Roscoe Arbuckle

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (b. 1887–d. 1933) was a comedian and filmmaker whose critical acclaim and popularity in the 1910s were entirely overshadowed by a career-destroying scandal in 1921. Following an early career as an illustrated song performer and several brief stints as a performer in Selig and Nestor film comedies, Arbuckle eventually found fame as “Fatty” after joining Mack Sennett’s legendary Keystone Film Company in 1913. Distinguished not only as an agile performer but also by his creative directing, Arbuckle achieved a level of autonomy unparalleled at Sennett’s studio, establishing his own East Coast unit of the company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at the end of 1915. By this point, Arbuckle approached the critical stature of his former Keystone confrère Charles Chaplin as one of the few film comedians to be discussed seriously as a filmmaker, his work celebrated by commentators for its visual pictorialism. Arbuckle would go on to head his own studio, the Comique Film Corporation, in late 1916, where he wrote, directed, and starred in twenty two-reel comedies (which also mark the screen debuts of Buster Keaton). Four years later he graduated to features at Paramount, making him the first major male clown to star regularly in feature-length comedies. Yet these achievements would be swiftly annulled by the events of 5 September 1921, when the actress Virginia Rappe was discovered critically ill at a party at Arbuckle’s San Francisco hotel room, dying four days later. Allegations of violent rape saw Arbuckle tried three times for manslaughter, the first two trials ending in hung juries, the third in his acquittal; his career, however, could not be recuperated. In the wake of the Rappe scandal, Hollywood’s leaders moved quickly to form a new regulatory agency, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), whose first major decision was to ban Arbuckle from the screen. Nonetheless, with the support of his friends, Arbuckle was able to find consistent directorial work through the 1920s, initially uncredited but subsequently under the pseudonym William Goodrich (his father’s name). It was also under this pseudonym that Arbuckle directed two feature films, The Red Mill (1927, starring Marion Davies) and Special Delivery (1927, starring Eddie Cantor). He eventually returned to the screen in six Vitaphone two-reel talking comedies produced in 1932–1933, dying of a heart attack hours after he completed the last of these.