Always willing to go on location

Among lovers of early American cinema, there is one indispensable question: Buster or Chaplin? That is, do you prefer the elaborate sight gags and implacable frown of Buster Keaton or the intimate bumbling and sentimentality of the Little Tramp, Charlie Chaplin? Silent film buffs tend to believe you can peer into someone’s soul based on the answer.

John Bengtson is a corporate lawyer who has written a book about Keaton -- one that painstakingly details the locations in his films, set mostly in L.A. -- which he will discuss Saturday as part of UCLA’s Keaton tribute. He is also a walking encyclopedia about Chaplin. But when push comes to shove, Bengtson admits he’s a Keaton man.

“Buster was cool,” he said. “He didn’t want the audience to feel things with him like Chaplin did. Keaton was more removed. He wasn’t looking for that connection.”

Indeed, Keaton’s nom de camera was the Great Stone Face. But he was a natural performer. Born Joseph Frank Keaton to vaudeville performers in 1895, he reputedly got his “Buster” moniker from Harry Houdini, who saw the 6-month-old fall unscathed down a flight of stairs. In 1917, he started working on movies with the soon-to-be-disgraced Fatty Arbuckle, before embarking on his career as writer-director-star in the ‘20s.

It is not surprising that Bengtson should prefer the auteur Keaton. Mild-mannered and soft-spoken, Bengtson moves his tall frame with a back-and-forth indecision that calls the silent star to mind. The 47-year-old, who lives with his wife and three daughters in the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek, is even prone to the occasional inadvertent gag. Sitting down at an outdoor cafe on Lombard Street, Bengtson nearly fell out of his chair when it broke. He righted himself, a look of dampened alarm on his face.

“I guess it’s appropriate that I should take a pratfall,” he said.

Bengtson had wanted to meet at this spot because it was there that, 83 years earlier, Keaton had filmed a chase scene for “Daydreams,” a short in which he played a young bumpkin who’d come to make his fortune in the big city -- so as to marry his best girl.

“Buster came running around this corner, with the cops chasing him,” Bengtson said, swiveling and pointing like a director, “and then he ran past that building and around that corner.”

Such is the devotion to detail by silent film buffs of Bengtson’s caliber. They focus on the choreography of gags, facial expressions, framings and cuts -- down to the second. To the silent stars’ later, awkward talkie work they pay far less heed.

Bengtson’s specialty is places. He can watch almost any scene in almost any of the roughly 30 films Keaton directed and say in a moment where it was filmed. So canny is Bengtson’s skill that he published his first book on the subject in 1999. In “Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton,” Bengtson analyzes hundreds of frames and matches them with locations, for the most part in L.A. Because his baroque stunts and crowd scenes required so much space, Keaton usually filmed on location.

Bengtson insists he is not a fanatic. “It was just a silly little thing that was fun to do,” he said of his book, which took up his evenings and weekends for three years. “My life isn’t consumed with this stuff.”

But at other times his enthusiasm seems to betray him.

“I don’t want to sound deranged,” he said, recounting the events -- meeting Keaton’s widow and son, finding like-minded souls in Web chat groups -- that led to his book, “but it is like I was meant to do this.

“I guess if I’m obsessed with anything, I’m obsessed with old photographs and imagining myself in them. I’ve become obsessed with how L.A. looked in the ‘20s.”

As a young man, Bengtson collected silent movies on High-8. Now he has all of Keaton’s films on DVD, a technology that has made his singular form of research possible. He freezes the movies on his computer, and then, with the aid of old city and insurance company maps and satellite photography, all of it readily available on the Web, he matches them with current-day shots of the same locations.

He is now doing the same thing for Chaplin’s larger body of work, with a book due in the fall.

“The silent era was such a distinct period of time,” he said. “There was a beginning, a middle and an end. And then it was over. And it’s never going to come back.”

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A maturing Los Angeles as backdrop

In his prime, from 1920 to 1928, Buster Keaton wrote, directed and starred in 29 films, many of which were shot in and around Los Angeles. Keaton’s sprawling sight gags and affinity for large crowd scenes required that he leave the studio lots and shoot on location, and he explored every corner of the region, from the teeming streets of downtown to the wide boulevards of Hollywood, from Newport Beach to the Antelope Valley. He shot one scene atop a train pulling into Union Station. Another he shot atop a boulder in Topanga Canyon.

In those years, L.A. was beginning its transition from a fledgling city -- a lemon growers’ exchange sat up the street from his studio on Cahuenga Boulevard -- to an urban center, and this transition is made dramatic in Keaton’s oeuvre. He used it all: We see in his films old Victorian mansions, newly built one-story houses, farmland, office buildings, park trails and seedy back alleys.

Based largely on author John Bengtson’s research, here, listed by movie, are some of the more interesting locales still relatively intact:

“The Scarecrow” (1920)

Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. On his way to elope with his girl, Keaton, driving a motorcycle with a sidecar, speeds down Beverly Drive. At the time, the house at 618 was one of the only buildings on the now fully developed street.

“Hard Luck” (1921)

Statue of Gen. Harrison Gray Otis in MacArthur Park, corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Park View Street. Trying to elude the police, as he often was, Keaton’s character posed next to the statue of Otis (founder of the Los Angeles Times). The statue still stands.

“The Goat” (1921)

Apartment house at 914 S. Alvarado St. One of Keaton’s grittier comedies -- there are scenes on bread lines and in jailhouses -- “The Goat” begins as Keaton is mistaken for an escaped convict and his face is plastered around town. His faithful girl lives in a still-intact apartment building, then called the Weymouth.

“Cops” (1922)

Cahuenga just south of Hollywood Boulevard. Running from a band of cops, Keaton emerges from an alley and jumps onto the back of a passing car. It was regarded as one of his great stunts. The alley, now sandwiched by a newsstand and the restaurant-bar Tokio, is still there, as is the Palmer building, in the background.

“Three Ages” (1923)

11238 Sierra Pass Place, Chatsworth. In a takeoff on D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” Keaton plays a lovelorn dreamer in various parts of history. In the Stone Age segment, he and his leopard-skin-clad lady scurry across a rock arch, still there today. Formerly the Iverson Movie Ranch, the location is now home to a condominium development.

“Seven Chances” (1925)

Greater Page Temple at 2610 La Salle Ave. In one of his most famous scenes -- it was redone in the 1999 film “The Bachelor” -- Keaton, an heir who’s put an ad in the paper seeking a wife, is chased from this church by a horde of angry brides-to-be. The church is completely intact.

“Go West” (1925)

Coca-Cola Building, at 963 E. 4th St., and 4th Street Viaduct. Keaton plays a hapless ranch hand who finds himself on top of a train full of cattle careening toward downtown L.A. The tracks are now the 4th Street Viaduct, at the end of which sits the old Coca-Cola building (it now belongs to a toy importer).

“Battling Butler” (1926)

Talmadge Apartments, 3278 Wilshire Blvd. at Berendo Street. Keaton’s callow youth, Alfred Butler, is sent on a camping trip by his censorious father to make a man of Alfred. The exterior of his mansion was in fact the beautiful Talmadge.

“The Cameraman” (1928)

Corner of Hollywood and Vine. In his last great silent feature, Keaton plays an aspiring newsreel cameraman. At this now-famous corner, he leaps onto the back of a speeding fire engine, hoping to film his big break (the engine, sadly, turns out to be on its way back to the station).

-- James Verini