The Silent Type

"5 Minutes to Heaven" was in the works for a long time.  Way back in the TMU days I read a logline from another short with the same name and thought it was a fun idea.  Over the next 10 years it percolated in my head until I finally wrote up the script in Oct 2021. The three main characters were to be architypes of silent movie comedians but not the actors themselves.  Over the next 6 months I watched a fair amount of silent comedies.

While Buster Keaton's The General is definitely the funniest Civil War comedy (!) its also likely one of the best looking silents with Keaton looking all the dapper modern a man can get while driving a locomotive. 

Harold Lloyd seems much more out of place with his sincere do-goodery.  My fondest Lloyd flick is The Freshman where I giggled immensely as the old tailor chased Lloyd around the dance floor trying to repair his busted tuxedo without anyone noticing.  Lloyd also does a nifty choreographed handshake that gets funnier every time he does it (and he does it a lot).  Its also the plot from Rudy (+/- is on you).

 

Safety Last is likely his most famous but its a weird one with Lloyd climbing the exterior of a building for an hour.  Kind of like a silent era Die Hard.  Unfortunately I found it a bit boring so maybe like a silent era Die Hard 2.  Maybe its Mall Cop on a horse drawn carriage.  Spit-balling.

Thinking about the veracity of truth on either side of the Fatty Arbuckle//Virginia Rappe scandal is one of the last things I want to do in 2022 but doomed silent era comedians smell like chocolate chip cookies so here we are with Fatty as the leader of this band of rascals.  

By far my favorite Fatty short is Coney Island where Fatty, Al St. John (Fatty's nephew) and Buster Keaton continuously knock each other down and grab the girl like she's some sort of spy-vs-spy briefcase.  The gal floats between the men seeming to prefer St John's cash and Fatty's grabbiness to Keaton's cool.   However, she gets off better than Fatty's wife who spends her time searching for her philandering husband*. 

Women aside, its a lot of fun with Buster knocking Fatty upside the head with a mallet, Fatty crossdressing and full on flirting with his nephew, and lots of Coney Island amusement park rides (a scene from the movie is subtly memorialized in a glass mural at the Stillwell Avenue Subway station).  

So, does "5 Minutes to Heaven" nail the parts?  Not likely.  Lloyd and Keaton are bit players, and yea I think I got Lloyd's smile and Buster's calm 1000 yard gaze into a scene or two but I don't think I generated either Arbuckle's physicality or his petulance.  The original script did not rely upon the real life counterparts but evolved during the filming to incorporate some of the characteristics that made it in.  Rethinking the script I would likely buy full in to portraying the actual actors and try to get a bit more of their personality into the film.  

*My guess is that Prohibition led to a comedic anti-wife sentiment in a lot of these shorts (the Tramp does it in Pay Day and with Mr. and Mrs. Stout in The Rink).  Coney Island's last title card states: "Resolved: That Women were the cause of all our trouble".  As cool as it is to talk like a drunken scientist this reminds me a lot of  "Here's to alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems". Homer Simpson is not a wise man but he knows better than to blame that shit on Marge.