Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age At the American Film Institue

It sounds like bragging, but we didn't borrow from the bank. We kept a certain amount of money aside and financed our own pictures. In a way we gambled a little heavier than some people do at Las Vegas, but we always got away with it. HAROLD LLOYD (Born in Burchard, Nebraska, 1893Died 1971) There are few more fondly remembered screen images than the young man with horn-rimmed glasses desperately clinging to the hand of a clock high over Los Angeles. That young man was seventy-six years old the night he joined twenty aspiring filmmakers who had earlier seen a thirty-five-millimeter print of Kid Brother in the old library of the Doheny estate in Beverly Hills. For most of them this was their first look at Harold Lloyd, a comic genius whose screen triumphs four decades earlier had made him one of the world's most famous faces, an international star who produced his films and took responsibility for every detail. He never took director credit, but he was the guiding light of his comedies. Lloyd owned his films and preserved them, but kept such a tight grip on them that he missed the opportunity for the kind of revivals enjoyed by his contemporary rivals, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In fact, most filmgoers remember him only for the famous clock scene in Safety Last! because it is seen so often in film history compilations. But in the 1920s audiences crowded into theaters and howled at Lloyd's antics in Grandma's Boy, Girl Shy, The Freshman, The Kid Brother and Speedywhich were always accompanied by a live orchestra. I remember Lloyd insisting that a piano was all right for two-reelers, but you had to have a big orchestra for features. He was slight at five foot nine, optimistic and genial. When he arrived at AFI he seemed more like someone's happy uncle than a man whose success had enabled him to build a forty-four-room house in Beverly Hills with a hundred-foot waterfall, a nine-hole golf course and a staff of sixteen full-time gardeners. Lloyd gave the world thrills and laughs. His era was the magical time of grand movie palaces, huge audiences and shared laughter, and his legacy includes some of the finest comedies ever made. It's just as well that Lloyd, a perfectionist who died two years after his AFI seminar, didn't live to see the postage-stamp screens of the modern shopping mall. I invited him to be AFI's first speaker because I felt it important to establish this series with a pioneer who went back to the roots of American filmmaking, a pioneer who understood the importance of AFI's goal of preserving our motion picture heritage. Lloyd's friend and colleague King Vidor joined the fellows in the questioning. HAROLD LLOYD September 23, 1969 May I just say that being a guest here tonight, I feel highly honored being in on the initial shove-off, as it were, of the AFI Conservatory. Certainly I'm sure that everyone here, every guest you have, is rooting that it's going to go tremendous places. I'm happy to say that I have the honor also of being one of the original men on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and to tell the truth, I don't believe it was as big as this when we started. I was on the original board that elected Doug Fairbanks, Sr., president, and it has gone quite a ways, so I'd say that if your institute here gathers momentum and keeps going, you may well outdistance the Academy Awards. I hope that takes place. This picture that you've just seen, Kid Brother, well, we had a little problem with that one. It is what I call a "character comedy." I made two different types of pStevens, George, Jr. is the author of 'Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age At the American Film Institue', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400040544 and ISBN 140004054X.