Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

by Dana Stevens Narrated by Dana Stevens

Overview

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and NPR

In this genre-defying “new kind of history” (The New Yorker), the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton's unique creative genius in the context of his time.

Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman.

Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton's life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett.

In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton's life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton's breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 11/29/2021

Slate film critic Stevens debuts with a masterful mix of cultural history, biography, and film criticism to consider of the work and legacy of silent film star Buster Keaton (1895–1966). She tracks Keaton’s rise from a juvenile vaudeville performer, who as part of the Three Keatons family act skirted emerging child labor laws at the turn of the century; assesses his “solidly-constructed” two-reelers, including the classic One Week; highlights his famous roles in such films as Sherlock Jr. and Steamboat Bill, Jr.; and describes his walk-on cameos in such ’60s B-movies as Beach Blanket Bingo. His career saw him work as an MGM gagman, commercial pitchman, and a creative force, and Stevens argues that Keaton’s career arc mirrors America’s evolving cultural tastes, making a strong case that “Buster Keaton belonged to the twentieth century, and it to him.” Stevens also includes wonderful mini-biographies of Keaton’s contemporaries, among them groundbreaking silent filmmaker Mabel Normand and vaudevillian Bert Williams, who inspired Keaton’s own work. Combining the same ingredients that made Keaton’s movies indelible—an elegant narrative, humor, and pathos—Stevens’s account isn’t one to miss. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Elyse Cheney Literary Assoc. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

"Was Buster Keaton the most influential filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century? Dana Stevens makes a compelling case in this dazzling mix of biography, essays, and cultural history." —Esquire

"Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Keaton and other personages of his time ... It's a new kind of history, making more of overlapping horizontal 'frames' than of direct chronological history, and Stevens does it extraordinarily well." —The New Yorker

“This biography of Buster Keaton by Slate's longtime film critic has been the Film Twitter event of this winter, and for good reason.” —Vanity Fair

“In this innovative, exciting combo of biography, history, essay, and acute cultural analysis, Dana Stevens does something I would have thought impossible—she tells the story of Buster Keaton’s life as if it were a Buster Keaton movie. This book is an exhilarating new way to view the man, his life, his art, and his genius.” —MARK HARRIS, author of Mike Nichols: A Life, Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution

"This book is as dazzling as a silent movie flickering before you in a dark room. Stevens has managed the rare feat — conjuring a life in all its specific detail while placing it in a modern context so that it becomes newly vital. Buster Keaton leaps off the page.” —RACHEL SYME, staff writer, The New Yorker

“In her brightly written and incredibly well-researched book, Dana Stevens celebrates the enduring filmic presence of Buster Keaton—"The Great Stone Face"—even while transforming him into a guidepost and compass from which to survey the spectacular rise of American popular culture in the modern era. Camera Man offers a unique kaleidoscope of cultural history, film criticism, and fascinating stories and anecdotes, filtered through Stevens’ distinctly modern sensibility and held together, in the end, by the slight but mesmerizing figure of Keaton himself.” —JAMES SANDERS, author of Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies and co-writer of the award-winning PBS series New York: A Documentary Film

"The world has been waiting for a Buster Keaton chronicler like Dana Stevens, who unfolds the great man’s archetypal American life with uncommon wit and grace. But Camera Man offers so much more than biography, revealing its subject as the embodiment, and the instigator, of a turbulent century’s transformations. Vaudeville and Hollywood, disruptive technologies and shifting mores, the complications of race and class and gender, the collisions of art and commerce—Stevens packs it all into an electric, genre-busting book that tosses up new ideas, arguments, and aperçus on every page. It’s a literary highwire act in the spirit of Buster’s famous cinematic set-pieces: a stunt with soul.” —JODY ROSEN, author of Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

"Buster didn't talk, but luckily Dana Stevens is here to tell us how the Great Stone Face invented a new film language. This rollicking read vivifies the era of innovation and upheaval that shaped the artist who shaped cinema for the next century and counting.” —AMY NICHOLSON, author of Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor and the forthcoming Extra Girls

"I have written three books on Buster Keaton’s work, and have barely scratched the surface of his deep and amazing talent. Stevens' book fills in a lot of gaps with a fan’s passion and a scholar’s insight. It is a fine contribution to the continuing scholarship on one of cinema’s most brilliant comedians and filmmakers. “ —JAMES L. NEIBAUR, author of Buster Keaton's Silent Shorts: 1920-1923, Arbuckle and Keaton, and The Fall of Buster Keaton

