Buster Keaton to have a comic slant. After Keaton's successful work with Arbuckle, Schenck gave him his own production unit, Buster Keaton Productions. He made a series of two-reel comedies, including "One Week" (1920), "The Playhouse" (1921), "Cops" (1922), and "The Electric House" (1922). Keaton then moved to full-length features. Keaton's writers included Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Mitchell, and Jean Havez, but the most ingenious gags were generally conceived by Keaton himself. Comedy director Leo McCarey, recalling the freewheeling days of making slapstick comedies, said, "All of us tried to steal each other's gagmen. But we had no luck with Keaton, because he
Buster Keaton his hair and adventure zipping toward him around the next bend. It is the "angle" that you remember: the figure perfectly straight but tilted forward, like the Spirit of Ecstasy on the hood of a Rolls-Royce... [in "The Three Ages"], he drives a low-grade automobile over a bump in the road, and the car just "crumbles" beneath him. Rerun it on video, and you can see Buster riding the collapse like a surfer, hanging onto the steering wheel, coming beautifully to rest as the wave of wreckage breaks. Film historian Jeffrey Vance wrote: Buster Keaton's comedy endures not just because