Interview: 'Camera Man' author Dana Stevens

In her work as Slate film critic and co-host of the celebrated “Culture Gabfest” podcast, Dana Stevens has established herself as one of the most trusted voices in film criticism. For the past five years, she’s funneled those gifts into her first book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, a fascinating chronicle of the titular beloved silent movie star.

A few days before the book’s Jan. 25 publication date, Stevens spoke with Asheville Movies about the ups and downs of writing a book during the COVID-19 pandemic, the joys of working with primary documents, and Keaton’s ongoing influence on today’s comedians and filmmakers.

Edwin Arnaudin: One thing I ask pretty much everybody I talk to here is whether or not they have a history with Asheville, North Carolina.

Dana Stevens: Not really. My brother went to Davidson, so I've been to North Carolina a lot, but that's pretty far from Asheville. He lived there for awhile afterwards. I just think of this great farm that he lived on in his post college years. But yeah, I'm not really familiar with the culture of North Carolina otherwise. I like the accent.

EA: [laughs] Yeah, I'm definitely excited to talk with you about the book, and thinking about the seeds for the book — in the intro, you talk about being overseas and having this neat introduction to Buster Keaton's films. But how did you get from that starting point to working your way up to a full, book-length project?

DS: As I say in the introduction, my love for Buster Keaton and interest in that time period far preceded any idea of writing the book — or any book. So in a way, this book was 25 years in the making, but 20 of those years, I was not actually writing it or thinking about writing it. I was just obsessed with that period. And it was almost like a hobby: just learn about that period and more about silent film and try to champion silent film as a critic as well, because I just feel like, even among cinephiles, it really gets short shrift that, for the first 35 years that this medium existed, almost all of those films have been lost. And we see so few of them, we screen so few of them, we talk about so few of them. Preserving a legacy was a little bit part of the motivation. 

But I had that sort of shock — this kind of like pleasurable shock of being introduced to Keaton. Not that I didn't know who he was, but I'd never really seen his stuff on the big screen and really delved into it until that film festival in France in 1996. And that sort of sparked this 20 years of loving that period and intermittently exploring it. Like, "I think I'll read a biography of Louis B. Mayer!" or whatever — something that comes in the book later on, but it was just pleasure reading. 

And then in 2015, after I had been established as a film critic at Slate, I was feeling a little bit of burnout of writing on contemporary films every week. Especially because, as we're always talking about in the criticism world, big-screen movies are getting more and more the same. And Marvel and these big companies and tent-pole movies are kind of taking over. I was starting to feel constrained. Like, "What's my future as a writer? Am I really just going to write for the rest of my life on whatever Marvel and Sony feel like releasing that week?”

I sometimes tell this story that, in 2015, I think it was, was the first time that Marvel put out one of those long term grids. All the film critics on Twitter were making fun of it — like “Marvel projections.” Do you know what I'm talking about? 

EA: For sure.

DS: Yeah, it said something like "Into 2025," which at the time seemed so far away. They had all these titles planned with the actual release date. So it would say things like "March 15, 2023, untitled Ant-Man movie." [laughs] Or something like that. It was all about staking out the dates and getting people excited about these movies. And I think I just had this real rush of depression, like, "Is this the entire horizon of my life as a film critic?"

And so that was when I started to think about writing a book, which is something that, over the years, various editors had approached me about and said, "I liked your writing. Would you be interested in a book?" And I was always flattered and would have coffee with them, but I didn't really have a book idea. And that also has to do with not finding the right editor. It's like a teacher or a mentor. You have to kind of click with the right person. 

So finally at one point in 2015, after my Marvel sadness with that grid, I met with a guy named Rakesh Satyal, who ended up being my acquiring editor, who really did get it. He just clicked with me and really knew my work on Slate and was fun to talk to. And somewhere in the course of our conversation, I was saying, "You know, I'm interested in silent cinema. I don't really have a specific pitch on it." And so, as we were saying goodbye, and I was sort of saying, "Well, I'll get in touch if I have anything," I said something like, "Oh, well, I've been in love with Buster Keaton for 20 years, but I'm sure there's not a book in that because he's been so written about already." And what Rakesh told me later was, "Just from the way your face lit up when you said ‘Buster Keaton,’ I knew that that was the book you had to write."

And so he really developed the idea with me, and the idea that it would do the thing that it does — kind of zig-zagging through history and telling stories outside of his life story; making it not a biography, but a cultural history of his lifespan. And so that's sort of how the book came into being.

