October, 1964.
Buster Keaton makes his last trip.
He is sick and within a few months he will be dead.
It has been 30 years since he last starred in a film worthy of his genius.
To earn a living, he appears in commercials and TV shows.
In the 1920s, he was one of the most famous movie stars in the world.
His films earned millions.
They were among the funniest, most emotional, most inventive movies of the silent era.
But within a few years, by the mid-'30s, he was broke. All washed up.
It's a story as old as American cinema itself -
the artist up against the studio system,
a filmmaker shackled by producers and crushed by the Hollywood machine,
a man sinking into decay and alcohol,
a once-glorious star suffering an abrupt fall from grace.
1928.
Buster Keaton is at the pinnacle of his success.
All around the world, audiences recognise him and adore him.
The sound of laughter resonates through movie theatres at the sight of his deadpan face.
He was the man who never laughed, nicknamed Old Stoneface.
Topped off with a boater hat as flat as a gramophone record, his face was an imperturbable mirror.
A mirror that reflects the emotions of cinemagoers.
Keaton had a strange beauty, one that was both melancholic and irremediably odd.
He could make audiences laugh and cry at the same time.
He had no need to pull faces, as actors habitually did back then.
All it took was a tiny shift in expression, a light in his big eyes, or the ghost of a frown.
Keaton never smiled because he didn't need to.
He had other ways of showing he was happy.
His body expressed his emotions.
The way he turned around or walked.
When Buster Keaton was in a scene, you couldn't take your eyes off him. He lit up the screen.
Buster Keaton was born on the stage.
His parents were music hall performers and from the age of four he was part of the show.
Very soon, he became the most famous member of the troupe.
Like a circus kid, he learned how to perform the most improbable stunts.
Controlling his body was like a sixth sense. He knew how to fall without hurting himself,
always avoiding landing on his neck, spinal column, elbows or knees.
He knew which muscles to tighten and which to relax. Buster could do it all.
He was a gymnast, acrobat, trapeze artist, dancer and athlete rolled into one.
It seems inconceivable now, but he never used a stunt double.
As well as being an actor, he was the boldest stuntman in the history of cinema.
Stuntman? No, the word fails to do him justice.
Buster was a funambulist.
He toyed with danger, mocked it,
sneered at it.
When he was shooting a movie, Buster took horrifying, yet carefully calculated risks.
Nothing scared him.
His death-defying antics dazzled audiences.
In Steamboat Bill Junior, he perfectly performed a stunt he'd already tried out in a short.
To make the facade of a building fall on him, he had to stand
in exactly the right spot. The slightest miscalculation and he would have a broken neck.
Buster was from another planet.
He made the most difficult stunts seem stunningly simple.
While filming Three Ages, his first feature-length movie,
he misjudged a jump between two buildings.
His injuries forced him off the set and three days of filming were lost.
But the fall was so spectacular that the take was used in the movie.
Buster edited it onto another stunt to wrap up the sequence.
Well, my old man was an eccentric comic.
And as soon as I could take care of myself at all on my feet,
he'd just start doing gags with me, kicking me clean across the stage
or taking me by the back of the neck and throwing me.
As I grew up to around 7 and 8 years old, we were called the roughest act ever in the history of the stage.
In spite of his incredible talent, Buster carried it all off with effortless elegance.
Despite boasting astonishing suppleness and dexterity,
he had a preference for playing clumsy and awkward types.
The man with the perfectly-toned muscles invariably played the wimp.
Buster was the puny weakling forced to tackle the tough guys,
sinister types ready to make him suffer.
Artists are not always sound businessmen
and in the early '20s Buster hooked up with a producer, Joe Schenck.
Schenck took care of the financial details so that Buster could concentrate on what he did best,
the artistic direction of his films.
Their arrangement meant Buster had complete creative control over his movies.
He was the sole captain of the ship, accountable for his ongoing projects only as a courtesy.
He was free to supervise every aspect of production.
He wrote, directed, starred in and edited his movies.
Buster called the shots, played any part.
At Keaton's small studio, he surrounded himself with a band of faithful sidemen
on whom he tested his ideas before shooting a movie.
His cameraman was one of the best in the business, while his set decorator was a master of his craft.
