Buster Keaton

afaik I haven't seen Doughboys. I suppose it can't be worse than the Durante teamings.

I've been looking at some of the shorts with Arbuckle that I realized I'd never seen (or had forgotten): Out West, Moonshine, The Rough House, Oh Doctor1 etc. Still strange to see him pulling faces, crying, and all that. In Out West he's kinda like Deadwood's Al Swearengen.

TCM is mercifully omitting Free and Easy (the final musical number...). Although I wouldn't mind seeing Estrellados, the alternate Spanish-language version.

Adam Gopnick:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/what-made-buster-keatons-comedy-so-modern-biography-james-curtis-dana-stevens

Oh, is that bio out now? Thought about ordering a copy.

I leafed through Stevens' on my Sunday bookstore run; got it reserved in the library after Gottlieb's Garbo bio.

Oh, I only knew about the Curtis one.

Oh, I see. The Stevens is out, but not the Curtis until next week.

Wonder if James Karen is interviewed.

but the Roman sequences are done with even more panache than Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I.”

Have you read the book about Dietrich by her daughter, Maria Riva?

https://filmforum.org/series/busters-century

Would be nice to go to see James Curtis introduce.

Autographed copies of the Dana Stevens at MoMI.

Nice article by Geoffrey O’Brien in current NYRB.

Actually I didn’t read the article yet, just the email about it which also mentions and links to several other relevant articles from yesteryear.

Have both the Curtis and Stevens books, the latter is shorter so I will try that one first.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/john-lahr/puzzled-puss

I read the Stevens and enjoyed it very much. A good biography interspersed with many interesting diversions about the times Buster lived and worked in. I started the Curtis but felt like I was getting pummeled with biographical minutiae and didn't get very far.

Sounds about right, thanks.

yeah i just finished the Stevens and it was good but does zigzag around quite a bit

Miniseries from Blank Check on Keaton’s movies.. starts here

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/three-ages-our-hospitality-with-dana-stevens/id981330533?i=1000612019681