The American silent-screen producer and director Mack Sennett (1884-1960) is frequently considered the originator of film comedy. He perfected the art of silent-screen slapstick in his "Keystone" series.
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.
During the first year Sennett produced 140 "Keystone Comedies," the most famous of which were Uncle Tom without the Cabin and Salome vs. Shenandoah. Unable to direct every comedy personally, Sennett supplied himself with a talented crew of gag writers, comedians, cameramen, and stunt men. At the completion of each film, he would attend the final screening and perfect the structure and timing through careful editing. All of these films were made so that, in projection, the action was faster than life.
Sennett's comic philosophy is perhaps best expressed in his comments on the Italian folk form commedia dell'arte: "The round, fat girls in nothing much doing their bumps and grinds, the German-dialect comedians, and especially the cops and tramps with their bed-slats and ladders appealed to me as being funny people. Their approach to life was earthy and understandable. They made fun of themselves and of the human race. They reduced convention, dogma, stuffed shirts … to nonsense, and then blossomed into pandemonium…. I especially enjoyed the reduction of authority to absurdity, the notion that sex could be funny, and the bold insults that were hurled at pretension."
The Sennett films defied logic and gravity in their epic chases and wild pie-throwing contests. In a Sennett comedy it was not unusual for a bandit to rob a bank with a vacuum cleaner or for a flood to carry a man out of his house in a bathtub. The Sennett Bathing Beauties, which featured such curvaceous creatures as Louise Fazenda and Gloria Swanson, added a touch of sexual delight to the then puritanical American film. Sennett's comedies, when they are at their best, are a combination of impudent satire, vulgar burlesque, and exhilarated madness.
The tragedy of Sennett's career was the arrival of sound in movies in the late 1920s; he was unable and unwilling to adjust to its demands. In 1928 Sennett permanently closed his studio. That same year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the classic innovator a special award, "for his lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen." He died on Nov. 6, 1960, in Woodland Hills, Calif.
Further Reading
The standard biography of Sennett is Cameron Shipp, King of Comedy (1954). Excellent critical studies of the film maker's work are in Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (1924); James Agee, Agee on Film (1958); Edward C. Wagenknecht, The Movies in the Age of Innocence (1962); and Kenneth McGowan, Behind the Screen (1965).
Additional Sources
Sennett, Mack, King of comedy, San Francisco: Mercury House;St. Paul, Minn.: Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 1990.
(click to enlarge) Mack Sennett. (credit: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive, New York)
(born Jan. 17, 1880, Richmond, Que., Can. — died Nov. 5, 1960, Hollywood, Calif., U.S.) Canadian-born U.S. film director. He performed in burlesque and vaudeville before joining the Biograph studio in 1908, and he soon was directing comedies under D.W. Griffith's tutelage. He left to form his own Keystone Co. in 1912. Considered the father of slapstick comedy in motion pictures, he produced the first U.S. feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), and made over 1,000 comedy shorts, often featuring the wild antics of the Keystone Kops. He hired stars such as Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, and Charlie Chaplin. Important directors such as Frank Capra and George Stevens also received experience under Sennett. Sennett excelled in comic timing, improvisation, and effective editing, and he used trick camera work and high-speed and slow-motion photography to produce his famous comic chase scenes. In 1937 he received a special Academy Award.
Sennett, Mack (sĕn'ĭt), 1884-1960, American movie director and producer, b. Danville, Que. In 1909 he began working for D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Company, and in 1912 he organized his own Keystone Company. Sennett's films, rarely more than one or two reels long, were slapstick comedies noted for their fantastic chases and custard pie warfare. His Keystone cops and bathing beauties became American institutions. In 1916 he became the third producer of the Triangle Corporation with D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince. The Keystone Company, after some years of difficulty, went bankrupt in 1933.
Bibliography
See his autobiography, King of Comedy (1954); G. Fowler, Father Goose (1934).
