Raymond Rohauer on saving Buster Keaton's THREE AGES (Dec 1970)

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Ed Watz
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Raymond Rohauer on saving Buster Keaton's THREE AGES (Dec 1970)

Postby Ed Watz » Tue Jun 06, 2023 10:43 am

December 1970 - Raymond Rohauer is the guest on a San Francisco radio talk show to discuss his upcoming Buster Keaton Festival.

The highlight is his recollection of saving Buster's first independent feature, THREE AGES, from nitrate decomposition. Rohauer, notorious prevaricator that he was, told different versions of this event, each embellishment more outrageous than previously as the years went by.

This is the earliest account of this story that I've found and it's probably the most honest, apart from the ending -- with the lab complaining to Rohauer that he ruined their $15,000 printer! Rohauer's story about the printer didn't make sense to me and I once told him so. If the emulsion was damaging the printer, the lab could've stopped after running the first 1,000-foot roll of film, yet they went ahead and printed five more 1,000-foot rolls of nitrate. He fidgeted uneasily before telling me, "Well, people running the labs aren't always the brightest."

https://youtu.be/EeskM_M6954

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"Of course he smiled -- just like you and me." -- Harold Goodwin, on Buster Keaton (1976)

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