We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Behind the Scenes with Fatty and Mabel 47
pen, though. Entering the yard, we barely escaped sending Al St. John, ''the Bouncing Boy of the Films," into the next county. By a miraculous leap, he jumped on the radiator, and rode away to the garage with us. Keystone should employ one camera man to do nothing but follow Miss Xormand around.
The studio was bristling with activity. Roscoe Arbuckle, the elephantine author-actor-director, was superintending the construction of a set, aided by Ferris Hartmann, his coworker, and a dozen prop men ; Elgin Lessley. the intrepid camera man, who has the reputation of turning out the clearest films of any Keystone crank turner, was loading his magazines. A dozen rough-and-ready comedians were practicing falls down a stairway. The heavyweight director turned and saw us.
"Oh, Miss Xormand, get ready for the hall scenes, please."
"Very well, Roscoe, and — very good!"
The dainty little comedienne going to her dressing room, I strolled over to the busy throng and exchanged greetings with Arbuckle.
"How are you getting along with your new picture?" I asked.
"Slow, but sure," was the reply. "It's a new theme, and I want to go at it easily. I'm not trying to be a 'highbrow,' or anything like that, but I am going to cut an awful lot of the slapstick out hereafter. If any one gets kicked, or a pie thrown in his face, there's goingtobea reason for it."
"How about that staircase?" I queried. "That looks as though something exciting was going to happen."
"Oh, nothing much," he answered. ''St. John and I are going to fall down it, but that's about all. Here, I'll show you," and I snapped the picture as he did.
Oh, it's great to be a comedian — if there's a hospital hand)!
As we stood talking, I heard an excited altercation in French and German, with an occasional word in good old U. S. A. I looked frightened, but Arbuckle only laughed.
When Mabel isn't making other people laugh she is having a good time herself in the big car that she brought with her from the Western coast.