Mack Sennett- Laugh Tester

The Man Who Makes the Keystone Comedies

A big shaggy man with a splendid leonine head is sitting at a desk in an office, "surrounded by stenographers, desks, telephones, filing cabinets and all of the junk that stands for business system. In rushes an agitated moving picture director.

"Say," he demands, "Would it be funny if the policeman fell out of the window onto a cactus plant?"

"It would not," answers the shaggy man with finality.

Exit the moving picture director.

The great white chief of the Keystone Company has spoken.

There are men who can bite a tea leaf and tell you whether it came from a tea plant up on the far slopes of the Himalayas where the borders of the British are guarded by the Gourkas, or whether it was sealed in Ceylon. There are others who can taste whiskey and tell when it ceased to be corn in the ear. Other experts can detect a bogus bill by the feel as it touches their fingers. Mack Sennett is the world's best laugh tester. He can bite into a joke and tell whether it is really funny or just a sort of bogus funny as accurately as the whiskey taster can tell the year of distilling.

Sennett is one of the towering personalities of the moving picture world. There are ten producing companies in the Keystone and a herd of comedians. Sennett is literally all ten companies and most of the comedians. Every comedy of the enormous output of the Keystone has been both written and acted by Sennett before it leaves the factory.

His extraordinary methods can best be shown by chasing him through a picture. We will assume that the scenario has been written by one of the "kept" scenario writers who work on salary for the company Sennett says that about fifty outside scenarios are received every day and fifty returned.

"It is the rarest timing in the world to find a real idea in the mail," says Sennett.

"If we find even the germ of an idea in any scenario, we buy it and ask the writer for more. But nearly all those sent to us are merely silly strings of crazy incidents. It is not possible to be really funny without being logical. You will notice in our wildest rough comedies that the story has probability and sequence. Take even that trained snake that pulled a man up a cliff in one of our comedies. If you had a trained snake it would be a most practical and excellent way of rescuing yourself from a precipice.

"Good comedies are so rare that even our hired scenario writers seldom turn out a perfect one.

"The way to write a good moving picture comedy is first to get your idea; you will find that either in sex or crime. Those two fields are the great feeding grounds of funny ideas.

"Having found your hub idea, you build out the spokes; those are the natural developments that your imagination will suggest. Then introduce your complications that makes up the funny wheel.

"If I could find a writer who could do this with success- that is to say one I could trust to turn out two comedies a week in such shape- that I could hand them out to the directors without going over them myself he could name his own salary. I mean that literally. He could prepare his own salary vouchers. That is how rare good comedy writers are.

"We have tried famous humorists and I can say with feeling that their stuff is about the worst we get. Every writer to whom we talk about scenarios is very airy and off-hand about it. 'Oh yes,' he says, 'I get you. What you want is just a lot of action.' Which is just what we don't want. What we want is a real idea- a logical, compelling idea. We will add the action."

Having found something that looks to him like a funny idea, Sennett goes over to a corner of the big studio, where, chalked on the board floor are the locale he intends to use. Lakes into which comedians are going to fall- rooms, fire escapes; etc., all indicated on the floor. There, among the chalk marks, he and the comedians work out every comedy situation. Not only do they plan all the situations and the business, but Sennett acts out every scene and shows how he thinks nearly every actor should do his part.

No one but a man with stage technique at his finger tips and a mind sizzling with pep and ideas could do this. There are few picture directors with the necessary physical strength.

Sennett has big heavy shoulders and a frame like a sailor. His shaggy hair and quick strong gestures speak of enormous reserve power. He is so full of pep that he acts out half a dozen comedies when he talks to you in his club.

His equipment has been thorough. He bumped the bumps in burlesque vaudeville, musical comedy, melodrama and all the rest of it.

"I never succeeded very well on the stage," he confesses. "I never could agree with the directors. It always seemed to me that they made mistakes in dragging in situations for the sake of getting a laugh. I thought their comedy was too forced. They didn't let us act naturally. I was glad to go into moving pictures for the sake of trying out my own ideas. They seemed to have justified my complaints against the directors under whom worked. If you want to make people really laugh- laugh all over- you must convince them."

Well, we will return to the chalk marks on the stage.

Sennett is showing the actors how he thinks it ought to be done. He has shown them to such good effect that some of them have become famous in the process. One of the actors he is showing is a very pretty girl bubbling over with the fun of the thing they are doing that is Mabel Normand.

"When Miss Normand first came to my company," said Sennett in his club the other night, "She got such a small salary that I can't think of any word short enough to tell about it. Now she gets the second or third highest salary paid in the picture business.

"Miss Normand is such a wonderful success even more on account of her head than her good looks. She is quick as a flash and just naturally funny. She is funny to talk to. She seems to think in sparks."

Sennett was asked if Miss Normand didn't have troubles like other people learning to act. "Worse," he said. "The trouble with her was inducing her to keep quiet. Like most girls with quick thoughts, she acted quickly. She moved so quickly that the audience couldn't get it. Deliberation and poise were the lessons she had to learn. It was a tough job getting her to slow down. After that, she took up the problem of getting what I call 'man comedy'- that is the repressed stuff. Not just flying around but sitting still and showing the changing thoughts on one's face.

"A somewhat similar development was that of Roscoe Arbuckle of our company- our fat man. We got him in the beginning because he was the rare combination of fat and perfect athlete. Arbuckle is a wonderful athlete in spite of his weight.