I really do think writers who are asking, "How did this come to be?" — nobody can tell anybody else what their path is, but I think a huge part of it is your editor. If Rakesh had not gotten it and been patient in helping me develop the idea, and had just said, "Give me a proposal or not," then it never would have come to be. It was because of his patience and creativity and helping to develop it that it came about.

Living up to the title. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

EA: You mentioned doing this pleasure reading along the way. But when you started really jumping into the research side, where did you even start?

DS: With him, that's so daunting. I knew that there was a lot written on him already, and I had read the major biographies of him, and I was familiar with the basic literature of Buster Keaton. Like, if you went to your average decent library and there was a shelf of books on him, I knew those books. But then when you start to dig into how much there is out there and how much, besides the secondary sources written on him, just how much primary material there was — like, reviews of all of his old movies, but also vaudeville coverage from the turn of the century. And he seems like one of the most photographed people in the world when you start looking for images of him. There's so much to sift through. It was extremely overwhelming.

Since I start with his childhood, the first place that I started to do serious primary document type research was at the [Margaret] Herrick Library, which is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the Oscars people have this beautiful research library in LA where, in order to see anything that's really old, you have to make an appointment in advance with the librarian. And it's one of those things where you're going in and somebody is carrying out this precious document that's 100 years old. And that was incredible. [laughs] That was amazing.

In fact, I remember actually arranging it so that on my birthday, I'd made the appointment well in advance so that on my 50th birthday, which I didn't want to be depressed about because I wasn't going to feel like I was growing old or something, I was looking at this beautiful document in the Herrick Library, which was his mother's scrapbook. I think I talk about it a little bit in the book, but it's the scrapbook that she kept of their vaudeville appearances with her clippings and her comments and everything like that. Seriously, it's the most powerful document I've ever held in my hands. It was incredible to think that his whole life, he carried that around with him, and had probably shown it to countless people and that I was seeing the original thing. And by the way, that whole thing is digitized on their website. So if you want to look at the stuff in there, it's really fun.

But I had all these big plans for research that never came to fruition because of COVID. So there's a reason that the early part of the book has more primary documentation than the later part, because there were specific boxes at the Herrick that I wanted to go back and look at. Like, "Oh, when I get to his middle age, I'll go and I'll look at those film scripts with his crews' notations on them." All this exciting stuff that, by the time I got to that part of the book, there were no more libraries open, there was no more travel, and so my research had to just be whatever was available online or through interlibrary loan, sent to my house and stuff like that.  I think a lot of non-fiction writers probably had that experience over the last few years. Like, "This just changed from being a more research-based book to a more, you know, 'what's in my brain’ book.” [laughs] Because it felt like that.

EA: I was curious about ways like that, that the pandemic had hindered your research. I figured it would be mostly hindering, but I didn't know if there were ways that enhanced it as well, in terms of having maybe an increased focus on the writing time. 

DS: Well, I have a child who is by now 15. When the pandemic started, she was 13, so she's more independent than a little kid, but she goes to performing arts school, so her homework is  singing and yelling loudly. [laughs] Performing things by Zoom. Every time I hear some writer say, "But I had so much time because of the pandemic," I want to go to their house and strangle them. [laughs] Because I've never had less time and had to work harder on time management than during that period. It's gotten better in 2021 because she's been back in school most of the time. But yeah, finishing this book was hard. Really, really hard. And I know finishing any book is hard, but just given the conditions of the pandemic, it really was the professional thing I've done I'm the most proud of — not even because of the content of the book, necessarily. I'm just proud that I got it done.

EA: And then along the way, even though you had to kind of compromise a little bit on some of the research materials that you had, it still sounds like you came across a good number of revelations about Keaton while putting the book together. Are there one or two that really stood out to you that you had kind of no idea going into the project?

DS: Yeah, there's lots of stuff online, so even without those archives, there were always discoveries that I was making. I write about this some in the book, but I loved reading about his childhood, which I feel like has not been amply documented, even though all of his biographies talk about the fact he was at vaudeville star in his childhood. But I feel like they tend to rush through that to get to the films. It's sort of like, "And that was his apprenticeship." But the fact is, he was a really significant figure in American entertainment before he ever stepped in front of the camera, and that lasted from when he had just turned five until he was 21, when he started in the movies.

So that was a nice, long stretch of 16 years of him working on stage. And something I learned that I hadn't known about necessarily was how remarkable he was as a child performer. That he was not just a part of a family act — that he was the family act, and that he sort of saved his parents from poverty. They were just barely getting by when he started with the act when he  had just turned five years old. And they were not a particularly successful or good vaudeville act.  They weren't touring the big circuits or anything. They were just struggling to get any work at all. 

