From the Archives: Movies & Music Come Together in a Restored Fort Lee Film

Film archivist Paul Gierucki is a long time friend of the Fort Lee Film Commission.  We fist met Paul in 2005 when he came to Fort Lee for our Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle film festival.  Paul was part of a symposium panel that discussed the work Roscoe Arbuckle did here in Fort Lee as a filmmaker in 1916.  We screened several Arbuckle films, many restored by Paul.  These films can be seen on the DVD set The Forgotten Films of Roscoe Arbuckle.  Paul was restoration director for this set of films and they include several of Arbuckle’s Fort Lee produced films.

Though Arbuckle started with Mack Sennett at his Keystone Studio in California in 1913, by 1916 Sennett had leased studio space in Fort Lee and set up Triangle Studios on Main Street and Linwood Avenue.  Sennett was quite familiar with Fort Lee having worked with D.W. Griffith for the Biograph Company from 1908 to 1912.  Here on the streets of Fort Lee Sennett stared in such films as the first American slapstick comedy The Curtain Pole (1909).  Sennett started Keystone in Fort Lee in the summer of 1912 and shot some of his first films here including the recently discovered A Grocery Clerk’s Romance (1912), which was shot outside Rambo’s Saloon on First Street in the Coytesville section.  By the end of that summer Mack Sennett took his Keystone Studio to California.

Sennett sent a troupe of Keystone filmmakers to the Triangle Studio in Fort Lee in 1916 but he stayed back at the home studio in California.  This afforded Arbuckle for the first time to direct and star in short comedy films without Sennett looking over his shoulder.  Here in Fort Lee Roscoe used the streets and studio to create magic.  Such films as He Did and He Didn’t, A Reckless Romeo (shot in Palisades Amusement Park) and The Waiter’s Ball have been found and lay testament to Arbuckle’s creative Fort Lee period.  This period is also very important for two other reasons – Arbuckle connected with Joe Schenck, co-owner of Palisades Amusement Park and a early movie mogul who hired Arbuckle away from Sennett in 1916 and created a studio for Arbuckle in Manhattan and that is where Arbuckle brought Buster Keaton into film.  Keaton worked with Arbuckle while Arbuckle was in Fort Lee and is listed in the credits of A Reckless Romeo but no surviving footage exists of Keaton in this film.

This brings us to The Waiter’s Ball.  Paul Gierucki is in the process of completing his restoration of this Fort Lee produced film.  The Fort Lee Film Commission has raised some funding to assist in this restoration and as a result we will be able to screen this restored film with a new live score as part of our August 10th Movies & Music Under the Stars program on the outdoor stage of the Fort Lee Community Center.  The program starts at 7PM that night with live music from the young Brooklyn based Dixieland group The Red Hook Ramblers.  They will play live in concert from 7-8:30 PM then they will perform their newly created score for the restored The Waiter’s Ball.  Following this performance we will screen the Oscar winning film The Artist (2011) shot in the style of a black-and-white silent film.   See this BBC News link to view a clip of The Waiter’s Ball http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14741952

The Waiter’s Ball is a creatively funny film shot both at Triangle Studio on Main Street and on a very rural looking Linwood Avenue. This Arbuckle directed short comedy classic features Arbuckle and his wonderful sidekick,  Al St. John, who happens to be Arbuckle’s real life nephew.