Dana Stevens on her new Buster Keaton book Camera Man

Dana Stevens. // Courtesy Dana Stevens

Thanks to animated GIFs, you’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that silent movie star and Picqua, Kansas native, Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton IV, died in 1966 at the age of 70.

With several of his classic movies readily available on home video or YouTube, the comic known for his stoic onscreen demeanor and bone crunching stunts is still a star and may be more popular than ever.

Keaton, aka “The Great Stone Face,” starred in and directed a series of technically challenging and side-splitting movies like The General, Sherlock Jr., and Our Hospitality. He’s also influenced filmmakers and performers as diverse as Dick Van Dyke, Jackie Chan, Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks, and Johnny Knoxville.

Slate critic Dana Stevens’ new book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, documents Keaton’s life and how his movies and stunts both reflected and changed the 20th century. Speaking by phone from New York, Stevens explains how Keaton came to be bigger than any screen displaying his face.

The Pitch: What do you think appeals to you about Keaton’s movies and artistry that you’d produce a 300-page book?

Dana Stevens: For one thing, I had kind of already devoted years of my life—maybe not to explicitly researching a book—just reading and watching things out of curiosity and for pleasure over a course of two decades before I even decided to write a book, then I signed a contract and started writing it.

So, that kind of passion and enthusiasm was already there. It was more a matter of expanding my reading and starting to look at the context that he comes from, and figuring out a perspective that I want to take on his work that I haven’t seen, and following my own curiosity in that way.

What do you think has led so many generations of people to his work?

He’s just one of the greatest artists that America has produced. Something fascinating about his artistry in particular is that he didn’t think of himself as an artist at all. 

He didn’t set out to explore any great themes or make any great statements. He was a craftsman of comedy who wanted to make people laugh and really knew how to do nothing else except make people laugh and spent his whole life figuring out devising new creative, interesting, funny ways to do that.

So, once you start reading about his life in conjunction with his work, he’s just an enormously sympathetic person. He’s not a saint. He had lots of flaws and could have made different choices that would have made his life and career go better.

But he is an enormously sympathetic figure and someone whose life and work kind of came together in ways that are fascinating to think about.

One of the really interesting things about the book is that you frame a lot of it around his debut short, One Week. Why is this something that should be part of a person’s viewing regimen?

I think One Week deserved a chapter just because it’s one of his great achievements. It’s also his first independent production with the Buster Keaton Studio. So, it’s his debut, in a way, as a solo filmmaker, even though—as the book goes into detail about—he had already been an entertainer and a filmmaker with [Roscoe] Arbuckle.

One Week was just a good place to do something that I tried to do throughout the book, which is take his work and his life and frame them in a way that illustrates something about American history and culture at that time.

One Week tells us about the 1920s, or the real estate boom, and the migration of people from the country to the city.

There’s a fact that didn’t make it into the book but really belongs in that chapter, which is that the 1920 census, you know, this is the year that when we came out it was the first time more people were living in cities than in rural places in the U.S. So, it’s often cited in histories of urbanization as this important landmark year. 

Obviously, Keaton was not aware of that and was trying to express anything about the census data of that year, but he was a person of his time who was, you know, pulling things from the world around him to make his art.

And I think One Week is just a great illustration of that in addition to just being hugely crowd pleasing. I’ve shown it a few times now on the big screen for book events, and it just never fails to kill.

Many silent stars lost their careers in the 1930s because their voices didn’t match their looks, but Keaton had no problem with dialogue and could even sing. Camera Man shows that other factors derailed his career during that time.

I think how different performers’ voices sounded is a much less important factor in whose careers foundered at that moment than people tend to think. 

Greta Garbo had a Swedish accent. Production people were afraid that would harm her career when sound came. Instead, she became even more famous. Her voice was part of her mystique.

Clara Bow is often cited as being somebody whose Brooklyn accent was what ruined her career. There were many other factors in all of those cases, including just changing tastes.

In Keaton’s case, and this is part of what the middle third or so of the book is about, it was neither his voice nor really changing tastes because the movies that he made at MGM—those early talkies that he made were so terrible but were successful, financially. In fact, they were more successful than almost all of his independent silent productions.

