Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life

**One of Literary Hub's Five Most Critically Acclaimed Biographies of 2022** **One of the New Yorker's "Best Books" of 2022** **Voted Best Silent Film Book of 2022 in the Silent London International Poll** It was James Agee who first christened Buster Keaton "The Great Stone Face," but to audiences who had known Keaton since the age of five, it was merely a formality. The whole world had come to accept his stoic features as one of the genuine trademarks of silent film comedy, a deadpan in a pork pie hat as famous as Charlie Chaplin's disreputable tramp or Harold Lloyd's eager beaver in straw boater and spectacles. "He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work," Agee wrote, "and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights."  Keaton's singular look and acrobatic brilliance obscured the fact that behinf the camera he was also one of the silent era's most gifted filmmakers. Through a string of nineteen short comedies and twelve extraordinary features he distinguished himself with such indelible works as "One Week," "The Play House," "The Boat," "Cops," "Our Hospitality," "Sherlock Jr.," "The Navigator," "Seven Chances," "Steamboat Bill, Jr.," "The Cameraman," and his magnum opus "The General." As a body of work, they rival Chaplin's in terms of quality and sheer comic invention. In 1960 Keaton was awarded an honorary Oscar.  Over the past century, Buster Keaton's story has become mired in myth and legend. Now James Curtis, the award-winning biographer of W.C. Fields, Preston Sturges, James Whale, and Spencer Tracy, follows Keaton's extraordinary life of triumph and tragedy in the first major biography in more than a quarter century. Drawing on newly unearthed archival resources, as well as interviews with family, friends, and co-workers, Keaton's complex genius emerges as never before.  Curtis brings new insights to Keaton's medicine show and vaudeville years as Buster becomes one of America's most famous performing children. Entering films as the protegee of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Keaton quickly ascends to co-director of some of the world's most popular short comedies. And when Arbuckle moves into features in 1920, Keaton begins to write, direct, and star in his own series of comedy classics, films that are still revived and honored today as some of the screen's greatest treasures. Curtis also examines in unprecedented detail what happens when a confluence of events brings an end to Keaton's time as a top star just as he appears to have mastered talking pictures. As Buster later put it, "There I was on top of the world--on a toboggan."  Illustrated with 130 images, some never before published, "Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life" is a compelling work of research and synthesis worthy of the man who has been called "the D.W. Griffith of Comedy" and who continues to be a potent influance on movies the world over. Read more