"An inspired merger of biography, film criticism and social history, this smartly-written, impressively researched book, with its worldly, intelligent grasp of the aesthetic and business sides of movies, deserves a place in every movie-lover's library." —PHILLIP LOPATE, film critic and author of The Art of the Personal Essay: an Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

Library Journal - Audio

06/01/2022

Stevens's enthusiasm for her subject and familiarity with her text deliver a truly immersive audio experience. Many listeners will recognize Stevens's warm, expressive voice from her co-hosting duties on the weekly pop culture podcast Culture Gabfest from Slate, where she has served as film critic since 2006. Film, however, is only the launch pad of this delightful cultural history that radiates from the life and work of actor, writer, and director Buster Keaton. Born in 1895 to a family of vaudevillians, Buster was a prodigy who began performing at age 5. His comedic timing and death-defying stunts that wowed his silent film audiences were born from the Three Keatons' act, where he had a recurring role as punching bag to his father Joe. After being tossed about for 17 years, Buster exits the vaudeville stage for the film industry. Her extensive research evident, Stevens showcases many colorful characters: actor and director Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, MGM executive Louis B. Mayer, Charlie Chaplin, actor and director Mabel Normand, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Alcoholics Anonymous founders Bill Wilson and Bob Smith. VERDICT This lively cultural history and affectionate tribute to a true film pioneer should have broad appeal.—Beth Farrell

Library Journal

★ 01/01/2022

In this thoughtful, engaging, and moving work, Slate writer Stevens posits that Buster Keaton's life is an entry point to understanding the 20th century—and vice versa. She follows Keaton from his days as the toddler star of the Three Keatons vaudeville act, to his late-career years making cameos in movies and television. The bulk of the biography focuses on Keaton's celebrated silent film career and his rocky entry into the talkies, which was derailed by bad personal and business decisions and further complicated by his alcohol addiction. Stevens enhances the work by contextualizing Keaton's life. His abusive childhood stage experience is juxtaposed against a discussion of early 20th-century child labor laws. An examination of blackface in Keaton's work leads to a more in-depth exploration of depictions of race and humor in pop culture at the time. A section on his repeated hospitalizations from drinking binges leads to an exploration of history of the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous. Stevens's acumen and analysis further elevate this book, offering insights and entertaining extrapolations on the myriad films and entertainment figures discussed within. VERDICT More than a biography of Buster Keaton, this is a stunning, extensively researched, and eminently readable cultural history.—Terry Bosky

Kirkus Reviews

2021-10-26
A film critic assesses the career and times of one of the geniuses of cinema.

“Keep your eye on the kid,” Joe Keaton wrote in an ad tagline in 1901, and was he ever right. That kid, his 6-year-old son Buster, was the star of the family stage act The Three Keatons, “the child star as prop, as projectile, as the personal belonging of a father who casually employs him as a household cleaning tool.” He was also a natural performer who revolutionized cinema with his silent films of the 1920s before bad business decisions, alcoholism, and changing times brought him down. In this erratic book, Slatefilm critic Stevens describes the high and lows of Keaton’s life—his early success in Roscoe Arbuckle’s two-reel comedies, triumph with his own studio, disastrous association with MGM, three marriages—while addressing societal events of the day such as child abuse in textile mills, women’s rights, and Black culture. Yet the author doesn’t flesh out these larger events, and attempts to connect Keaton to them are often misguided. Stevens rightly bemoans the poor treatment of women in the cinema of that era, so it’s odd she doesn’t note that many lead actresses in Keaton’s great films—Sybil Seely in One Week, Kathryn McGuire in The Navigator, Marion Mack in The General—more than hold their own and are every bit the Keaton character’s equal. The author devotes eight pages to Spite Marriage, a 1929 MGM mediocrity Keaton didn’t control, but she provides far less detail about Our Hospitality, Go West, and other superior films where Keaton was in charge. Stevens devotes more space to Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 Limelight, a plodding film in which Keaton has only a small role, than some of Keaton’s directorial gems. Readers hungry for details of how Keaton made his pictures should look elsewhere.

An appreciative but wildly uneven look at a brilliant filmmaker.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177458342
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	01/25/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: They Were Calling It the Twentieth Century
The Three Keatons, ca. 1901.

(Photo courtesy of Bob and Minako Borgen)

New Year’s Eve 1899 must have felt momentous even if you weren’t a four-year-old backstage at Proctor’s Twenty-Third Street Theater, still buzzing from last week’s Christmas gift: a big brown stitched-leather ball meant for playing an American game less than a decade old, which was just beginning to organize into professional leagues. Of course, Buster was still too young to grasp what it meant for one century to turn into the next, or for that matter what it meant that his parents—who had struggled so hard to find work in New York that winter that the three Keatons had at times gone cold and hungry—were suddenly flush enough to buy him such a lavish present.

