DOG ASIDE: Cornelius Crane “Chevy” Chase (born October 8, 1943) is an American comedian, actor, and writer….born into a prominent New York family….Chase worked a plethora of odd jobs before he moved into comedy and began acting with National Lampoon. He quickly became a key cast member in the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live….where his recurring…
DOG ASIDE: This HBO’s Young Comedians Show features the comedy of Joe Nipote…who grew up in Detroit, MI…..as a person determined from an early age to make a living as a performer. He earned an acting scholarship to Central Michigan University….but quit one semester shy of graduation to try out his talents in Hollywood. After…
DOG ASIDE: Carl Reiner (born March 20, 1922) is an American actor, director, producer, and writer of comedy whose career spans nearly seven decades. During the early years of television comedy….from 1950 to 1957….he co-wrote and acted on Caesar’s Hour and Your Show of Shows….starring comedian Sid Caesar….and in the 1960’s….Reiner was best known as the…
DOG ASIDE: In the first Keaton pictures with sound….he and his fellow actors would shoot each scene three times….one in English….one in Spanish….and one in either French or German. The actors would phonetically memorize the foreign-language scripts a few lines at a time…..and shoot immediately after. This is discussed in the TCM documentary Buster Keaton:…
DOG ASIDE: Keaton signed with MGM in 1928….a business decision that he would later call the worst of his life….as he realized too late that the studio system MGM represented….would severely limit his creative input…..for instance, the studio refused his request to make his early project, Spite Marriage, as a sound film….and after the studio…
DOG ASIDE: Keaton started experimenting with parody during his vaudeville years….where most frequently his performances involved impressions and burlesques of other performers’ acts. Most of these parodies targeted acts with which Keaton had shared the bill.…so when Keaton transposed his experience in vaudeville to film….in many works he parodied melodramas. Other favorite targets were cinematic plots…
DOG ASIDE: Orson Welles stated that Keaton’s The General is “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made”. A 2012 worldwide poll by Sight & Sound ranked Keaton’s The General as the 34th greatest film and the top comedy. The magazine’s 2002 poll ranked it #15…
DOG ASIDE: Film critic David Thomson later described Keaton’s style of comedy as follows: “Buster plainly is a man inclined towards a belief in nothing but mathematics and absurdity … like a number that has always been searching for the right equation. Look at his face—as beautiful but as inhuman as a butterfly—and you see…
DOG ASIDE: In February 1917, Keaton met Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York City….where Arbuckle was under contract to Joseph M. Schenck. During his first meeting with Arbuckle….he asked to borrow one of the cameras to get a feel for how it worked. He took the camera back to his hotel…