"The Sawmill", a silent short released in 1922, starring Larry Semon and Oliver Hardy, is a very crazy comedy. This got famous for the one of the most expensive short silent comedy that was ever produced. It's a miracle nobody was killed during shooting. The cast and crew (consisting of 75 grips and electrical technicians, caterers, costumers, riggers, prop men and prop makers, construction and paint technicians, payroll cashiers, secretaries and script clerks, special effects technicians, transportation captains and drivers, assistant directors and production assistants) lived in a specially built bunker town while filming the short on location. Simple plot: A bumbling sawmill employee (Larry Semon) tries to win the hand of the owner's daughter (Ann Hastings) while staying out of the clutches of the mill's bullying foreman (Oliver Hardy). In the 'teens and '20's, Larry Semon was a top comedian primarily in two-reel comedies. His comedies, while expensively mounted and populated with good comic actors, never quite made the leap to Chaplin, Arbuckle or Keaton standards. It was set in (naturally enough) a lumber camp. Larry plays the "rugged he-man type" usually portrayed by Wallace Beery or Jack Holt. Semon's physical bearing makes this an amusing target. Lawrence "Larry" Semon (July 6, 1889 -- October 8, 1928) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter during the silent film era. French audiences knew him as Zigoto, Italian ones as Ridolini, and Spanish ones as Jaimito ("Jimmy") in pre-war releases and Tomasín ("Tommy") in the 1940 rereleases by Manuel Rotellar. In his day, Semon was considered a major movie comedian, but he is now remembered mainly for working with both Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy before they started working together. He is also sometimes noted for directing (as well as appearing in) the 1925 silent film Wizard of Oz, which had a slight influence on the better-known 1939 talkie The Wizard of Oz released by MGM. Born in West Point, Mississippi, Semon was the son of a vaudeville magician, Zera the Great, while his mother worked as his assistant. While working as an artist, Semon appeared in monologues in vaudeville, where he attracted the attention of Vitagraph Studios. In 1915, he was offered a contract with the company. As his fame grew, his films expanded from one reel (about 12 minutes) to two reels, and Semon was given a free hand in making them. This became a dangerous policy because Semon became notorious for being expensive and extravagant: his two-reel comedies could easily cost more than an average five-reel feature film. As a former cartoonist, Semon staged similarly cartoony sight gags, using elaborate special effects. No gag was too big for Semon. He loved chase sequences involving airplanes (sometimes using three in a film), exploding barns, falling water towers, auto wrecks and/or explosions, and liberal use of substances in which to douse people. A typical Semon comedy might involve barrels of flour, sacks of soot, gallons of ink, gobs of jam, or pits filled with mud. For example, in Semon's The Bell Hop, a man sleeping under the spray of a malfunctioning fountain imagines he is swimming in the ocean, and in his sleep he dives off the bed, through the floor, and into a vat of paint in the lobby below. Oliver Hardy recalled in an interview that Semon, when staging his comedy short The Sawmill in a lumber camp, would not use traditional, painted stage sets. Instead, Semon insisted on building permanent log cabins complete with modern conveniences. The production budget soared, and his bosses at Vitagraph finally demanded that Semon become his own producer and underwrite his productions personally. Semon tried to reverse his financial problems by entering the more lucrative field of feature films. He produced and starred in a few features in the mid '20s, but by 1927 he was back in short subjects released through Educational Pictures. After filing for bankruptcy in 1928, Semon returned to vaudeville. While traveling on the vaudeville circuit, he suffered a nervous breakdown and went back to Los Angeles. After returning to Los Angeles, Semon was sent to a sanatorium in Victorville, California, where, on October 8, 1928, at the age of 39, he died of pneumonia. Resources: wikipedia.org, imdb.org New soundtrack and dubbing: Cinemateca Music: Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ ) licensed under Creative Commons licence: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

• published: 04 Nov 2013
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