Chaplin & Keaton

CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Bowler hat, thick eyebrows, tiny mustache, bamboo cane, tight-fitting jacket, oversized pants, oversized shoes

Easy Street (1917): The film is 22 minutes long. The plot: short, skinny bum gets hired as policeman, gets sent to restore law on Easy Street, matches wits with 8-foot-tall troublemaker. The jokes in Easy Street are side-splitting and arranged in the perfect order, and they continue to inspire me when thinking about physical comedy. The best joke involves the use of a lamppost light in hand-to-hand combat. No, seriously.

The Gold Rush (1925): Of all the genius he used for all his films, Chaplin poured 98% of it into this hour-and-a-half thrill ride of a movie. In 1890s Alaska, an endearingly clumsy prospector (Chaplin) drifts into uncharted Arctic territory and finds himself sharing an isolated cabin with an equally goofy gold-digger (Mack Swain) and a cutthroat fugitive (Tom Murray). A love interest (Georgia Hale) shows up for Chaplin later on.

No other work by Chaplin can better prove his talent. The Kid (1921), his feature-length debut, was weighed down too much with scentimentality, and forgot the humor. The short subjects he made before that were really really funny, but they lacked heart. Gold Rush blends comedy and emotion with enviable ease. The cabin material all has a well-deserved place in comedy history: Swain & Murray wrestling with the rifle (and Chaplin dodging the barrel), the shoelace dinner, the jumbo-chicken hallucination, the dancing pastries, and (in the finale) a snowstorm that places the cabin halfway off the edge of a cliff. This material is interwoven with the time Chaplin spends in a Klondike village, and the complicated friendship that develops between him and Hale ... whose character proves to be one of the most intriguing female roles in silent cinema, lovable and unbearable at the same time.

Chaplin was married to Hale during filming. Chaplin ended up married to most of his female co-stars throughout his career. And he had MANY female co-stars.

BUSTER KEATON
Porkpie hat, baggy emotionless eyes, persistent frown, dorky striped suit

Cops (1922): At a length of 17 minutes, Cops is nevertheless the definitive Keaton masterpiece. Picture a day where everything in your life goes wrong. What you just pictured probably pales in comparison to the events in Cops. And the worst part is that Keaton, playing a regular guy setting out to impress his girlfriend with some business skill, fails to notice the snowball effect of bad things happening .... that is until the ENTIRE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT starts chasing him for no good reason. The super-fast, super-loony chase scene is crammed with brilliance. The punchline that resolves the chase is a pure assault on the funny bone, followed by a last-minute twist of fate that is completely heartbreaking.

Keaton based Cops on the tragic final years lived by his close friend Fatty Arbuckle, a former comedy superstar. The shit that happened to Arbuckle is historical proof that the life of a celebrity should NOT be envied.

The General (1927): What can I say about General? Misunderstandings. Wheel rides. Cannonballs. Bear traps. Train wrecks.

General has no heart whatsoever, despite its insistence on mixing in heavy levels of drama and seriousness. The parts of this film you NEED to see are the jokes, because let me tell you something, there are only so many train jokes that can be done, and Keaton did all of them. All of them.

The setting for General is the American Civil War, with the Southern side portrayed as the victorious heroes. Even though the Union won! Also, when this film was first released, the Civil War was still a relatively recent event. So, not too surprisingly, audiences turned their noses, and within a few years Keaton found his career reduced to ashes.

New Sezar Salad Members

New members of the team include Adam Turgeon (who will be playing Travis Green in the upcoming 15 Eyes), Bohdan Onushko (who will play Mr. Mort), and Izzy Lawson (who will take charge of cameras and lighting).

Kowalski I

Something to say about my collaborator Jordan Kowalski:

He is unpredictable, in a good way. He is optimistic. He is filled with philosophy. He is a debonair ladies man who knows how to party. (He has the cottage to prove it.) He sees people for what they are.

Male auditions almost finished

Four main roles in 15 Eyes. Three of them are male. A total of 9 guys signed up to audition (3 for Travis, 3 for Mort, 3 for Dr. Katzenlager), which is good considering how small Sezar Salad is right now. With 1 left, I can breathe a temporary sigh of relief ....

.... before having to cast the one female role: Brenda. Which 11 girls have already expressed interest in. Do you ever notice how much more attention women pay to things than men do?

D.W. Griffith

Intolerance (1916): 3 1/2 hours long. 0 seconds of boredom. The way in which Griffith wove the stories of four separate historical periods into one cohesive narrative is still unmatched after 95 years. The themes are loud, the melodrama is intense. The sets are HUGE.

Griffith made Intolerance because of the reactions of some audiences to The Birth Of a Nation (1915). Nation was undeniably racist: the Ku Klux Klan were depicted as heroes of the Reconstruction, seeking to rid their nation of dark-skinned terrors. Intolerance, by sharp contrast, makes a point of bashing persecution, setting the golden standard for all the social-issue dramas of the 20th century ... although Griffith avoids racial issues and sticks mostly to religion.

Griffith became a prophet through Intolerance by describing Prohibition three years before it ever happened.

Creative Influence

Every so often I will give a rant about a particular artist, be they a filmmaker, actor, novelist, playwright, poet, painter, or musician, etc. etc. and just exactly how they influence my approach to entertaining people. Because unless an artist has lived their whole life under a rock, they are not truly original ... all artists have a legacy of previous artists running through their bloodstream.

Topics in the near future include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Frank Capra and Stanley Kubrick.

Deadlines I

Many times I will talk here about deadlines for Sezar Salad projects.

My favorite author, Douglas Adams, once infamously said I LOVE DEADLINES. I LOVE THE SOUND THEY MAKE AS THEY GO WHOOSHING BY. Ironically, I take the opposite approach. Having learned from years of failed enterpreurial ventures, my philosophy is that deadlines really help people in not only finishing their work, but finishing it in high quality.

Here are several crucial 15 Eyes pre-production dates, mostly as a written reminder to myself in the days ahead.

Deadline for casting the male roles: November 18th
Scene 5 deadline: November 25th
Deadline for casting Brenda: December 2nd
Deadline for assembling key crew: December 16th
Full screenplay deadline: January 1st

The First Post (alternate title: How Do You Know That Anyone Will Actually Read This Blog?)

The creation of this blog marks the official birth of an artistic group I have founded:
The Sezar Salad Hashbrown Company.

Its mandate: to master the art comedy filmmaking, and to breathe life into Canadian cinema.

At this starting point, there are seven members: Jordan Kowalski, myself (Mo Leslie), Jonah Murray, Nicole Nadeau, Rob Sapienza, Christopher Wallace and Brianna Wodabek. The seven of us, all Sheridan College first-years, are at work on our first project:

15 Eyes. A 20-minute satirical piece about an ordinary man and the vision he gains ... literally. Blinking into theaters summer 2012.

Provided the group does not disband or disintegrate after the debut effort, we will make high-quality low-budget shorts for the festival circuit, eventually preparing ourselves for feature-length material. We will generate brilliant new ideas that Hollywood will be jealous of. (Note that we dont have to immigrate from Canada to Hollywood in order to be awesome.) And on top of that, we will do everything in our power to make people laugh.

That is the first post.

Hooray.