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ABSTRACT: This article examines slapstick comedies about moviemaking produced by the Mack Sennett Comedies studio (1917-33) and studies the model of filmmaking that these metamovies advance. Mack Sennett Comedies' movies on moviemaking, this essay suggests, repeat founding facts, icons, and technology associated with the Keystone era and, through their constant replay, elevate those motifs to the status of myth. In so doing, Mack Sennett Comedies not only built its corporate identity as a slapstick universe of play, leisure, and fun but also contributed to the imagination of Hollywood filmmaking, advancing slapstick practices as a model for the way in which the film industry represented its early years. As an addendum, this essay also reprints and examines a postcard from a booklet entitled Making the "Movies": A Peep into Filmland, issued by the California Postcard Company in 1922.
KEYWORDS: Mack Sennett Comedies, Keystone Film Company, metamovies, slapstick comedy, film technology
Several movies produced by the Mack Sennett Comedies studio between 1917 and 1933 show a sense of documentary integrity in the shooting of Los Angeles locations and the exploitation of real-life events. The penchant to ground comedy in local reality is also visible in the slapstick films that take filmmaking as their subject, picturing the multifaceted process of film production. These metamovies are truly "home-made" films: they use the studio grounds that are not dressed as sets as filming locations; they display the operation of movie machinery in full view of the cameras; they demonstrate methods of rehearsing, acting, and directing; and they present comedians as regular people behind the scenes. Or do they? This essay examines the process of filmmaking as it was pictured in Mack Sennett's slapstick movies about moviemaking and explores the impact of these visualizations on the idea of Hollywood as a place and style of film production.
Slapstick cinema frequently revisits the subject of making movies, nowhere more visibly than in the film catalogue of comedy king Mack Sennett. At least twenty-nine of the approximately 460 comedies released by Mack Sennett Comedies are constructed around some aspect of the movie world, such as building sets, acting and rehearsing, breaking into the movies, moviegoing, photography, and fandom. When we count the sixteen Keystone movies-on-movies made between 1912 and 1917, this adds...