Inside One Of The Worlds Craziest Stuntmen, Buster Keaton

For those of you unfamiliar with Keaton, he was an actor best known for doing incredible, stunt-based slapstick movies in the silent movie era. When the slapstick era had kicked off, there were a lot of people trying to burst in and steal some market share. Keaton, however, stood out in a tier of his own making. 

He would design gags and stunts with Clyde Bruckman, who was a prolific comedy writer that also worked with Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Abbot and Costello, W.C. Fields and more. What set their work apart from everyone else is that they would create insane stunts that Keaton would perform himself. These stunts were quite literally death defying, as you can see in the video at the top of the blog. 

He would jump from moving trains, have 2-ton wall frames dropped on him, balance between moving cars, and there was one scene in 'The General' where he throws a railway tie to knock another off the tracks. 

Think about this one for a minute. There are about 100 different ways he could have died during the course of this stunt! There is also this one, where he rode a traffic gate down into a moving car.

Keep in mind that this stunt today would be done by a stuntman with wires and a whole support crew around him. This one above was literally just Keaton. In this one below, he planned to jump to the other roof originally, but fell short and plummeted down below (thankfully into a safety net).

Originally, he was supposed to make it to the other roof. But he liked how it looked, so he ended up incorporating it into the movie. 

Keaton was a boss that ripped off 10 straight years of insane stuntwork before signing an ill-fated contract with MGM in the sound era. They stunted his creative freedom, made him use a stuntman and pared him with other comedians. Between that and his divorce, he became and alcoholic. He eventually recovered, and got more work in feature films and later TV. He passed away in 1966, but will always be remembered as a pioneer in the industry. He has been cited as an influnece by a wide range of people including Orson Welles, Johnny Knoxville, Mel Brooks, Richard Lewis and more. 

Crazy to think that this guy did things in black and white that we would never see today.