The answer: after Joe and Myra’s acrobatics-and-cornet duo act had flopped hard at Tony Pastor’s continuous-vaudeville house in early December (as Joe himself would later concede in one of the columns he occasionally contributed to the New York Dramatic Mirror, “the act didn’t go... ’twas bad”),1 he had somehow wrangled them a year-end week of bookings at the prestigious Proctor’s chain, earning the cash to buy the ball for his boy.

The basketball would have a long life as a Keaton prop. Just nine months later, during the family’s first paid engagement as a trio at the Wonderland Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, Buster got laughs by bouncing that ball off his father’s head as the old man stood downstage, holding forth on the importance of patience and gentleness to proper child rearing. (“Father hates to be rough,” went a common opening line.) In what became the template for their act for years to come, Buster’s continued interruptions—sometimes verbal, but most often taking the form of some prop-based provocation or audience-distracting piece of upstage business—would cause Joe to wheel around and witness his authority being flouted. Joe would then give both the audience and his son a more practical tutorial on day-to-day parenting by seizing the suitcase handle Myra had sewed to the back of her son’s costume and flinging the boy against whatever backdrop, curtain, or piece of scenery was available.

The contrast between the roughness with which this small child was handled and the equanimity with which he seemed to spring back from every mishap provided the wellspring of the act’s humor. Whatever anxiety this comic premise created in the audience—which, given the demographics of vaudeville attendance, would have included many families with children—was no incidental side effect of the merriment but part of the point. The Keatons were not just funny, they were thrilling, with real-time risk an essential element of the program. As a grand finale in the early years, Joe sometimes hurled Buster clear into the wings, from whence a stagehand would reappear after a few suspenseful seconds with the grinning boy in his arms: “This yours, Mr. Keaton?”2

Many years later, having grown too big for Joe to throw around the stage—and having learned, after many hissed paternal reminders, that the laughs got bigger when he ditched the smile—a somber teenage Buster would stand in the middle of the stage on the Keaton act’s one consistent prop, a sturdy wooden table. (In the years before his son joined the act, Joe had sometimes billed himself as “The Man with the Table.”) Whirling a basketball on a rubber rope over his head, Buster would approach his father’s head in gradually widening arcs, first knocking off Joe’s hat and, on the next revolution, clobbering the paterfamilias himself, thereby inviting whatever hair-raising act of retribution Joe proceeded to visit upon him. Another, even more patricidal variation involved Joe shaving onstage with a straight razor, whistling in blissful ignorance as Buster’s whirling basketball-on-a-rope slowly approached him from behind to the audience’s mounting gasps. In what must have made for an absurdist touch, Myra, a tiny woman known for her impeccably dainty Gibson Girl fashion, sometimes stood at the front of the stage playing the saxophone, serenely ignoring the melee while her son and husband courted death behind her.

Most impossible for the four-year-old Buster to comprehend was that, in some way, the century to come would be his, in a much more lasting way than the basketball. Though he was born five years before it officially began, Buster Keaton belonged to the twentieth century, and it to him. It was as essential in inventing him as he was in inventing it, and it’s impossible to imagine either one turning out the same without the other.

For the first three decades of the new century, Buster’s life as a performer and creator traced a steep and steady upward trajectory, catapulting his family from the greenhorn fringes of the entertainment industry to its topmost tiers in a remarkably short span of time. It was in late October 1900 that the just-turned-five-year-old made his first paid appearance in his parents’ act, earning the Keatons an extra ten dollars a week at that Wilmington engagement. Buster’s acrobatic and comic gifts were about to become so crucial to the family’s reversal of fortune that, before New Year’s Eve of the same year rolled around, Joe Keaton would be rounding his son’s age upward by two years in a letter to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Joe was requesting special permission for Buster to appear onstage on the prestigious Proctor’s circuit in New York State, where state law banned children under seven from performing theatrical work of any kind without a permit from the SPCC.3

That organization was better known in its time as the Gerry Society after its cofounder and longtime president, the powerful and controversial lawyer turned child welfare czar Elbridge T. Gerry. This prominent philanthropist and social reformer was a grandson of the founding father of the same name, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence who served as vice president under James Madison and whose skill at slicing up voting districts to his own advantage while governor of Massachusetts gave the American language the term “gerrymandering.” We should pause here to learn a bit about the later Mr. Gerry and the child-protection movement he was instrumental in helping to launch, since we’ll be hearing more from him and the “Gerrymen.” Lord knows the Keaton family did.

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