"It was a case of anything goes and we'd try anything," he said.
"No humourless money men told us what to do. We alone decided
"what a movie needed to get a laugh out of the audience."
Surrounded by his team, Buster was like a skilled artisan,
meticulous and with total dedication.
During a shoot, he left himself room to improvise,
but if he particularly liked a scene he might spend several days getting it right,
and if the edited sequence did not work as he'd hoped, he shot it again whatever the cost.
Thanks to his independence and artistic freedom, his talent was allowed to fully blossom.
Between 1920 and 1928, he shot 19 shorts and ten feature-length films.
His creativity knew no bounds.
Every film was more inventive than the last. Buster's exploits became more and more audacious.
Nothing was too challenging for him.
It turned out that the man who almost never attended school was a born scientist.
Had he not been a filmmaker, he'd have wanted to be a civil engineer.
But more than a civil engineer, he was above all a poetic engineer.
In his film The Scarecrow, Buster dreamed up a small and very practical home
in which every object was dual purpose.
The gramophone was also a gas cooker. The bed was a piano.
And the table allowed a meal to be eaten without an inch of space wasted and everything within easy reach.
And once the meal was over, clearing the table and washing up was child's play.
Buster also took a keen interest in film technology.
The first thing he did, even before starting his career in movies,
was to completely dismantle a camera to find out how it worked.
Thereafter, he constantly sought to use the camera in original ways.
Throughout the 1920s, he experimented with what was still a new art form.
By seeing only his comic acting performances, it was easy for audiences to overlook
his most important quality - his genius as a filmmaker.
Buster's shots are all carefully and perfectly composed.
As a director, his ideas are delightful and often disarming in their poetry and simplicity.
Oh, my God!
# Happy birthday to you
# Happy birthday, dear Buster
# Happy birthday to you. #
I better get a whistle.
A real steam engine. A real one.
Buster Keaton was always fascinated by trains.
Old trains, trolley cars, locomotives,
wagons, steps and balconies.
It sometimes seemed as though making movies was just a big excuse for him to play with trains.
He liked to build detailed reconstructions.
He ran after trains, caught them in mid air, climbed over them, walked on them, straddled them,
sat down on them wherever he could, wherever he pleased.
He took them to escape or to travel far from home, unless he got himself thrown off first.
In 1926, he dedicated an entire film, The General, to his great love.
In this movie, Buster is a train driver trying to recover his beloved locomotive.
To save his true love, he must save his train and vice versa.
Using his acute sense of geometry, Keaton constructed his film in two almost-perfectly symmetrical parts.
Along the way, he pulled off some of his trademark feats.
Everything is filmed on a moving train and always without a stunt double.
For the shot in which the enemy engine is destroyed, using a model was out of the question.
He had a bridge constructed over a river in Oregon and drove a real train off it.
These few seconds of film cost $42,000
the most expensive in the history of silent film.
The movie itself cost a total of $750,000, a huge budget in those days.
The General is a masterpiece, but it ended up overshadowing other equally wonderful Keaton movies.
Sherlock Junior. The Navigator. Go West. Battling Butler.
These films were hugely popular with cinema audiences.
In the mid-1920s, Buster Keaton was, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd,
the most famous comedy actor in the world.
He was barely 30 years old.
His face still had a childlike quality.
And his childhood often provided him with the material for his films.
Buster used to tell a story of how, as a child, he was awakened by the roar of a whirlwind.
At the window, he was sucked outside, thrown into the road and carried away by the wind,
his small body flung about like a leaf.
He was eventually rescued, but he had had a narrow escape.
Many years later, as a filmmaker, he recreated it in an astonishing sequence.
To recreate the potency of a cyclone, Buster set up aircraft engines on the set.
Then, as the camera filmed him, he danced with the wind.
In his movies, when Buster wanted to attract a girl, he never did so by flexing his muscles
or showing off.
Rather, he used infinite tenderness,
the romanticism of the eternal lover.
In real life, Buster married Natalie Talmadge.
Natalie had two sisters, both of them movie stars.
One was married to Joe Schenck, Buster's producer.
Buster had cast his wife Natalie in his film Our Hospitality.