So it wasn’t a matter of him, you know, losing popularity or going out of style. It wasn’t because he had the wrong voice. I really think in his case, it was because of just a really stark mismatch between his style of comedy, his way of making comedy, and what the studio factory system demanded of performers.

You know, it was just a terrible idea to take him to MGM in the first place. And that meshed really badly with his character. 

He had this kind of characterological passivity. He had always worked in this particular way, basically with almost family members, or with a crew that he treated like family and in a small independent unit.

And then he suddenly found himself, plugged into a factory system as a contract player—he was miserable. He didn’t know what he was doing. No one knew what to do with him, and all of those factors together are what made that transition so terrible for him.

You talked about changing tastes. He later revived his career on television in projects like a Gogol adaptation called The Awakening and in a Twilight Zone episode. 

He was very suited to that early era of TV before it sort of became this massive consumer drug it started to be perceived as later. When I was growing up, TV was the boob tube.

Early TV really didn’t have that vibe at all because there were a lot of live events, live theater, or live vaudeville performances. It was a place for experimentation with something like The Awakening.

It’s hard to imagine something like that being made now, in a one hour teleplay based on a Gogol short story that has an old vaudeville star playing a straight dramatic role. They were kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall.

There were lots of interesting things from that first decade and a half of TV, and he was artistically excited by that environment, as opposed to the studio factory system.

You also document how many other contributors to the rise of cinema have been forgotten. A lot of film geeks aren’t familiar with Frances Marion, Mary Pickford, Lois Weber, or Alice Guy-Blaché. All of those women were essential to the dawn of cinema, but their work and their legacy hasn’t been properly studied.

So to me, that chapter belongs there precisely because it’s the missing piece of that history. It’s true that chapter does not directly overlap with Keaton’s life in too many ways.

He was not involved with Mabel Normand’s career, for example, who’s the main focus of that chapter in the way that Chaplin or Arbuckle was. Two other big characters in the book worked with her, and he never did, but I was interested in her and the women in the teens in general.

This kind of change is happening between the wild west days of the teens, when film was sort of new enough that anybody who had a good idea could get a production company, including women, into a boys club, because suddenly it was a very successful business. 

And that was where the money was. It was really obvious that it was going to become a new nexus of power.

You dealt with a Black minstrel who was a huge influence on Keaton, and Keaton even cited him in that Studs Terkel interview.

Oh, the Bert Williams chapter. That was something that emerged in the course of research for me. Perhaps I knew the name, but I didn’t really know much about Bert Williams when I started. And then his name just started to come up everywhere.

He’s mentioned in several anecdotes and in Keaton’s autobiography, because he admired his work, and their lives criss-crossed during his childhood in vaudeville.

When I started looking into what it meant to wear blackface in the first quarter of the 20th century—in order to talk about the various scenes and Keaton’s work where there’s some sort of racial joke—Bert Williams came up again and again as a Black performer who wore blackface from the turn of the century onward, even after that started to become controversial among other Black performers.

He continued to regard that as part of his character and almost part of his mask, and he even wrote about that. He’s just such a compelling performer in himself. I mean, his music is still great to listen to for his storytelling.

You know, these records all still survive and are really easy to find streaming online. I’ll just put on Bert Williams and cook some dinner, because he’s a great performer and not enough people listen to him or watch the few films he appeared in anymore.

Do you think that you have to cover movies like Keaton’s differently than you would if somebody assigned you to see The Batman?

Sure. It’s a very different writing process, which at times during the very slow process of getting this book done, used to drive me crazy. I would think, on a regular basis for Slate, I turn out a thousand words a day. I do that practically every week for a new movie. You have 24 hours. 

And yet, very often writing this book, I would spend an entire day at my laptop working away and have 300 more words at the end of the day, because for one thing, it’s historical research.

So ,you’re stopping to go and look things up a lot more often, but also it’s not consumer service writing. I’m not telling people thumbs up or thumbs down. Is Buster Keaton good? We’re starting from the notion that this is a legendary figure in film history.

I’m trying to interpret in, I hope, a deeper way than what I would do when I’m telling people whether or not to go to a movie. Also, spoilers can figure into it. When a movie is a hundred years old, I’m not going to tiptoe around revealing,

Although, once in a while in the book, as with the One Week chapter, I do say, “Hold on, reader. Put down the book, and go watch the movie right now, because the joke gets this across much better than my description of the joke ever could.”

