Mack Sennett

Once dubbed "The King of Comedy," producer and director Mack Sennett was a ringmaster for a motley crew of comedic talent that included Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and the Keystone Kops, who slid, slipped and slapped their way across American movie screens of the 1910s. His anarchic world of cross-eyed rubes, nightmare-bearded villains, comely bathing beauties and bumbling cops falling off cliffs, out of buildings, and throwing custard pies was an unexpected creation of a man who grew up wanting to be an opera star. Sennett's brand of slapstick humor proved to be highly popular with audiences and helped him become one of the most powerful men of early Hollywood. With outside financial backing, Sennett set up his famed Keystone Studios in 1912 and began cracking out one- and two-reel shorts by the hundreds. He also ventured into feature filmmaking, most notably with "Tillie's Punctured Romance" (1914), starring Mabel Normand, with whom he had a long romance until the mid-1920s. In 1917, Sennett left Keystone to make movies independently. Among the pratfalls, chases, and pantomime, Sennett set the tone in Hollywood's early days and created the ground rules for American screen comedy that were to follow.