Basically, the entire family was in movies.
Buster and Natalie had a dog and two children.
They lived in a huge villa in Beverly Hills, which Buster had constructed in 1925.
Seven bedrooms, six servants, with a three-room apartment above the garage for the driver and his wife.
Five acres of lawn, one huge bed for Natalie, another for Buster.
In his spacious home, Buster even set aside a room in which to edit his films.
Natalie organised the most popular costume parties in Hollywood.
All the big movie stars and film producers flocked to them.
Their lifestyle was most unlike Keaton,
but as a former child performer who grew up on the road, he denied himself nothing - nice cars,
luxurious clothes, sports equipment.
Buster Keaton was 32 and the world was his oyster.
He was rich, famous and married to a society woman.
His films were praised by the critics, his private life seemed perfect.
He even took the occasional mistress.
Best of all, though, he was an independent filmmaker, answerable only to his audience.
Buster had everything a man could wish for. What more could he want?
Bigger movies? More money? More success?
What exactly was Buster Keaton running after?
At the pinnacle of his success, he made what he would later describe as the biggest mistake of his life.
In 1928, Joe Schenck, Buster's brother-in-law and producer, gave him the worst possible advice,
urging him to sign for the rapidly-expanding MGM Hollywood studios.
Buster was instinctively against the move. He feared he'd be swamped in such a huge structure,
but Schenck insisted, as though pushing Buster's head into the noose.
Buster turned to his friend, Charlie Chaplin, for advice.
Chaplin told him, "Don't do it. They'll ruin you, helping you.
"They'll warp your judgment. You'll get tired of arguing for things you know are right.
"It's not that they aren't any good. They have the best guys in the country, but there are too many
"and they'll all want to have a say in your movies, like too many cooks in the same kitchen."
In the end, Buster gave in to the relentless pressure.
Closing down his small studio, he moved in at MGM.
The pay was good - $3,000 a week - and he was given his own little house inside the studio.
The promised movie-making paradise turned out to be hell for Buster.
In return, he had unwittingly given up his most precious asset - his artistic independence.
With the stroke of a pen, Buster signed away his freedom as a filmmaker.
His contract stipulated that he would be consulted on storylines, but would not have the last word.
That would be the decision of the MGM producer.
When Buster started working at MGM, the studio was already a huge factory churning out movies.
They had six studios, hundreds of technicians and 18 press attaches employed full-time
to publicise their films.
MGM was also an extraordinary machine that manufactured screen icons.
Overnight, studio bosses could transform an extra dreaming of glory
into an international star.
They taught them to walk, to speak, to dance, changed their names and dyed their hair.
At the head of this operation, Louis B Mayer ran the studio with an iron fist.
He controlled the private lives of his stars, married them off when rumours of homosexuality took hold
in the tabloid press, exchanged performers with other studios,
all the while jealously watching over his child stars.
For Mayer, the key ingredients to a successful movie were, in order of importance,
a star, then the producer, then the script and finally, a long way behind, the director.
In the middle of all this bustle, Buster was just one more star among so many others,
just another product promoted by the publicity department alongside a host of others.
I decided on a plot. We always looked for the story first.
And the minute somebody came up with a good start, we jumped to the finish.
If a man gets into this situation, how does he get out of it?
As soon as we found out how to get out of it, then we went back and worked on the middle.
We always figured the middle would take care of itself.
Right from the outset, Buster saw his working methods undermined at MGM.
Little by little, his small band of loyal supporters were taken away from him.
Instead he was given new technicians to work with, studio employees whose first priority was
to satisfy the boss and immediate superior. The quest for technical perfection was counterproductive.
As Buster himself said, "No film ever became a masterpiece only through perfect lighting
"or outstanding camerawork."
Worse still, MGM demanded that Keaton write a script, something he had never done before.
He'd always built the storyline of his movies through discussions with his team,
assembling everything in his head, but at MGM there was no messing around with screenplays.
To better oversee the work, Louis B Mayer applied strict division of labour.
One writer was charged with coming up with ideas, another with writing the story, a third the dialogue,
which was rewritten by a fourth before the script was polished by a fifth.
Rewrites could involve 36 writers working on the same script.
