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A biography of pioneer comedy mogul Mack Sennett and the tale of his Keystone studio and comedians.
Faber and Faber, London, November 2003
Faber and Faber/Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, February 2004
Sight and Sound, January 2004:…Sennett… leapfrogged from burlesque hopeful to movie mogul by using Biograph’s D.W. Griffith as a one-man film school, only to reject his mentor’s high moral melodramas for the frenetic funnies that made his name. Nosing out new talent like melancholic man-child Harry Langdon or genre twists like the farce fantasy `The Shriek of Araby’ and W.C. Field’s reheated vaudeville classic `The Dentist’ kept his studios ticking over from 1912 until the early 1930’s, to the tune of 1,000 titles.
Louvish wrestles the story from the gargantuan Sennett paper archive with empathy and brio, piling on facts and paring down anecdotes until he can kick away the two established pillars of Keystone folklore. Sound comedy didn’t kill slapstick (Sennett mastered the technical transition and even discovering Bing Crosby), but the old master was unable to adapt gis sunny, pre-Freudian worldview to the shadowy expressionism of Depression America. And the mother-loving, lifelong bachelor probably fabricated his famous romance with Mabel Normand. Not so much `Mack and Mabel’ as `Mack and Fable.’ (KS
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