The fun factory : the Keystone Film Company and the emergence of mass culture

From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company—home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties—made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought "lowbrow" comic traditions to the screen, the studio played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. In __The Fun Factory,__ Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach, __The Fun Factory__ offers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter. Phantasma Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. “Satire in Overalls”: The Keystone Film Company and Popular Culture 1. “The Fun Factory”: Class, Comedy, and Popular Culture, 1912–1914 2. “Funny Germans” and “Funny Drunks”: Clowns, Class, and Ethnicity at Keystone, 1913–1915 3. “The Impossible Attained!” Tillie’s Punctured Romance and the Challenge of Feature-Length Slapstick, 1914–1915 Part II. “More Clever and Less Vulgar”: The Keystone Film Company and Mass Culture 4. “Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes”: Keystone, the Triangle Film Corporation, and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture, 1915–1917 5. “Uproarious Inventions”: Keystone, Modernity, and the Machine, 1915–1917 6. From “Diving Venus” to “Bathing Beauties”: Reification and Feminine Spectacle, 1916–1917 Conclusion Notes Filmography Index "From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company - home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties - made an indelible mark on American popular culture wit its high-energy comic-shorts."--Page 4 of cover.