The Hayseed & One Week

In 1917, Roscoe Arbuckle was a comedy star making some of the most popular films in the world. Buster Keaton, a fellow vaudevillian, was booked at New York’s Winter Garden. Walking down Broadway, they meet. As Keaton describes later:

“Arbuckle asked me if I’d ever been in a motion picture. I said I hadn’t even been in a studio. He said, ‘Come on down to the Norma Talmadge Studio on Forty-eighth Street on Monday. Get there early and do a scene with me and see how you like it.’ Well, rehearsals [at the Winter Garden] hadn’t started yet, so I said, ‘all right.’ I went down and we did it.”

Arbuckle and Keaton become parters in all aspects of film, and in the next three years, made 14 two-reelers together.

The first film this evening will be “The Hayseed”, released in October 1919, and almost the last of these 14 shorts. I’ll be accompanying on solo ukulele — the same show I performed as a pop-up in this year’s Orlando Fringe Festival.

By 1920, Arbuckle moved to Paramount to make full-length films, Keaton had taken over the production company, and in September, he releases his first movie as writer, director and story: “One Week”. This brilliant and hilarious short will be the second picture of the evening. Instrumentation is TBA, and TBH, TBD.

7pm at Scuppernong Books, and a free event.