For Buster, this method was a disaster.
He found himself surrounded by a gaggle of writers each striving to impose his ideas
to justify his fee.
Suddenly, everybody was involved in his job, including administrators and producers.
All the chatter, the meetings and the brilliant minds, Buster began to doubt his own instincts.
The man who liked to improvise on set now found himself forced to stick to a script.
Before long, he wouldn't even be allowed to do his own stunts,
probably deemed too risky by the insurance company.
Nevertheless, Buster's first film for MGM, The Cameraman, is a marvel,
in no small part because Buster managed to ditch the studio's screenplay,
using the circumstances that arose on set as an excuse.
While shooting scenes in New York, Buster was recognised by passers-by.
A crowd of onlookers gathered, making it impossible for the film to be shot as required.
The scene was recorded by an amateur cameraman.
According to the carefully-worded screenplay, nobody in New York knows our hero.
Unable to stick to the script, Keaton seized the opportunity to introduce his own ideas.
MGM would not be fooled twice. While Buster's second MGM feature, Spite Marriage, has its moments,
it's no match for his best work.
With our early successes,
we had to get sympathy to make any story stand up.
But the one thing that I made sure
was that I didn't ask for it.
'If the audience wanted to feel sorry for me, that was up to them.
'I didn't ask for it in action.'
One heart.
Come on in.
Any special page? Under the K.
# Come all you rounders Gather here and there
# For a story I'm gonna tell you about a brave engineer
# Casey Jones was the gentleman's name On a 6-8 wheeler, he won his fame
# Pulled out the station with a big heavy train
# Kept on going till he struck the main
# The man at the throttle was Casey Jones
# Casey was a-going at a terrible pace when 444 stared him right in the face
# The fireman said, "Boy, you better jump cos two locomotives are a-going to bump!"
# Casey Jones, got another poppa Got another poppa on the Salt Lake Line! #
By the end of the 1920s, Hollywood was in the throes of a major revolution.
Buster Keaton had nothing against talkies. On the contrary,
he had ideas about how to use sound in his films.
In 1929, he even asked MGM to shoot his film Spite Marriage with dialogue.
The studio's reply was that their sound equipment was primarily for musicals and dramas,
not Keaton-type films.
When the studio finally cast him in a talkie, it was to make him sing in a ridiculous costume.
# Show girls, slow girls Here's your only chance and how
# Free and easy... #
The film, Free And Easy, made a lot of money for MGM, although the movie is a disappointment.
Because his talkies were artistic failures, it was long assumed that it was the arrival of sound
that killed him. But the studio's methods were his real undoing.
A short from 1934 entitled Allez Oop showed that he could use dialogue in a very inventive way.
It's my watch that needs attention, not me. Oh, yes.
Name, please. Paula Stevens.
Phone number? 987.
Married or single? Single.
Engaged? What has that to do with repairing a watch?
Oh...I thought maybe I'd deliver it to you.
MGM clearly wasn't for him.
He found himself very much alone, working in a system that was over his head.
In the early 1930s, Louis B Mayer decided to cast Keaton alongside comic actor Jimmy Durante
in a series of films. It was as though Buster was no longer considered heavyweight enough
to carry a film on his own, as though the brilliant soloist suddenly needed help.
It's persecution! Unadulterated persecution!
Jimmy Durante, which his machine-gun delivery and outlandish style, was the polar opposite of Buster.
Casting two such incompatible stars in the same movie made little sense.
Listen to me...
But Buster was dealing with studio bosses who were churning out movies,
sticking to a formula that met their manufacturing specifications.
With Buster's very personal style at loggerheads with the well-oiled MGM machine,
the studio now sought to sideline him.
Making movies is exhausting enough, but banging your head against a wall
when you know you're right makes it even more so. In the end, Buster gave up.
One could imagine the frustration, anger and suffering of a filmmaker stripped of his freedom.
Within just a few short years, Buster found himself trapped,
suffocated by a system he had signed up to of his own free will.
Forced to appear in films unworthy of his talent, Buster started drinking more and more.
On the set of the movie embarrassingly titled What - No Beer?
he was drinking so much that he went missing for a day.
His absence brought production to a standstill and cost MGM a whole working day.