Career Highlights: Shriek of Araby, The New Janitor, Tillie's Punctured Romance
First Major Screen Credit: Monday Morning in a Coney Island Police Court (1908)
Biography
Canadian-born of Irish stock, actor, producer, director, and studio head Mack Sennett came from serving as a minor clown in third-string vaudeville to dominating the American motion picture comedy industry of the silent period. Hearing that one could make five dollars a day appearing in early movies, Sennett joined on at Biograph Studios in New York in 1908 and became one of the first members of D.W. Griffith's repertory company there; Sennett was also Griffith's first protégé among film directors. Griffith recognized Sennett's flair for comedy and featured him in many Biograph subjects between 1908 and 1910; Griffith's The Curtain Pole (1909), based on a French farce, was written by Sennett and is regarded as one of the first American slapstick comedies. Sennett began to direct in 1910, and when Mabel Normand joined Biograph in 1911, Sennett began to feature her in his comedy films as the star; comic Ford Sterling also began to work with Sennett at this time. In late 1912, Sennett broke with Biograph and formed the Keystone studio with Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann as backers, taking both Normand and Sterling with him and building a studio in Edendale, CA. The first Keystone was The Water Nymph (1912), starring Normand. The Bangville Police (1913) was the first subject featuring the Keystone Kops, and introduced Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who had previously been with Selig Polyscope, to Keystone. By the time Charlie Chaplin arrived in 1914, Keystone was already established as the top producer of film comedies in the United States, noted for knockabout chaos, pie throwing, explosions, collapsing sets, and free-for-all irreverence. Chaplin, however, became the biggest male movie star of any kind to date in a very short time, and Sennett wasn't able to hang onto him; Chaplin left for Essanay by the end of 1914. This started a trend; Ford Sterling left in 1915, and Arbuckle the following year. However, Sennett had a matchless sense of spotting talent, and over time he would launch or significantly assist the film careers of Gloria Swanson, Chester Conklin, Charley Chase, Edgar Kennedy, Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon, Al St. John, Marie Dressler, Phyllis Haver, Betty Bronson, Carole Lombard, Bing Crosby, and W.C. Fields. Many of the women, including Swanson, made their film debuts among the ranks of "Sennett's Bathing Beauties."
In 1915, Sennett signed on -- along with D.W. Griffith and Thomas Ince -- to distribute Keystone through Triangle Film Corporation, which turned out to be a mistake, as in 1917 it was discovered that Harry Aitken, head of Triangle, was slowing embezzling the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Sennett caught wind of this early and began legally unbinding himself from Triangle with the intention of leaving Aitken with nothing more than the brand name of "Keystone," which he ultimately did. But in the process, Sennett lost control of Mickey (1918), an expensive project for which Sennett had built a separate studio to produce; that the film was hugely successful when released while others made the money from it, coupled with the loss of Normand to the Goldwyn Studio in 1917, were major setbacks. The popularity of cross-eyed comic Ben Turpin helped the newly named Mack Sennett Comedies -- distributed by Paramount, and later Pathé -- to win back its cachet. Sennett also regained Normand's services in 1920, but finally lost them amid the scandals swarming around her as the 1920s progressed. Sennett updated his product from mere slapstick and stunts to incorporate special effects and other advanced devices and arrived at a surprise hit with Lizzies of the Field (1924), which featured mass destruction of automobiles. Sennett began production of Technicolor shorts in 1927, and released his first talking picture in 1928. However, with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Sennett -- who around 1920 had amassed the largest personal fortune of anyone in Hollywood -- was suddenly broke. He left Pathé and entered into a new distribution agreement with Paramount in 1932 that ultimately turned sour, was badly injured in an auto accident that also killed his star Charles E. Mack in 1934, and finally lost his studio in 1935; What's Up Thar (1935) -- a western comedy short featuring Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers -- was his last film. In 1938, Sennett received an honorary Academy Award recognizing his influence on movie comedy. Nevertheless, though he had 25 years left to him, afterward Sennett was like a man lost; he finished out his days at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, CA, frequently expressing his regret that he'd never married Mabel Normand, who had died in 1930.