We got him on account of the falls he could make. Every week he has been developing. I can see the difference in every picture we turn out. He began as a rough 'faller' and he has become a finished artist. And he is still going."

Miss Normand and Arbuckle and all the rest of them were trained over there among the chalk marks on the floor. That chalked off patch of flooring may be said to be the post graduate college of moving picture comedy.

Sennett says that the great problem at this stage of the comedy is to plan effects so they appear to have "just happened." Their highest efforts are put upon the accidents. The stubbing of a toe, the tomato that hits the wrong man, are planned with the utmost care. Some actors fail utterly because they can't help showing that they expect the accident that is to get the laugh. Every move of the Keystone policemen, who seem to dash around at wild random, is planned down to the finest detail. While they are working out the stuff on the chalk marks, there is one busy citizen. This is Sennett's stenographer. He is the best acrobat in the Keystone organization has to be. While Sennett dashes hither and yon around the chalkmarks, the stenographer dashes around after him.

Every word of the "chief's" directions are taken down in short hand.

Finally they have worked it out, down to the last detail among the chalk lakes and streets. The stenographer then transcribes his notes.

The next day, these notes and the necessary actors are turned over to a sub-director who turns the chalk lakes into real ones. The sub-director makes the stenographer's notes come true. He works out in film form the business that has been planned on the chalked stage.

So much territory is used in one of the Keystone comedies that it takes a week or so to work it out. By this singular method Sennett is able to direct the whole thing in miniature in a few hours.

By this method he personally directs the scenarios of all his ten or twelve companies. In a short time Keystone intends adding ten or twelve more and Sennett will also direct these. His will be the mind behind every scenario.

It is of course impossible to anticipate on the chalked floor all the details that come up when the real work is done.

For this reason, as Sennett sits in his office, a constant stream of moving picture directors are dashing in upon him.

He will be talking he picture scenarios with a writer when a director dashes in and "puts up to the chief" some intricate question of comedy effect. This the ancient ceremony called "Passing the buck."

Right off the reel, Sennett will be called upon to accept or reject some idea that will make or break an expensive production. These interruptions would just about drive the average man crazy.

But like many men of excessive vitality and perception, Sennett has trained his mind to switch on or off like a dynamo.

He says he has trained himself to switch from one thing to another without the slightest feeling of irritation.

"The secret of it, he says, "is in the doctrine of non-resistance. If you think to yourself 'I wish this fellow would not cut in on my work,' you are hopelessly lost. The salvation of your nerves is to surrender yourself to any one who wants your attention. The reason that people get on the average man's nerves is that he gets on his own nerves. I don't get on my own nerves. Impatience or irritability would kill all the pep in sensitive, high-strung people such as I have to do with."

In due course of time, the actors come back with a few bumps and a feeling of elation at work well done and the "makings" of a film. The next job is the projection room.

Sennett cuts all the film sent out by the Keystone. He is a hard cutter. Only about one-fourth of the film made ever sees a public screen. That is to say, for every four feet of film taken, one foot is used and three feet thrown away.

This stage is, after all, the supreme test of the director. It is at this point that he has to show an almost uncanny instinct for gauging the public taste.

The "legitimate" stage director can correct his mistakes. The first performance of every farce comedy is an experiment. He tries the play the first night. Some of the funny situations "get over;" some don't. Those that do not are cut out or changed. The moving picture comedy director has no such safety valve. The only test he has for what will make the public laugh is his own intuitive sense.

He puts on what he thinks is funny and it has to stand. He seldom has any very definite means of finding out just which parts the public liked and which parts failed of appeal.

Sennett's years on the stage, hearing audiences laugh, stand him well now.

Having seen Sennett the scenario maker, the actor and the film cutter, we take a look at Sennett the business man.

"I feel sorry for the men who are trying to break into the picture game," he said. "It is getting harder every year. To begin now at the beginning and come in competition with the directors who have learned through long and hard experience will be an ordeal to try any man's courage. The great difficulty of mastering the moving picture business is keeping up the constant changes. These come with incredible rapidity. You can understand how rapid are theme changes when I tell you that we couldn't possibly put over today the comedies we were producing with success six months ago. They made a big hit six months ago but are entirely out of style now.

"Rough horse play has suddenly vanished from moving picture comedy.

"The moving picture comedy now demands subtle effects. Let me cite you a typical scene.

"A man is sitting in a hotel parlor. At one end of the room is sitting his affinity with her escort; at his side sits his wife. He is trying to show devotion to his wife without letting the affinity know he is married and to beam upon the affinity without letting his wife suspect. He just sits there. The comedy consists of the changes on his face. That takes real art; it also takes real scenarios; also takes real directing. This was the stuff at which Charlie Chaplin excelled.

There is a lot of money to be made in pictures- fortunes. But it takes great judgment and a game spender. No one who stops to think about the cost can ever succeed. The cost is simply not to be taken into consideration.

"For instance there are four people on the payroll of the Keystone company who just one year ago, were getting three dollars a day. Now they are each under contract at a salary of $10,000 apiece. We consider them cheap at the price.

"The moving picture business is the business for a man who is up on his toes and thinking fast."

Original article by Harry C. Carr, 1915.

Harry C. Carr, "Mack Sennett- Laugh Tester," Photoplay Magazine, May 1915, pages 71-76.

© 1997, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)

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