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MR. SENNETT
TTie /Co^5 a?i<i clowns, the ups and downs
"YOU KNOW," SAID THE LATE SNUB POLLARD, one of the
original Keystone Kops, "I guess I've been bathed in no less than ten tons of very wet cement. I figured up once I'd caught about fourteen thousand pies in my puss and had been hit by six hundred automobiles and two trains. Once I was even kicked by a giraffe."
These hardships occurred in the pursuit of a most peculiar art, an art which flourished only briefly, then disappeared, done in by technology, pseudo-sophistication and, perhaps, a decline in the creative energy of the group which forged the unique, the incomparable style of silent screen comedy in the manic atelier of Mack Sennett.
The Keystone Kops in particular, Sennett's entire group in general, achieved stardom en masse. From time to time a particularly strong personality — a Chaplin, a Harry Langdon, a Keaton — would emerge from the gang and strike off on his own, having developed his trade in this school of hard knocks. But by and large the Kops and their quarries stand as anomalies in the history of stardom. A good many strange people have achieved stardom, but no group of this size — and nature — made it, either before or since. This is in character, for the Keystone group always stood a little outside the main stream of film history. There was really only one thing they could do — make Keystone comedies — and very few of them survived the coming of sound. Even at the height of their powers the kind of film they were making had about the same relationship to the rest of movie making as the work of S. J. Perelman has to the art of the novel. The same basic tools (camera and film, pen and paper I are used, but after that the similarity ends.
The Kops were the sole creation of Mack Sennett. an indifferent actor who worked for Griffith at Biograph. graduated to scenario writing, then to the supervision of rube comedies. He paid generous tribute to Griffith as the man who "was my day school, my adult education program, my university," and indeed, his emphasis on movement in the comedies is certainly related to the theories of Griffith, as is his editing technique. But the source of Sennett's work
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