Mack Sennett was probably the only studio head in Hollywood history to personally supervise every shot, cut, gag, and title card of every film that carried his name; if he didn't put his personal "ok" to it, it wasn't filmed. Gag writers and directors would periodically try to sneak one past him, such as Frank Capra, who once deliberately filmed a gag that Sennett had rejected just to show the boss that he was "right." Sennett agreed that the gag was a good one, then promptly fired Capra, and then re-hired him to teach Capra not to cross the boss; such firings and re-hirings were common with Sennett. He was able to watch the entire goings-on at Mack Sennett Comedies from his bathtub within a glass-walled room, three-stories high above the studio. Given his enormous productivity, the surviving output of Sennett's films is extremely disappointing -- while all but one of the 35 Chaplin films survive, the remainder only exist in a spotty, haphazard, and unpredictable fashion. In the early days of television, clips from Sennett's comparatively few surviving films were shown so often that the public eventually lost their taste for them. Nevertheless, certain Sennett films are iconic -- Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life (1913); Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), which starred Chaplin, Normand, and Marie Dressler in her film debut in one of only about a dozen features Sennett made; His Trysting Place (1914), with Chaplin and Mack Swain; Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916); Teddy at the Throttle (1917), with Gloria Swanson as the damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks; Campus Vamp (1928), with Carole Lombard; and the four sound shorts Sennett made with W.C. Fields at the very end of his career, The Dentist (1932) and The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933) among them. Mack Sennett was dubbed "The King of Comedy" in his heyday, and was so in a way that would not be possible for any other actor, director, producer, or studio head to hope to achieve now or at any time in the future; Sennett was a one-man industry of comedy. ~ David Lewis, All Movie Guide
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Born Michael Sinnott in Richmond, in the province of Quebec, Canada. Sennett was a son of Irish Catholic immigrant farmers; his father was a blacksmith in the small Eastern Townships village. At age 17 his family moved to Connecticut.
The family lived for a time in the Massachusetts town of Northampton, where, according to his autobiography, Sennett first got the idea to go on stage after seeing a vaudeville show. He claimed that the most respected lawyer in town, sometime Northampton mayor and later president of the United States Calvin Coolidge, and Sennett's mother tried to talk him out of his theatrical ambitions.
In New York City, Sennett became a singer, dancer, clown, actor (mostly playing low comedy parts, usually oafish rural types), set designer and director for Biograph. A major distinction in his acting career, often overlooked, is the fact that Sennett played Sherlock Holmes 11 times, in a parody format of course, between 1911 and 1913.
Sennett's slapstick comedies were noted for their wild car chases and custard pie warfare. His first comedienne was Mabel Normand, who became a major star (and with whom he embarked on a tumultuous personal relationship). His films featured a bevy of girls known as the Sennett Bathing Beauties which included Juanita Hansen and Phyllis Haver. Sennett also developed the Kid Comedies, a forerunner of the Our Gang films and in a short time his name became synonymous with screen comedy. In 1915 Keystone Studios became an autonomous production unit of the ambitious Triangle Pictures Corporation, as Sennett joined forces with movie bigwigs D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince.
In 1917 Sennett gave up the Keystone trademark and organized his own company, Mack Sennett Comedies Corporation. (Sennett's corporate bosses retained the Keystone trademark and produced a cheap series of comedy shorts that were "Keystones" in name only: they were unsuccessful, and Sennett had no connection with them.) Sennett went on to produce more ambitious comedy short films and a few feature-length films. During the 1920s his short subjects were in much demand, with stars like Billy Bevan, Andy Clyde, Harry Gribbon, Vernon Dent, Alice Day, Ralph Graves, Charlie Murray, and Harry Langdon. He produced several features with his brightest stars, such as Ben Turpin and Mabel Normand.
Many of Sennett's films of the early 1920s were inherited by Warner Brothers when Warners merged with the original distributor, First National. Warner added music and commentary to several of these shorts, but eventually destroyed the original elements for storage space. As a result many Sennett films, especially those from his most productive and creative period, no longer exist.
