The tricks of the slapstick producers are numerous. The familiar scene of the automobiles skidding all over a wet pavement is sometimes actually hazardous to those participating but more often it is filmed with a slow camera, the cars also skidding around rather slowly, with the result that the completed picture gives the impression of sheer and utter recklessness. In the Ben Turpin picture already mentioned the comedian endeavored to eat asparagus and just as he would get a tip near his mouth it would curl away like a snake. Of course there are such things as wires and springs.
The element of surprise enters into the making of the modern comedy to a great extent. Harold Lloyd and his director, Hal Roach, employ the method of the surprise laugh to admirable effect. One of the biggest laughs that this comedian has ever been responsible for was brought on by a totally unexpected surprise. He appeared as a youth who sought suicide as a way out of all his troubles. He climbed on the railing of a bridge with a rock hung round his neck and leaped into the water below. The water was only about a foot deep and the youth came to a jarring stop when his feet hit the bottom. The laugh that followed was really to be described as an outburst.
Messrs. Lloyd and Roach probably scorn the tricks by which scenes can be made to look thrilling, preferring instead to accomplish the actual thrill, more than any other comedy producers. It may be recalled that Mr. Lloyd once caused a variety of heart afflictions by appearing in a picture in which he was seen walking in his sleep on the edge of a high building. Fake? Not a bit of it! The real thing—that is the high building, not the sleep-walking.
All the studios in California confined to the elaborate production of slapstick-thrill comedy have their own hospitals and their own staffs of bonesetters and doctors. And, in order that the public may have its fill of laughs, these hospitals often have their fill of patients.
CHAPTER XI OTHER TRICKS UP DIRECTORS' SLEEVES
_Proving that the illusion once created by the double exposure has been completely spoiled by giving it so much publicity.—And so the spoiling process is begun on a number of other tricks employed by the director to fool the public_