York Sun, Picture-Play, Photoplay, the Los Angeles Herald, Variety, and Motion Picture News.