Buster Keaton's The General
The Making of a Silent Comedy Masterpiece

About this book:

On a scorching Oregon afternoon in 1926, Buster Keaton watched forty tons of steam locomotive plunge into the Row River—a single, $22,000 shot captured in one take, the most expensive in silent film history. *Buster Keaton's The General* takes you behind the scenes of cinema's most audacious gamble: the transformation of a real Civil War railroad raid into a masterpiece that Orson Welles called perhaps the greatest film ever made. From the pages of a forgotten memoir to the muddy, smoke-filled trenches of location shooting, this is the definitive biography of a production where the star was also the stuntman, the director, and the engineer—risking his fortune, his studio, and his life on every frame.

Discover the meticulous geometry behind Keaton's death-defying stunts, performed without doubles, CGI, or safety nets. Ride the cowcatcher as he clears ties from the track at speed. Witness the construction of a Civil War battleground in the Pacific Northwest wilderness, the orchestration of the legendary burning bridge sequence, and the chaotic life in a location camp where locomotive sparks sparked real forest fires. Through archival research and production records, every chapter reveals the collision of artistic obsession and industrial muscle that forged a new language of visual comedy.

Yet this is also a tragedy of hubris and timing. When *The General* premiered, audiences expecting breezy slapstick rejected its austere, historically grounded epic—triggering a financial collapse that cost Keaton his independence and led to a disastrous MGM contract. For decades the film moldered in vaults before a critical resurrection cemented its legendary status. Here is the complete, frame-by-frame story of the iron horse masterpiece: how a stone-faced vaudeville veteran built a motion picture out of steam, sweat, and raw courage, and why it remains the purest expression of cinema as a machine of wonder.