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As one of the founding fathers of the movies, Mack Sennett has been hiding in plain sight for 100 years, his name honored and known — he had the finest nose for talent of anybody in movie history, hiring Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Carole Lombard, Bing Crosby and a host of others when they were in the chrysalis stage — but his films are largely unwatched, his achievements largely unexamined. For all intents and purposes, he’s been the Invisible Man of the movies.
Until now.
Brent Walker’s Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory (McFarland) is a weighty humdinger, 660 double-columned pages of business biography, analysis, filmography and biographies of actors and Sennett personnel. As such, its core market is probably historians and people with a professional interest in the movies, but the Wall Street Journal crowd will find much here to fascinate them.
Walker has spent nearly 20 years plowing through the Sennett archives at the motion picture academy and has come up with a book that documents Sennett’s rise, as well as how Sennett’s basic refusal to change with the times doomed him to slow obsolescence and, in 1933, bankruptcy.
The book’s sole flaw is its acquiescence to Sennett’s own incoherent financial narrative; according to Sennett’s financial statements, he was losing money all through the 1920s, while strangely never attempting to cut costs.
Clearly, considerable amounts of money were being stashed away.
In the 1930s, when sound changed the rules of the game and public taste changed them even more, Sennett reacted the way he would have 10 years earlier, had he been telling the truth: He cut costs severely. But by then it was too late.
This is a homeric achievement in scholarship, and undoubtedly the standard reference to a major career.
In the pipeline …
Twelve will publish The Sherlockian by Graham Moore, a novel that follows two parallel mysteries. The first involves a Sherlock Holmes devotee investigating the death of a Holmes scholar; the second involves Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker teaming up to hunt a serial killer.
Mike Browning’s Word of the Week …
fainhead: willingness; gladness
Longtime reader here with a request. Can you please click on the editorial page, and tell me if you’re on board with the language selected to trumpet the Phelps story? I think it’s poor editorial judgment to keep that disrespectful language up for 5 days, merely to draw eyeballs to the story. Why? Just as we wouldn’t use the n-word to trumpet a story about color slurs, why do gays deserve that slap in the face for wanting to read the editorial page? Mr. Phelps doesn’t need their help; I can walk by a funeral sign, or avert my eyes. Readers can stop reading that page for 5 days sure, but isn’t there a better way to play that headline?
If you’re on board with that, ok. But it seems a weak First Amendment argument to run it … just because you can. It’s not a PC thing; it’s a basic respect thing. Thanks for anything you can do to help change your editorial board’s judgment for the better.