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From 1913 to 1916, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rose from the ranks of bit player to writer, director and star of comedies for Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Company. Because of Sennett's belief that actors were interchangeable, he lost Arbuckle to producer Joseph M. Schenck, who not only paid the comedian handsomely, but also permitted him complete creative control. To help in the new venture, Arbuckle recruited Buster Keaton, popular star of a knockabout vaudeville act; Keaton took a large pay cut to act in motion pictures, and Arbuckle welcomed his ideas and taught him all he knew about making movies. This volume of the video collection presents films that Arbuckle and Keaton made for Schenck between 1918 and 1919; they are presented chronologically so we can watch Buster grow from Arbuckle's bit player to his full partner.

Following the 1921 scandal that was inflamed by a publicity-seeking prosecutor and the tabloid press, Arbuckle's films were withdrawn from circulation in America, and the negatives were not preserved. The films in this collection were gathered from international archives and private collections. The English intertitles are new, and except for Back Stage, derived from non-English sources. All the films are digitally mastered from 35mm, sometimes directly from the nitrate originals.

VOLUME TWO INCLUDES:

• Good Night, Nurse (Jul. 1918)
• Back Stage (Aug. 1919) with Molly Malone, John Coogan
• The Hayseed (Oct. 1919) with Molly Malone, John Coogan
• The Garage (Dec. 1919) with Molly Malone, Harry McCoy and music by Robert Israel.

For the five years between 1908 and 1913, D.W. Griffith directed some 450 films for the Biograph Company, delivering at a rate of two or three films per week. These films, one and two reels in length, are sometimes regarded as apprentice works, films in which Griffith borrowed, invented, and perfected the forms and techniques that he later used to such memorable effects in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), and Isn't Life Wonderful? (1924). But the Biographs were more than that.

The twenty-two films presented in this collector's version of D.W. Griffith Years Of Discovery: 1909-1913 are the centerpieces of that extraordinary group of films. Volume One includes such widely recognized masterworks as The Musketeers of Pig Alley and Corner in Wheat. But lesser-known social dramas like What Shall We Do With Our Old? and a comic gem called The Sunbeam are also included. They rank among the best in a collection of short films that helped shape cinematic narrative for two generations.

Plots are simple and direct, and if the films are saturated with quasi-comic cliches and old-fashioned insensitivities, they also reveal an extraordinary dramatic talent of brilliant force. It is easy to see why the Griffith Biographs were so popular at the time. With an uncanny instinct for acting talent, Griffith assembled the foremost film ensemble of his day, including Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Lionel Barrymore, Henry Walthall, and Mae Marsh. Beyond that, the requirements of plot detail, the tight physical locale of interior sets (we never see more that three sides of any room), and the need to establish character immediately resulted in a kind of cinematic shorthand which gave these shorts terrific compression. The limitations of time and space also meant that people, places, and objects frequently took on extraordinary metaphoric power they gradually lost as movies got longer. Many of the Griffith Biographs rank with the finest movies he ever made; collectively, they provide an unparalleled record of American life at the turn of the 20th century.