Then they put their kid in the act and suddenly within — and here's the surprise to me: it was how quickly he rose and how quickly he established their reputation and his reputation as a great performer. So when you trace through the original documents, you see that, at age five when he's just joined the act, there's some coverage that says, "Little Buster Keaton is assisting in his parents' comedy show," or something like that. And six months later, when he's five and a half, you see something like, "Buster Keaton, the star of the Keaton comedy combination, gets laughs again." And they're even talking about his reputation. Like, "He's just as funny on the west coast as he was on the east coast last week," or something. So you really see that he becomes...there's buzz around his name by the time he was six years old.

Portrait of the artist as a young man. (Public domain)

EA: I like that — zeroing in on something that both appeals to you and that you've seen kind of a gap in the research.

DS: And that's something you can really only discover with primary documents, right? I mean, you can read in a book about him later that says, "He quickly rose to the top of this field." But when you actually see, like, “Oh, wait. Six months ago, they talked about it in this way. Now they talk about it in this way." And again and again, the tone of the coverage about him — and there's a lot of this in the book, too — the tone of the coverage about him has this kind of flabbergasted quality that really makes you wish that some of those performances had been recorded so you could see the three Keatons in action, but you can't. But people will say things like, "His work appears to be completely polished,” and, "He doesn't seem to have ever been trained." And, "We don't understand how this seven-year-old is so good at acrobatics and comedy." And so, if you're a fan of the stuff you can see — the films — you're dying to go back in time with a time machine and see what those live stage performances were like.

EA: So, kind of like with people choosing Beatles or Stones or having maybe The Kinks on the side, it does seem like there's kind of a Keaton vs. Chaplin camp, but also some people preferring Harold Lloyd on the side to be kind of indie rock. 

DS: Uh huh. [laughs]

EA: Even though you've written this book on Keaton, I'm curious about your stances on Chaplin and Lloyd.

DS: I say this is the book as well: I'm not a ranker. When I do my Top 10 lists, I never rank it, and my editors all know that. And I don't even love doing the Top 10 list in the first place. I love talking about the good movies of the year, but the whole idea of pitting one form of art against another is just a thing I always resist. 

When it comes to Keaton or Chaplin, obviously the one I wrote a book on is my favorite, but I would never deny the artistry of Chaplin and how important it was, not just for Keaton, but for all of early film. And reading about that period over the years, you really get a sense that, whether or not you're a super fan of Chaplin, you live in a world that was completely influenced by him in terms of film, but also just in terms of fame — what it is to be a globally famous person. Because film was able to spread people's reputation so much faster than any medium had before, he really was one of the first worldwide celebrities. He's an incredibly important historical figure. His films are still really funny. He's a genius at pantomime. He's a genius at a ton of the things that he does.

Leaving aside the fact that, as a person, he seems extremely unsympathetic, which I kind of get into in my chapter on Limelight, I feel like, as an artist, he's not the director that Keaton was. I think this is kind of a commonplace about Chaplin: he pretty much parked the camera down and did his thing in front of the camera and almost treated making film like stage comedy, where he'd gotten his start. Whereas Keaton, from the moment he got behind the camera, even before he was the one in charge, when he was working with [Roscoe “Fatty"] Arbuckle for those few years, had this real sense of the medium: where to put a camera, how to frame an action, how to edit. He edited all his own movies. I don't think Chaplin did, so there's that difference between them.

And then just for me, Keaton's sensibility and sense of humor has survived and is more timeless in a way than Chaplin’s is. Chaplin’s comedies will still make people laugh reliably, for sure. I feel like more of Chaplin's features, especially, have dated somewhat badly. They tend to be a little bit preachy. Keaton was never interested at all in politics or ideology, which some people could fault him for, but he was certainly never up on a soap box the way that Chaplin is, say, at the end of The Great Dictator, when he just addresses the camera and kind of delivers this political speech. So, I think Keaton's sensibility has survived a little bit more into the present day, although I really hope that people continue to watch all three of those guys' movies: Lloyd, Chaplin, and Keaton. And also to move outward from there and just investigate silent film for themselves and see what else they find interesting.

EA: You talked about that sensibility surviving. Are there certain filmmakers or actors or movements where you especially see Keaton's influence today? 

