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COPYRIGHT, KEYSTONE COMPANY
Mack Sennatt, Developer of Comedians.
MACK SENNATT, managing director of the MLr- Keystone Comedies, is a marvel in his
v line of discovering good comedy people for the films.
A comedian himself, he possesses a marked quality of sizing up his companies and invari¬ ably picking out the best comedy men and women in them and sending them right along the ladder. He has picked five of the winners of this year — Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling, Charlie Chaplin and his brother, no less famous, Sid Chaplin.
Sennatt writes all his own scenarios. He is constantly jot¬ ting down notes and bits of action dialogue on envelopes. He utilizes every spare moment in working them up and keeps his companies earning their breakfast rolls by the literal sweat of their brows. This and his habit of supervising every detail of the company and planning for every possible emergency have
given him the nickname of “The Master Mind’’ in the com¬ panies.
A1 Kessel, of the Keystone Comedies, selected Mack Sennatt as a comedian and later boosted him right along to the job of managing director. He has $50,000 worth of faith in Sennatt annually, what with the salary and dividends he pays him. When Mr. Kessel was recently in California, he dropped into the Keystone Studios one morning and found Sennatt feverishly posing an actor on a draped dry-goods box and inviting him to jump off. He explained that it was an off day in big ideas and he was trying to build up a comedy from a box basis. The two of them framed up a corking comedy with this slight founda¬ tion — one that made them a lot of money.
His development of Miss Mabel Normand into one of the leading comedy women of the day has been one of his notable successes. Mr. Sennatt has the comic sense not always easy to find or to express.