Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens
Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle once said of Buster Keaton that he “lived in the camera.” It was Arbuckle who gave the 22-year-old Keaton his film debut as an actor in his 1917 two-reeler The Butcher Boy, where he is seen wearing his trademark porkpie hat for the first time. At the end of the first day’s filming, Keaton asked Arbuckle if he could take the movie camera back to his boardinghouse, so as to disassemble it and put it back together in time for the next day’s shoot.
As Dana Stevens shows in Camera Man, Keaton never encountered a new technological medium without wanting to find out exactly how it worked.
