![]() ![]() ![]() The network balked at the idea of a domestic comedy centered around a couple of mixed race, so the two worked up a live vaudeville routine to be filmed as an experimental pilot. #Buster keaton seriesIn 1950, when CBS was trying to convince Ball to star in a sitcom based on her successful radio series My Favorite Husband, she agreed to sign on only if the show could costar her real-life husband, the Cuban-American bandleader Desi Arnaz-a narrative reenacted in the new feature film, Being the Ricardos. When asked to name the best comedians of the up-and-coming generation he would often cite Ball as one of his “pets,” calling her timing “impeccable.” In fact, Keaton had had a behind-the-scenes role in getting I Love Lucy on the air. Though Keaton never mentioned it by name, among his favorite shows during the 1950s must surely have been the pioneering sitcom I Love Lucy, starring his old friend and onetime MGM protégée Lucille Ball. “The man never left his den,” one of his grandsons stated in an interview. Actor James Karen recalled Keaton watching a show while shouting instructions at the screen as if he were directing it: “Cut! Now move that camera!” Visitors to the San Fernando Valley house he bought with Eleanor in 1956 remembered him in the converted garage he called his “den,” keeping one eye on a tiny black-and-white screen while he held up his typically laconic end of the conversation. In between film jobs, he would sit in front of it for hours, playing solitaire, smoking, and offering a running critique of whatever was on to whoever passed through. #Buster keaton tvThereafter, to visit the Keatons was to hear the TV in the background, always at high volume to compensate for the hearing loss he had suffered since an ear infection during his service in World War I. Soon after encountering TV for the first time, Keaton bought a set for the home he and his wife Eleanor then still shared with his mother and siblings. But by midcentury, after a decade and a half as a behind-the-scenes gag writer at MGM, he was reinventing himself as an innovator in yet another new medium just beginning to discover what it could do: television. In the 1930s, the coming of sound to motion pictures, combined with Keaton’s disastrous drinking problem and crumbling first marriage, put his career and life on the skids for a few years. That said, Keaton spent the 1920s as the all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The Cameraman, and The General. #Buster keaton skinAfter a childhood spent as the juvenile star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville, he moved with remarkable seamlessness to even greater success in the still-new medium of film as a director, star, stuntman, and editor.Īhead of his time in myriad ways, Keaton was unfortunately very much a product of the ambient racism of the Jim Crow era, as discussed in an entire chapter of Camera Man on the use of blackface, redface, and other ethnic “humor” in his films indeed film historian Daniel Moews counted 18 instances of jokes in Keaton’s oeuvre related to skin color or ethnicity. As if by destiny, Buster Keaton came into the world in 1895, the same year the Lumière brothers screened the first publicly shown motion pictures. ![]()
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