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Mack Sennett
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Mack Sennett was the outstanding pioneer and primitive of American silent comedy. Although Sennett's name is most commonly associated with the Keystone Company, which he founded in 1912, Sennett's film career began four years earlier with the Biograph Company, the pioneering film company where D.W. Griffith established the principles of film narrative and rhetoric. Sennett and Griffith were colleagues and contemporaries, and Sennett served as actor, writer, and assistant under Griffith in 1908 and 1909. In 1910 he began his career as director of his own films under Griffith's supervision.
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Mack Sennett was born Michael Sinnott on Jan. 17, 1884, in Quebec, Canada. He emigrated to New York at the beginning of the 20th century to act in films by D. W. Griffith. Not very successful, Sennett turned to movie direction, and his first two efforts, Comrade (1911) and One-round O'Brien (1912), were so popular that sequels were immediately demanded. Assured of financial backing, he formed his own organization, the Keystone Company, and moved to Hollywood, Calif.
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Having recently severed his ties with Triangle Films, comedy producer Mack Sennett served up his first two-reeler for Paramount release, A Bedroom Blunder. The plot is typical of the sort of farcical fare that Sennett had been churning out since 1912. Charles Murray stars as "An Average Husband," who while vacationing with his wife Eve Thatcher at a resort hotel tries to make time with pretty tourist Mary Thurman. Meanwhile, Thurman's roving husband Wayland Trask sets his sights on Murray's missus. The rest of the picture is a dizzying chase in and out of hotel bedrooms, with the flustered house detective (Pat Ford) bearing the brunt of the slapstick. Mack Sennett's fabled Bathing Beauties ... make a few brief (and briefly attired) appearances.
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Born in Richmond, Quebec, Mack Sennett's parents were Irish immigrants. When he was 17, the family moved to East Berlin, Connecticut and later, Northampton, Massachusetts, where Mack worked as a labourer. After a chance meeting with actress Marie Dressler in 1902, Sennett went to New York to try for a career on the stage. He earned chorus boy parts, and eventually began acting in films in 1908, appearing alongside a number of Hollywood stars, including fellow Canadian Mary Pickford.
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Canadian-born director Mack Sennett, the creator of the Keystone Kops, is regarded as the father of American slapstick comedy. Originally a performer in vaudeville and the theater, he studied silent-film direction under the tutelage of D. W. Griffith and in 1912 founded the Keystone Company in Los Angeles. His movie house eventually produced more than 1,000 one- and two-reel comedy shorts, and Sennett proved himself as a master of comic timing and film editing. Legendary comedians such as Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, and Fatty Arbuckle all appeared in early Keystone productions, and the fast-paced Keystone Kops comedy troupe became world famous. Sennett ... produced the first feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance (1912), and biting modern satires, such as A Small Town Idol (1921), in the 1920s. In 1937, he was presented with a special Academy Award for his "lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen."
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Mack Sennett was born an anarchist, a disturber of the peace who captured working-class resentments and turned them into comic mayhem at the expense of authority of all kinds. "Nearly every one of us lives in the secret hope that someday before he dies, he will be able to swat a policeman's hat down around his ears," he once remarked. "Lacking the courage and the opportunity, we like to see it done in the movies."
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Mack Sennett