W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




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.

Eventually, by hiding in a doorway, they trapped him, and as he slunk furtively by they pranced out, in the manner of cinema gangsters, and cried "Ha!" "Oh, good afternoon, fellows," said Sennett, paling. "Well, I've got to be going." "O.K., squirt," replied one of them, digging in his hip pocket for what turned out to be a handkerchief. "How about that Cnote?" (In later years Sennett was not positive about the exact phrase — it may have been "Yard" or "Century".) "Say, fellows," he said, brightening up, "I've got a wonderful idea how you might get back that hundred — I've been thinking about it a lot." "Spill it, punk," said one of them. "Well," Sennett went on, "the way I got it figured, you give me $2500 to start a studio with and you'll get back your money just as soon as the profits start coming in. Among the very first receipts." The gamblers gave him the $2500, and the Keystone Studios were in business. "You still don't know anything about comedy," Fields would observe after the above recital. Sennett insisted that slapstick, to be artistically funny, must be carefully prepared for. "It has a causeand-effect motivation," he would tell Fields. "You can't just spring it unexpectedly, it has to be built up." Fields: "Pfffffft." " — on a rising tide of laughter you can make something absurd at the climax seem excusable. Introduce it at the beginning and it will seem awful and embarrassing. You can take tremendous liberties with it only if you built it up. Right?" "I think I'll work my golf act into this two-reeler about the dentist," Fields would agree. 219