Keaton’s mentor was fellow Kansas native Roscoe Arbuckle, and you point out in the book that today, Arbuckle is known for a crime that he never committed against actress Virginia Rappe. 

In fact, it’s the crime that no one ever committed. There was no murder. Also, the charges that there was any kind of sexual assault were dropped after the first of three trials.

So, there was no rape; there was no murder. And yet, Arbuckle found himself more or less kind of crucified in the court of public opinion during these three trials. And he kind of became the public face of people’s general disgust with Hollywood in the sense that it was a place of scandal, whether or not it had anything to do with him.

So, even after his acquittal, he was destroyed. And it does make me sad during the beginning of the #MeToo movement to hear him cited in some sort of vague way as some sinister or sordid figure from the past, because that really is just buying into the same yellow journalism that kind of destroyed his career and ultimately, him, in the first place.

Both Camera Man and James Curtis’ new biography of Keaton explain that medical issues led to Rappe’s death. Nevertheless, both wound up having their images hurt because there was a lot of slut-shaming around her. The poor woman died. She got a raw deal, too.

Oh, there was tons of slut-shaming at the trial. I’m not at all saying that trial was conducted in an ethical manner. He was eventually acquitted. If you read the testimony from the trial, there were all kinds of characterizations of Virginia Rappe that probably, hopefully, they would not be able to get away with now.

There was also subordination of perjury and just all kinds of shady stuff going on behind the scenes. It was pretty much a mess.

Keaton and Arbuckle originally came from the Midwest. Did that have any kind of influence on their comedy?

Kansas was actually a spot where a lot of entertainers came from that part of the century. Louise Brooks, for example, was a Kansan. I don’t know what it was about the Midwest. 

I guess part of it was that, in a way, vaudeville and traveling entertainment was sort of a wild west phenomenon. I think if you already were living in a place that was, at that time, something of a frontier, maybe it made you a little bit hardier about going out and having a life on the road.

I wouldn’t quite call Keaton a Kansan although he was born in Kansas, and both his parents were from somewhere in the Midwest. He never went back to the city he was born in until he was an old man. 

If he identified with any state as his home, it was probably Michigan, where Muskegon and his family’s summer cottage was. 

In some ways, he was a man without a home. For most of his life, he was always moving from place to place or trying to find domestic happiness and kind of a permanent shelter. That didn’t really come until he moved into his last house in Woodland Hills, California with his wife in 1956. He was already 60 by the time that happened.

Some of the later stuff he did at Educational after MGM was actually really good. His drinking at the time helped sink his career at the bigger studio, but Jail Bait and Grand Slam Opera are both wonderful.

They are good. He did some good things then, and those things never get talked about. Unfortunately, that ended up being something that I didn’t focus on a ton in my book, just because I did my book sort of snapshot style, moving from period to period. 

His movies are a hundred years old, yet you can’t swing a stick without finding an animated GIF of him taking a fall.

Yeah, he’s very “GIF-able.”

I actually interviewed a guy named Don McHoull who runs the Twitter feed, @SilentMovieGIFs. He’s just kind of a GIF master. He’s really great—not just with Keaton, although that’s his best performing subject.

He told me on the phone, that [Keaton’s] really great at reducing jokes down to this one particular movement, especially in kind of a pattern that you can watch over and over again.

And Keaton just lends himself so extremely well to that format that it doesn’t surprise me that he has a big digital afterlife—maybe more than any silent comedian because he was so action focused in his work.

More so than Chaplin or Lloyd, his movies were about action and motion as much as they were about character and story.

Those little movements—like watching the house collapse on him in Steamboat Bill, Jr., or watching him leap over cliffs in Seven Chances. People want to know who this figure is. Who’s accomplishing this feat and looking almost like an animated figure moving through space?

He almost doesn’t seem like a person who’s subject to the regular laws of physics. That fascination was part of what kicked off my desire to write about him in the first place back when I discovered him for myself.

So. it’s been fun with this book, watching some people who didn’t know him before or didn’t know his work well, and discover him in that way, including the modern GIF incarnation of Keaton.