My Wonderful World Of Slapstick

Author : Buster Keaton
Publisher : Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1786254964
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Wonderful World Of Slapstick written by Buster Keaton and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over half century ago the society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children complained to Mayor Van Wyck, of New York, that Joe Keaton, a vaudeville actor, was brutally mistreating his five-year old son. At each afternoon and evening performance the child, billed as “The Human Mop”, was slammed on the floor, hurled into the wings, and sometimes banged into bass drums. Unable to find a bruise or scratch on the lad, Mayor Van Wyck refused to ban the act. The “Human Mop” bounced on to worldwide fame as Buster Keaton, one of this century’s greatest comedians. In this intimate autobiography Buster Keaton tells his whole personal and professional story, beginning with his colourful and exciting childhood as the undentable tot in the “Three Keatons” whose proudest boast was having the rowdiest, roughest act in vaudeville. Buster has played with all the great ones, from George M. Cohen and Bojangles Robinson and Al Jolson to Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan and Red Skelton, during his sixty years as a star in vaudeville, silent and talking pictures, night clubs and television. Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle got him into the movies and taught him how to throw a custard pie. Buster could not even keep slapstick out of his eleven months as a draftee in our World War I army. He came out to help create the Golden Age of Comedy with his friends Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Arbuckle, Mack Sennett and the Keystone Cops. Marital troubles and alcoholism once got Buster down, but could not keep him down. MY WONDERFUL WORLD OF SLAPSTICK was written with the collaboration of Charles Samuels, co-author of His Eye Is On the Sparrow, Ethel Waters’ best-selling autobiography. Buster Keaton’s Life Story will enchant and thrill all those who enjoy looking past the glitter and the grease paint into a magnificent performer’s mind and heart.

Author : James Curtis
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0385354223
Total Pages : 832 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Buster Keaton written by James Curtis and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed cultural and film historian James Curtis—a major biography, the first in more than two decades, of the legendary comedian and filmmaker who elevated physical comedy to the highest of arts and whose ingenious films remain as startling, innovative, modern—and irresistible—today as they were when they beguiled audiences almost a century ago. "It is brilliant—I was totally absorbed, couldn't stop reading it and was very sorry when it ended."—Kevin Brownlow It was James Agee who christened Buster Keaton “The Great Stone Face.” Keaton’s face, Agee wrote, "ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was also irreducibly funny. Keaton was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work and . . . he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.” Mel Brooks: “A lot of my daring came from Keaton.” Martin Scorsese, influenced by Keaton’s pictures in the making of Raging Bull: “The only person who had the right attitude about boxing in the movies for me,” Scorsese said, “was Buster Keaton.” Keaton’s deadpan stare in a porkpie hat was as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp and Harold Lloyd’s straw boater and spectacles, and, with W. C. Fields, the four were each considered a comedy king--but Keaton was, and still is, considered to be the greatest of them all. His iconic look and acrobatic brilliance obscured the fact that behind the camera Keaton was one of our most gifted filmmakers. Through nineteen short comedies and twelve magnificent features, he distinguished himself with such seminal works as Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Cameraman, and his masterpiece, The General. Now James Curtis, admired biographer of Preston Sturges (“definitive”—Variety), W. C. Fields (“by far the fullest, fairest and most touching account we have yet had. Or are likely to have”—Richard Schickel, front page of The New York Times Book Review), and Spencer Tracy (“monumental; definitive”—Kirkus Reviews), gives us the richest, most comprehensive life to date of the legendary actor, stunt artist, screenwriter, director—master.

Author : Buster Keaton
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 9781578069637
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Buster Keaton written by Buster Keaton and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweeney collects interviews from the beginning of Buster Keatons career in the 1920s and concludes with his 1950s and 60s television work. The pieces here provide a critical perspective on Keatons acting and cinematic techniques.

