Buster Keaton Interviews (2007)

This collection makes for a nice read, with lots of anecdotes and insights straight from the horse’s mouth.  I’d recommended reading it bit by bit rather than in one or a few sittings, but it’s definitely a good time.

Just what it says on the label, this book compiles sixteen interviews with Buster Keaton.  Some are a page or two, while others exceed twenty pages.  There are print interviews, transcribed TV interviews, and a few interviews translated from foreign-language publications. 

It surprises me a little that the overwhelming majority of the interviews come from the last ten years of Buster’s life, during the Keaton renaissance of the ‘50s and ‘60s.  There are only three that were actually conducted during his silent career, and then, they’re very early in his silent career – the last of them was written in 1923, just after he finished Our Hospitality.  I wonder if that sort of thing, celebrity interviews, just wasn’t done very often in the ‘20s?  The first two, in fact, are more informational than anything else, with no more than a few short quotes from Buster.  The third, though, is interesting to me.  The interviewer spends a lot of the article commenting on the interview scenario, Buster’s friendly but shy demeanor, and the interviewer’s suspicion that she could get a lot more of the “real” Buster if they weren’t in a studio office with suits running around.

Fortunately, the later interviews are packed to the gills with the real Buster.  There’s plenty of plain-talking observations on Hollywood then and now (well, in the ‘50s and ‘60s,) animated stories about a particular scene from this or that film, polite brushoffs when the interviewers start waxing too philosophically on the Genius of Keaton, and notes from the interviewers about how engaging and personable Buster is.  What’s interesting is that, particularly in the ‘50s, Buster’s work had only recently been rediscovered and had started to be shown again on late-night TV and, rarely, in theaters.  So, many of these interviewers talking to Buster about his long and illustrious career have never even seen the classics they’re asking him about.  That must have been so weird, especially when you’re talking about silent movies.  It makes for a rather unusual interview dynamic, with Buster telling these interviews what particular shorts or features were about, but I think it also speaks to how resonant Buster’s work is, seeing these interviews asking him to describe movies they’ve only read about.

Some fun stories about particular films (The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and Seven Chances get a lot of time devoted to them for the features, and The Boat and The Playhouse are probably the most talked-of shorts,) covering amusing filmmaking challenges, Buster’s process, and, of course, stunt and technical mishaps.  He also shares quite a bit about his vaudeville career, his history with Fatty Arbuckle, and the difficulties of the MGM years.  Word of warning, though – the same stories get repeated in many interviews, which is why I’d recommend reading the book more gradually.  Obviously, it’s perfectly natural for Buster to tell eight reporters in a ten-year span the same anecdote about the rolling-boulders sequence in Seven Chances, but reading it eight times in the same week is a bit much.  Still, there’s a lot to enjoy here, and some nice tidbits – even with things I’d already learned elsewhere, I like to read Buster telling about them, and I love how consistently he fascinates his interviewers with everything he accomplished in his amazing career.