Actors - Mack Sennett

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	Actors - Mack Sennett

Mack Sennett (January 17, 1880 – November 5, 1960) was an innovator of slapstick comedy in film. During his lifetime he was known as the King of Comedy.

Keystone Studios

Born Michael Sinnott in Richmond, Quebec, Canada Sennett was a son of Irish Catholic immigrant farmers; his father was a blacksmith in the small Eastern Townships village. At age seventeen his family moved to Connecticut.

In New York City, Sennett became a singer, dancer, clown, actor (mostly playing low comedy parts, usually oafish rural types), set designer and director for Biograph. With financial backing from Adam Kessel and Charles O. Bauman of the New York Motion Picture Company, in 1912 Sennett founded Keystone Studios in Glendale, California. Many important actors started their careers at Keystone, including Charlie Chaplin, Raymond Griffith, Gloria Swanson, George O'Hara, Ford Sterling, the Keystone Kops plus he hired and trained F. Richard Jones who would become a brilliant director/producer.

Sennett's slapstick comedies were noted for their wild car chases and custard pie warfare. His films featured a bevy of girls known as the Sennett Bathing Beauties which included Juanita Hansen and Phyllis Haver, as well as Mabel Normand, who became a major star (and with whom he embarked on a tumultuous personal relationship). Sennett also developed the Kid Komedies, a forerunner of the Our Gang
films and in a short time his name became synonymous with screen comedy. In 1915 Keystone Studios became an autonomous production unit of the Triangle Pictures Corporation with D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince.

In 1917 Sennett gave up the Keystone trademark and organized his own company, Mack Sennett Comedies Corporation, producing longer comedy short films and a few feature-length films. During the 1920s his short subjects were in much demand, with stars like Billy Bevan, Harry Gribbon, Vernon Dent, Alice Day, Ralph Graves, Charley Murray and Harry Langdon. He produced several features with his brightest stars such as Ben Turpin and Mabel Normand.

Move to Pathé

In the mid-1920s he moved over to Pathé distributors which had a huge market share but made bad decisions such as attempting to sell too many comedies (including Sennett's main competitor, Hal Roach) at once. In 1927 Paramount and MGM, Hollywood's two top studios, noting the profits being made by companies like Pathé and Educational, both re-entered the production and distribution of short subjects after several years. Roach signed with MGM but Sennett found himself and Pathé in hard times because the hundreds of exhibitors who had previously rented their shorts had switched to the new MGM or Paramount products.

Experiments, awards and bankruptcy

Sennett occasionally experimented with color and was the first to get a talkie short subject on the market in 1928. In 1932 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in the comedy division for producing The Loud Mouth and won in the novelty division for Wrestling Swordfish. Less successful films such as Hypnotized (with blackface comedians Mack and Moran) were produced in the early 1930s near the end of his career, when he sold his catalog of films to Warner Brothers. As moviegoers' tastes changed, Warner used these for occasional stock footage but eventually destroyed them to save storage space. As a result many Sennett films, especially those from his most productive and creative period, no longer exist.

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Actors - Mack Sennett

Keystone Studios

Move to Pathé

Experiments, awards and bankruptcy

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