DS: Oh yes! So many. Another casualty of COVID is that I was going to have the last chapter of the book be about Keaton's influence in the present day and I was going to talk to  contemporary creatives who were either influenced by him —  who explicitly quote him — or he may be just considered a behind-the-scenes influence on their work. And because of COVID, it was just really hard to do that. I found that if people don't have a current project to promote, their publicists won't send the email on. 

I wanted to talk to Jackie Chan, who obviously has many times cited Keaton as an influence and has explicit Keaton quotes and gags. He would have been a dream interview to get, but he's very hard to talk to even in the best of times. And so I never did get through to him. And then just people from different walks of life: Edgar Wright, the director, he's actually reading the book  now. I sent him a copy of it because he was interested in it. But Edgar Wright's films are also full of Buster Keaton references. John Wick 2, the Keanu Reeves movie, which I mention on the last page of the book, begins with an image of Buster Keaton on a bicycle as Keanu was riding by on his motorcycle. That would have been cool, talking to Keanu about Buster Keaton, but no way I was going to get through his people.

Let's see...who else do I see as being influenced by him? I mean, any comedian that uses physical comedy and slapstick, although doing it at that level, I don't think there's anybody right now. And I don't know if there will ever be anybody again, who does it at that level, if only because Keaton had all this training from the stage and the circus and from his childhood that it was just encoded in his body that he could do that stuff.

And I've talked about this with a friend who has written a wonderful screenplay about the old Buster Keaton. It's still just being developed. It's not being made yet or anything. We were talking about casting choices for the old Buster Keaton and how we could picture all of these people, but when it came to the young Buster Keaton, we couldn't think of anyone. Who could possibly...? We were saying the only way you could do the flashbacks would be to put in actual Keaton movies and have him looking back at his old movies, because it's just very hard to imagine somebody who could combine that sense of comedy and those physical abilities. And certainly those directorial abilities. I mean, that's just a once in a million thing.

EA: I’m curious, too, as a reader in tune with the world, now that you have your book out, are there things about the publishing cycle that you're especially excited to be on the author side of, where maybe before you were just the reader or interviewing other people that have new books out?

DS: Yeah, it's true! I'm the talent. [laughs] It's weird. I don't know! You'll have to ask me that in a week after the book actually launches. The pub date is Tuesday, and this is maybe the third interview I've done for it. I'm not very used to... I've been just writing this thing, you know? I feel like I've been this invisible drudge behind a laptop for over five years. And during COVID, really, truly invisible. Like, not seeing anybody; nobody's seeing me. So it's going to be this moment of high visibility. 

I'm getting my hair done this afternoon [laughs] so I'll look good for the various events I'm introducing next week. I'm pretty comfortable in that position. I don't mind being behind a mic and talking because I podcast every week. And I used to teach, so I don't mind introducing a film in front of an audience or something like that. But, yeah, it's a little bit nerve-racking! It's going to be this brief period of having the spotlight on me as I try to sell my book. [laughs] Right now, it sounds fun, but maybe by next week I'll be terrified. I don't know. 

EA: Yeah, that makes perfect sense because you've got all this podcasting experience. And I thought the same thing when I saw you say on Twitter that you’d recorded the audiobook. Was that something you set out to do?

DS: Yeah, I asked to record the audio book. They actually sent me clips from seven different narrators that were available. And I had some choice. It was sort of like, "Oh, do you want to listen to these and see which narrator you like and we'll see if we can get that person?" And I listened to them all and they're all really professional, but after listening, I said to my producer, the same one who produces the Slate Culture Gabfest, "I could read my book just as well as any of these people." Because I would really love to do it myself. I love listening to books read by their own authors. To me, that's an extra treat. And I just love reading out loud. I had this feeling that I could do it as well or better than these pro narrators, just because I know the ideas in it.

And he said, "Yeah, you should go for it. You should try it." And so I asked my publisher and they said, "Sure." It was very fun, and I think it came out well. The [director] had to once in a while coach me on things, because I get excited and I talk too fast or whatever, but I think we got a really good product at the end. 

EA: Well, I wish you well with it all. I'm excited for more people to experience the book and learn more about Keaton, especially now with our current film climate.

DS: Yeah! I want people to know that that stuff is out there. It's all almost all free streaming. Once in a while, you have to pay something, but it's mostly in the public domain and there's really no excuse. If you're interested in Keaton or really any silent film, a few Google searches away, you know, you can find almost anything.

For more information and to purchase Camera Man, click here.

(Author photo by Sylvie Rosokoff)