His films were from the silent era. Comedies that usually involved some drunk or sleepwalker stumbling around the ledges of high buildings.
I saw a bunch of these when I was a kid but I cant rember the names of the films or who did them. Thanks
Harold Lloyd? (Although, when his character was trapped on a high building, he wasn’t usually drunk or sleepwalking.)
Thanks NDP! Heres the one I was thinking of
I was thinking Mack Sennett.
Hal Roach was mainly famous for Little Rascals. I remember watching him at the Oscars ca. 1992 when Billy Crystal was walking the crowd and introduced him. He received a huge ovation and Crystal moved off. Roach was 100 or so at the time (literally) and evidently a tad senile and, as Crystal moves off, he rises and begins talking to the crowd. There’s no camera anywhere around him and so it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying, but the camera focused on him and Crystal ad-libbed “Hal Roach… still the king of silent film.”
I couldn’t decide if that was really good ad-libbing or really rude. Either way, I don’t think Roach knew he had said it. (Crystal had another embarassing encounter with Fay Wray a few years ago when he picked her from the audience, made a joke, and held the microphone out. (DON’T expect a 90 year old woman to be great at improv, for God’s sake, especially when she probably wasn’t when she was 30.) I think since then he’s learned to leave the Barely-Living Legends alone (or perhaps Luise Rainer punched him in the nuts and screamed “Sehen sie mein name, bitch!” at the backstage party).