In one scene in the film, you can hear the alcohol in his voice.
Near beer? That's it. Near beer. No.
But that was not all.
Shortly afterwards, Buster openly defied MGM tsar Louis B Mayer himself.
Mayer often demanded that his stars appear in promotional films.
Keaton, weary of these staged assignations, refused to play ball.
# ..in the rain We're singing in the rain... #
The following Monday, he found a curt letter on his dressing room table.
"Your services at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios are no longer required." Signed Louis B Mayer.
Humiliated, Buster swore that he would never set foot in MGM again.
Having been let go by MGM, Buster was available to work for any of the other big studios -
Paramount, Columbia, Warner Brothers, Universal, Fox, RKO -
but not one of the majors made him an offer. Known to be an alcoholic and difficult to work with,
he'd become a pariah in Hollywood.
When I was six months old, in a small hotel,
I fell down a full flight of stairs to the bottom.
I didn't cry,
so they knew I wasn't hurt.
And Houdini says, "That was sure a buster,"
meaning a fall. And my father said, "Well, that would be a good name for him.
"It don't sound bad."
In his films, Keaton had the art of falling down to perfection.
Since childhood, he fell as naturally as he breathed,
but this particular fall would prove to be a difficult one to get up from.
His private life collapsed like a house of cards.
His wife filed for divorce.
Buster lost everything -
his sumptuous home in Beverly Hills, his beautiful cars, his fortune.
A further dagger blow was delivered with his wife's legal application
to have their children's surname changed from Keaton to Talmadge.
Keaton was drinking so much that he ended up suffering from delirium tremens.
In his fevered nightmares, driven mad by his cravings,
he apparently saw himself attacked by rodents and insects.
Committed to an asylum, he was forced to undergo shock treatment.
Keaton was force-fed drinks by barmen in white coats
whose job it was to deliberately aggravate his heartburn
until he couldn't swallow another drop of alcohol.
To earn a living, Buster took any work he could,
appearing in low-budget shorts.
The man who only a few years earlier had been directing blockbusters
was now begging to be allowed to direct one of these small films.
Buster Keaton was barely 40 years old. In just a few years,
he went from being a worldwide star to a washed-up artist with no future.
How did it come to this for such a giant of the movie industry?
Hollywood is an ogre that devours its own children.
In one final, ironic twist, Buster ended up seeking a return to MGM,
not as a director, much less a star actor.
He was offered a job as a gag man, offering advice on other people's films, uncredited,
for the princely sum of $100 a week.
Then, just when he reached rock bottom, life offered him a new start.
In 1940, Buster fell in love with an MGM dancer.
Eleanor Norris would stay with him until the end of his days.
With her help, he emerged from a long nightmare, like a drowned man coming up for air.
Buster Keaton had regained his footing.
In the ensuing 25 years, Keaton carried on working,
taking supporting roles in movies, appearing in television serials and commercials
that re-used the gags from his films as a way of reviving the magic of his youth.
Buster Keaton became a living imprint, the image of a golden age of comedy,
now looked back upon with nostalgia and affection.
The remorseless old beast of Hollywood paid him one final tribute.
In 1960, Keaton was given an honorary Oscar,
like a medal awarded to a general who is being stood down once and for all.
Footage of the presentation has been lost.
His films, meanwhile, preserved on fragile, highly-inflammable spools,
were in danger of disappearing altogether.
Fortunately, thanks to a collector, the masterpieces of Buster Keaton have been transferred
to more durable media.
Some of them, of which no known copy remained, were found in a secret chamber behind the editing room
of his former home.
His re-released films found a new audience.
At last, his genius lived again.
In his latter years, he was rediscovered by a new generation of filmmakers.
In 1964, he appeared in a short called The Railrodder
in which he journeys across Canada by railroad at high speed in a small vehicle.
The shoot, during which Buster travelled by train, was filmed.
It captures all the poetry, simplicity and grace of Buster Keaton.
In February, 1966, Buster died from lung cancer.
In his coffin, he clutched a rosary in one hand
and a pack of cards in the other, ready for either an eternity in heaven
or a game of cards in hell.
Killed off artistically 30 years earlier, his films will live on forever.