Buster Keaton, His Famous Career

"I have found-especially on the stage- that when I finish a stunt, I can get a laugh by just standing still and looking at the audience as if I was surprised and Slightly hurt to think they would laugh at me. It always brings a bigger laugh.” Keaton

Reading Famous peoples biographies is really important for us because we can get an idea of where the artists came from, and what it took them to be where they are.

Joseph Frank (Buster) Keaton was born in 1895 and died in 1966. Keaton as well as Chaplin came from a family of artists, both of Keatons parents were dancers and his mother also played the saxophone. Keaton is the oldest of 3 siblings, he had a brother named Harry and a sister Louis, both appeared in some of his films.

Keaton’s film career started in 1917, he was about to start rehearsing for the Schubert Brothers' "The Passing Show Of 1917, but he received an offer of doing a scene with him from Arbuckle that had just started a production with Joseph Scheneck at the Norma Talmadge studio on The Butcher Boy. Keaton took the opportunity and left The Passing Show, from that decision he started his very successful career.

Keaton kept on working with Arbuckle until 1919, and then he started making his own movies. In 1920 Schenck bought the old Chaplin studio and renamed it the Keaton studio, Buster had complete artistic and technical control over his productions. He had a contract, doing 8 movies per year. He worked with the same technical crew and writers until 1928. After that MGM took over the Keaton studio, that caused a lot of great ideas in the early films produced. Keatons first independent feature was in 1923 and is called The Three Ages. In 1928 he lost control to MGM. Among the 9 movies he made are The General, Our Hospitality, Steamboat, Bill, Jr, Go West, and The Cameraman.

Here is a Montage of Buster Keatons movies. I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkdtS8OFlA
http://www.geocities.com/~oldbrit/obpage3.htm
In this page there is a lot of information of Keaton and also links to some articles.

http://www.takkinen.se/Articles/buster.html