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230 KEYSTONE CRADLES STARS
name became almost as synonymous for slapstick as did Fred Karno's.
The Keystone Cops, a harum-scarum police force which was forever careering madly down roads in zig-zagging motor cars, with policemen falling off the patrol waggon and climbing aboard again, a police force which, in its time embraced many actors who later became famous, such as Ramon Novarro and Harold Lloyd, was the hallmark of these violent comedies.
In their heyday, Keystone comedies starred such famous comedians as Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon, Wallace Beery and Chester Conklin, while their leading ladies included Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson, Betty Compson, Marie Prevost, and dozens of other comely young women who later rose to a more imposing stardom in straight drama or sophisticated comedy.
Keystone was founded by Adam Kessel, a bookmaker, who, it was said, was put out of business by a law which, in 1908, prohibited betting on the New York race tracks. With no business and plenty of time for memories, Kessel recalled a loan which he had made to an acquaintance and went to collect it. He found his debtor busy in a small office surrounded by tins of films and learned that there were great profits to be made for loaning out films on hire. Kessel decided to get into this new form of gambling and took into partnership another bookmaker named Bauman. In a horse trap they would tour the nickelodeons and offer their wares for hire.
They, too, fell victims to the Patents Company. The cutting off of their supplies of pictures forced them to start up as producers. Their first picture, Disinherited Son's Loyalty, cost two hundred dollars. They then made a jungle film with a stuffed wolf hired from a taxidermist and embarked on an outdoor epic called A True Indian's Heart. From the picture of a bison on an American dollar bill they got the idea of calling their films " Bison Life Motion Pictures ". Later they amalgamated with a travelling Wild West show, known as the 101 Ranch Show and made cowboy and wild animal pictures, shortening the name — quite inexplicably to English audiences — to " 101 Bison ".
Faced with competition by Selig's Zoo films and the tremendous number of cowboy and Indian pictures, they turned their attention to comedy and started the Keystone Company. This trade name was, in turn, a borrowed one ; it came from the keystone of an arch, which was the insignia of one of the principal American railways.