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.

Early life

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.

Keystone Studios

With financial backing from Adam Kessel and Charles O. Bauman of the New York Motion Picture Company, in 1912 Sennett founded Keystone Studios in Edendale, 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.

Due to heavy losses in the 1929 stock market crash, distribution problems, changes in public taste and the advent of sound films, Sennett was forced into bankruptcy in November 1933. He retired two years later at the age of 55, having produced more than a thousand silent films and several dozen talkies during a 25-year career.

Death

He died in Woodland Hills, California at the age of 80 and was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Legacy

In March 1938 Mack Sennett was presented with an Academy Honorary Award,

For his lasting contribution to the comedy technique of the screen, the basic principles of which are as important today as when they were first put into practice, the Academy presents a special award to that master of fun, discoverer of stars, sympathetic, kindly, understanding comedy genius, Mack Sennett.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry Sennett was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6712 Hollywood Blvd.

Today his name is still highly recognizable (even to those who have no contact with his films) and the term Keystone Kops has become part of the language, describing incompetent buffoons with supposed authority. Some historians even credit Sennett's films with having been responsible for municipal police forces across North America altering their uniforms to include military style officers' caps since by the 1920s tall, English style hats had become so indelibly associated with slapstick comedy.

Henry Mancini's score for the 1963 film, The Pink Panther, the original entry in the series, contains a segment called "Shades of Sennett". It is played on a silent film era style "honky tonk" piano, and accompanies a climactic scene in which the incompetent police detective Inspector Clouseau is involved in a multi-vehicle chase with the antagonists.

In 1974, Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman wrote the musical Mack & Mabel, chronicling the romance between Sennett and Mabel Normand.