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John Gillett : Could you tell us something
about Steamboat Bill Jr, with the big cyclone at the end where you get the
impression that the whole set is being systematically destroyed? It must have been one of
the most elaborate of all your films to stage.
Buster Keaton : The original story I had was about the
Mississippi, but we actually used the Sacramento River in California, some six hundred
miles north of Los Angeles. We went up there and built that street front, three blocks of
it, and built the piers and so on. We found the riverboats right there in Sacramento: one
was brand new, and we were able to age the other one up to make it look as though it were
ready to fall apart.
My original situation in that film was a flood. But my so-called
producer on that film was Joe Schenck, who at that time was producing Norma Talmadge,
Constance Talmadge and myself, and who later became president of United Artists. Then
later on 20th Century-Fox was Joe Schenck and his brother Nicholas Schenck was head man of
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Schenck was supposed to be my producer, but he never knew when or
what I was shooting. He just turned me loose.
Well, the publicity man on Steamboat Bill goes to Schenck and
says: "He can't do a flood sequence because we have floods every year and too many
people are lost. It's too painful to get laughs with." So Schenck told me, "You
can't do a flood." I said, "That's funny, since it seems to me that Chaplin
during World War One made a picture called Shoulder Arms, which was the biggest
laughing picture out of it." He said, "Oh, that's different." I don't know
why it was different. I asked if it was all right to make it a cyclone, and he agreed that
was better. Now, he didn't know it, but there are four times more people killed in the
United States by hurricanes and cyclones than by floods. But it was all right as long as
he didn't find that out; and so I went ahead with my technical man and did the cyclone.
JG : How about the technical side? The
marvellous shot, for instance, of the front of the building falling on you, so that you
are standing in the window as it hits the ground. What were the problems in staging that
scene?
BK : First I had them build the framework of this building and
make sure that the hinges were all firm and solid. It was a building with a tall V-shaped
roof, so that we could make this window in the roof exceptionally high. An average second
storey window would be about 12 feet, but we're up about 18 feet.
Then you lay this framework down on the ground, and build the window
around me. We butt the window so that we had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder,
and the top missed my head by two inches and the bottom my heels by two inches. We mark
that ground out and drive big nails where my heels are going to be.
Then you put that house back into position while they finish building
it. They put the front on, painted it, and made the jagged edge where it tore away from
the main building; and then we went in and fixed the interiors so that you're looking at a
house that the front has blown off.
Then we put up our wind machines with the big Liberty motors. We had
six of them and they are pretty powerful: they could lift a truck right off the road. Now
we had to make sure that we were getting our foreground and background wind effect, but
that no current ever hit the front of that building when it started to fall, because if
the wind warps her she's not going to fall where we want her, and I'm standing right out
in front.
But it's a one-take scene and we got it that way. You don't do these
things twice.
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