Move to Pathé
In the mid-1920s Sennett moved over to Pathé distribution. Pathé had a huge market share but made bad corporate decisions, such as attempting to sell too many comedies at once (including those of Sennett's main competitor, Hal Roach). In 1927 Paramount and MGM, Hollywood's two top studios, noting the profits being made by companies like Pathé and Educational, both re-entered the production and distribution of short subjects after several years. Roach signed with MGM but Sennett found himself and Pathé in hard times because the hundreds of exhibitors who had previously rented their shorts had switched to the new MGM or Paramount products.
Experiments, awards, and bankruptcy
Sennett made a reasonably smooth transition to sound films, releasing them through Earle Hammons's Educational Pictures. Sennett occasionally experimented with color and was the first to get a talkie short subject on the market, in 1928. In 1932 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in the comedy division for producing The Loud Mouth (with Matt McHugh, in the sports-heckler role later taken in Columbia Pictures remakes by Charley Chase and Shemp Howard), and he won in the novelty division for his film Wrestling Swordfish.
Sennett often clung to outmoded techniques, making his early-1930s films seem dated and quaint. This doomed his attempt to re-enter the feature film market with Hypnotized (starring blackface comedians Moran and Mack, "The Two Black Crows"). However, Sennett enjoyed great success with short comedies starring Bing Crosby; these films were probably instrumental in Sennett's product being picked up by a major studio, Paramount Pictures. W. C. Fields conceived and starred in four famous Sennett-Paramount comedies.
Sennett's studio did not survive the Great Depression; the Sennett-Paramount partnership lasted only one year, and Sennett was forced into bankruptcy in November 1933. His last work, in 1935, was as a producer-director for Educational Pictures; he directed Buster Keaton in The Timid Young Man and Joan Davis in Way Up Thar. He went into semi-retirement at the age of 55, having produced more than 1,000 silent films and several dozen talkies during a 25-year career. His studio property was purchased by Mascot Pictures (later part of Republic Pictures), and many of his former staffers found work at Columbia Pictures.
In March 1938, Sennett was presented with an honorary Academy Award.
Later projects
Rumors abounded that Sennett would be returning to film production (a 1938 publicity release indicated that he would be working with Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy), but apart from Sennett reissuing a couple of his Bing Crosby two-reelers to theaters, nothing happened. Sennett did appear in front of the camera, however, in Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), itself a thinly disguised version of the Mack Sennett-Mabel Normand romance. In 1949 he provided film footage for, and appeared in, the first full-length comedy compilation, Down Memory Lane (1949), which was written and narrated by Steve Allen. Sennett was profiled in the television series This is Your Life in 1956, and made a cameo appearance (for $1,000) in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955). He contributed to the radio program Biography in Sound, broadcast February 28, 1956.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry Sennett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6712 Hollywood Blvd. Also in 2004, he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
The Keystone legacy
Today the name of Mack Sennett is still highly recognizable (even to those who have no contact with his films) and the term "Keystone Cops" has become part of the language, describing incompetent buffoons with supposed authority. Some historians even credit Sennett's films with having been responsible for municipal police forces across North America altering their uniforms to include military style officers' caps since by the 1920s tall, English-style hats had become so indelibly associated with slapstick comedy.
Henry Mancini's score for the 1963 film, The Pink Panther, the original entry in the series, contains a segment called "Shades of Sennett". It is played on a silent film era style "honky tonk" piano, and accompanies a climactic scene in which the incompetent police detective Inspector Clouseau is involved in a multi-vehicle chase with the antagonists.
In 1974, Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman wrote the musical Mack & Mabel, chronicling the romance between Sennett and Mabel Normand. Sennett also was a leading character in The Biograph Girl, a 1980 musical about the silent film era.
Peter Lovesey's 1983 novel Keystone is a whodunnit set in the Keystone Studios and involving (among others), Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle and the Keystone Cops.
