#edward sutherland

Buster with Lew Cody and director Edward Sutherland on the set of The Baby Cyclone 1928

-Keaton made a more conventional entrance to visit his pal Lew Cody on the set of The Baby Cyclone. Cody’s character was about to take a fall and they had two stuntmen present. One of the doubles tried the fall, but director Eddie Sutherland wasn’t getting what he wanted.

“Finally I said, ‘Sedgwick wouldn’t need me for a while. Give me Cody’s clothes.’ So, there was no stage dressing room in those days; I just went behind a piece of scenery and put on his full dress suit, that’s all. I come down [the stairs], step on the cake of soap, and…The trouble with the other stunt men doing it is that they each did good falls, but they weren’t funny. And he didn’t want a big, dramatic straight fall—it had to look funny or he couldn’t use the scene. So instead of hitting the piece of soap and both feet going out from under me that way, I did it the other way. I hit the soap and took my feet out that way so that it threw me onto my head. And as I came down, I threw a neck roll and lit with the tails of the coat over my head, and I was on my knees like that with the tail of the coat over here, which is an ideal cut with the camera right there. For a double, it hid me immediately when I hit, see. So all I had to do was to move Cody in there, into the exact same spot, move the camera camera up just a few feet, and he just rose up, got the coattails back off his head, shook his head like that, and went on with it. Now, they did it without putting a number board up on the camera or anything. So it was a continuous scene on the screen except for the one little quick blur moving the camera.

In the projection room, Thalberg was watching the dailies when the scene came up. “You must never let Cody do a thing like that,” he told Sutherland. “Do you realize the chance you took? Cody could be laid up for weeks!”All Sutherland could manage without breaking Keaton’s cover was a weak, “Well, he wanted to do it.”

Thalberg could only see dollar signs, unaware that someone far more valuable than Cody had actually done the trick. “Well, never let him do anything like that again!” he ordered. If word ever reached him that Keaton was issued a $7.50 stunt check for the fall, he never let on.

Films Watched in 2021:

Estelle Allen and Edward Sutherland in the Romeo and Juliet production of 1915

Films Watched in 2019: