Charley Chase began his film career in early 1913 working as a comedian, writer, and director at the Al Christie studios under his real name, Charles Parrott. Chase then joined Mack Sennett's Keystone studio in 1914, costarring in early films of Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, as well as directing the frenetic Keystone Cops. By 1924 he was starring in a series of one-reel comedies at Hal Roach studios, graduating to two-reel films the following year. In 1929, he made the transition to sound films. Along with the continuing popularity of his own short comedies, Chase often directed the films of others, including several popular Three Stooges efforts. In The Charley Chase Talkies: 1929-1940, James L. Neibaur examines, film-by-film, the comedian's seventy-nine short subjects at Roach and Columbia studios. The first book to examine any portion of Chase’s filmography, this volume discusses the various methods Chase employed in his earliest sound films, his variations on common themes, his use of music, and the modification of his character as he reached the age of forty. Neibaur also acknowledges the handful of feature film appearances Chase made during this period. A filmmaker whom Time magazine once declared was receiving the most fan mail of any comedian in movies, Charley Chase remains quite popular among classic film buffs, as well as historians and scholars. A detailed look into the work of an artist whose career straddled the silent and sound eras, The Charley Chase Talkies will be appreciated by those interested in film comedy of the 1920s and 30s.

Details the life of Charley Chase—a major force in the shaping of motion picture comedy.

American silent film comedies were dominated by sight gags, stunts and comic violence. With the advent of sound, comedies in the 1930s were a riot of runaway heiresses and fast-talking screwballs. It was more than a technological pivot--the first feature-length sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927), changed Hollywood. Lost in the discussion of that transition is the overlap between the two genres. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd kept slapstick alive well into the sound era. Screwball directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch got their starts in silent comedy. From Chaplin's tramp to the witty repartee of His Girl Friday (1940), this book chronicles the rise of silent comedy and its evolution into screwball--two flavors of the same genre--through the works of Mack Sennett, Roscoe Arbuckle, Harry Langdon and others.

In 1989 alone, for example, there were some forty-five major motion pictures which were sequels or part of a series. The film series phenomenon crosses all genres and has been around since the silent film era. This reference guide, in alphabetical order, lists some 906 English Language motion pictures, from 1899 to 1990, when the book was initially published. A brief plot description is given for each series entry, followed by the individual film titles with corresponding years, directors and performers. Animated pictures, documentaries and concert films are not included but movies released direct to video are.

Once labeled the “lot that laugher built,” the Hal Roach Studios launched the comedic careers of such screen icons as Harold Lloyd, Our Gang, and Laurel and Hardy. With this stable of stars, the Roach enterprise operated for forty-six years on the fringes of the Hollywood studio system during a golden age of cinema and gained notoriety as a producer of short comedies, independent features, and weekly television series. Many of its productions are better remembered today than those by its larger contemporaries. In A History of the Hal Roach Studios, Richard Lewis Ward meticulously follows the timeline of the company’s existence from its humble inception in 1914 to its close in 1960 and, through both its obscure and famous productions, traces its resilience to larger trends in the entertainment business. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the motion picture industry was controlled by an elite handful of powerful firms that allowed very little room for new competition outside of their established cartel. The few independents that garnered some measure of success despite their outsider status usually did so by specializing in underserved or ignored niche markets. Here, Ward chronicles how the Roach Studios, at the mercy of exclusive distribution practices, managed to repeatedly redefine itself in order to survive for nearly a half-century in a cutthroat environment. Hal Roach’s tactic was to nurture talent rather than exhaust it, and his star players spent the prime of their careers shooting productions on his lot. Even during periods of decline or misdirection, the Roach Studios turned out genuinely original material, such as the screwball classic Topper (1937), the brutally frank Of Mice and Men (1940), and the silent experiment One Million B.C. (1940). Ward’s exploration yields insight into the production and marketing strategies of an organization on the periphery of the theatrical film industry and calls attention to the interconnected nature of the studio system during the classic era. The volume also looks to the early days of television when the prolific Roach Studios embraced the new medium to become, for a time, the premier telefilm producer. Aided by a comprehensive filmography and twenty-seven illustrations, A History of the Hal Roach Studios recounts an overlooked chapter in American cinema, not only detailing the business operations of Roach’s productions but also exposing the intricate workings of Hollywood’s rivalrous moviemaking establishment.

During the first fifty years of the American cinema, the act of going to the movies was a risky process, fraught with a number of possible physical and moral dangers. Film fires were rampant, claiming many lives, as were movie theatre robberies, which became particularly common during the Great Depression. Labor disputes provoked a large number of movie theatre bombings, while low-level criminals like murderers, molesters, and prostitutes plied their trades in the darkened auditoriums. That was all in addition to the spread of disease, both real (as in the case of influenza) and imagined ("movie eyestrain"). Audiences also confronted an array of perceived moral dangers. Blue Laws prohibited Sunday film screenings, though theatres ignored them in many areas, sometimes resulting in the arrests of entire audiences. Movie theatre lotteries became another problem, condemned by politicians and clergymen throughout America for being immoral gambling. The Perils of Moviegoing in America: 1896-1950 provides the first history of the many threats that faced film audiences, threats which claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

Short subject films have a long history in American cinemas. These could be anywhere from 2 to 40 minutes long and were used as a "filler" in a picture show that would include a cartoon, a newsreel, possibly a serial and a short before launching into the feature film. Shorts could tackle any topic of interest: an unusual travelogue, a comedy, musical revues, sports, nature or popular vaudeville acts. With the advent of sound-on-film in the mid-to-late 1920s, makers of earlier silent short subjects began experimenting with the short films, using them as a testing ground for the use of sound in feature movies. After the Second World War, and the rising popularity of television, short subject films became far too expensive to produce and they had mostly disappeared from the screens by the late 1950s. This encyclopedia offers comprehensive listings of American short subject films from the 1920s through the 1950s.