Author : Paul Merton
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1409035662
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Silent Comedy written by Paul Merton and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the surface it may seem slightly surprising that a master of verbal humour should also be a devotee of silent comedy, but Paul Merton is completely passionate about the early days of Hollywood comedy and the comic geniuses who dominated it. His knowledge is awesome - as anyone who watched his BBC 4 series Silent Clowns or attended the events he has staged nationwide will agree - his enthusiasm is infectious, and these qualities are to be found in abundance in his book. Starting with the very earliest pioneering short films, he traces the evolution of silent comedy through the 1900s and considers the works of the genre's greatest exponents - Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and Harold Lloyd - showing not only how each developed in the course of their career but also the extent to which they influenced each other. At the same time, Paul brings a comedian's insight to bear on the art of making people laugh, and explores just how the great comic ideas, routines, gags and pratfalls worked and evolved. His first book for ten years, this is destined to be a classic.

Author : Tina Post
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479811246
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Deadpan written by Tina Post and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.

Author : Wes Gehring
Publisher : Indiana Historical Society
ISBN 13 : 0871952750
Total Pages : 397 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Red Skelton written by Wes Gehring and published by Indiana Historical Society. This book was released on 2008 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For twenty years, Hoosier comic Red Skelton entertained millions of viewers who gathered around their television sets to delight in the antics of his notable characters. Gehring examines the man behind the characters-- someone who never let the facts get in the way of a good story. He delves into Skelton's hardscrabble life with a shockingly dysfunctional family in the southern Indiana community of Vincennes, his days on the road on the vaudeville circuit, the comedian's early success on radio, his up-and-down movie career with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and his sometimes tragic personal life.

Author : Tom Paulus
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135966230
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Slapstick Comedy written by Tom Paulus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Chaplin's tramp to the Bathing Beauties slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy's place in film history and American culture.

Author : Matt Phelan
Publisher : Candlewick Press
ISBN 13 : 076365079X
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bluffton written by Matt Phelan and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Scott O'Dell Award-winning graphic artist visualizes the story of young Henry, who in 1908 Muskegon, Michigan, bonds with a young Buster Keaton over games of baseball while the latter summers locally with a troupe of vaudeville performers.

Author : Dana Stevens
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1501134205
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Camera Man written by Dana Stevens and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They were calling it the Twentieth Century -- "She is a little animal, surely" -- "He's my son, and I'll break his neck any way I want to" -- "The locomotive of juveniles" -- A little hell-raising Huck Finn -- The boy who couldn't be damaged -- "Make me laugh, Keaton" -- Speed mania in the kingdom of shadows -- Pancakes at Childs -- Comique -- Roscoe -- Brooms -- Mabel at the wheel -- Famous players in famous plays -- Home, made -- Rice, shoes, and real estate -- The shadow stage -- Battle-scarred risibilities -- One for you, one for me -- The "darkie shuffle" -- The collapsing façade -- Grief slipped in -- The road through the mountain -- Not a drinker, a drunk -- Old times -- The coming thing in entertainment -- Coda: Eleanor.

Author : Gabriella Oldham
Publisher : SIU Press
ISBN 13 : 0809385945
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Keaton's Silent Shorts written by Gabriella Oldham and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2010-08-20 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filling a major gap in the critical canon, Keaton’s Classic Shorts: Beyond the Laughter chronicles the rapid growth in the filmmaker’s understanding of what makes both comedy and film successful. Keaton developed his major themes in these nineteen silent short films shot between 1920 and 1923, creating his persona “Buster” with his trademark stone face. These short films clearly indicate Keaton’s love of the camera and his concern for composition, symmetry, and images that delight the eye and startle the mind. Oldham reconstructs each of these rarely seen films to enable the reader to “watch” Keaton’s performance, devoting a separate chapter to each. She analyzes each film’s strengths, weaknesses, and prevalent themes and threads. She also enables readers to plumb the depths of what seems to be surface comedy through philosophical, biographical, historical, and critical commentary, thus linking the shorts together into a cohesive study of Buster Keaton’s growth through his three-year independent venture as a filmmaker. Beyond the laughter and beyond the great stone face, Oldham presents a treasure of cinema comedy and a unique philosophy of life as captured by a great filmmaker.