FRED A. KREBS
Fred holds an MA in History and teaches at Johnson County Community College. He is a long standing member of the Keaton Celebration Committee and is an active member of the Kansas Humanities Council Speakers Bureau.

DAVID MACLEOD
David co-founded and still runs the British Buster Keaton Appreciation Society. The Blinking Buzzards, as well as being secretary of the Damfinos-the international Buster Keaton Society. He is the author of “The Sound of Buster Keaton” (1995) - a detailed look at Buster’s life after the introduction of sound with analysis, synopses and credits for his sound films from 1929-1967. He is also the author of “Looking Back: Buster Keaton’s 1951 British Music Hall Tour” (2001) - a little known episode in Buster’s life when he toured the UK for two months in 1951. He is editor of “The Big Bumper Buster Booklet” (2002) - a compilation of articles from the first 25 issues of the “Buster Bulletin”.

HOOMAN MEHRAN
Hooman has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and a Masters from New York University. Together with Frank Scheide, he is editor of a series of volumes on the life and art of Charles Chaplin. He serves as trustee of Silent Cinema Presentations in New York, a non profit organization sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts. He has lectured on early 20th century cinema throughout the U.S. and in the United Kingdom and Japan.

FRANK M. SCHEIDE
Dr. Scheide is currently teaching at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville. He has taught film at the university level since 1973, having received his MA from New York University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He is a prolific writer and filmmaker and is currently co-editing The Chaplin Review, a series of books being published by the British Film Institute and McFarland Publishing.

JOHN TIBBETTS
John is an author, educator, broadcaster, artist and pianist. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in Multi-Disciplinary Studies – Art, History, Photography and Film. He has hosted his own television show in Kansas City Missouri (“AM Live”) worked as a news reporter/commentator for CBS Television on CNN’ produced Fine Arts programming for KXTR-FM radio; written (and illustrated) four books, more than 200 articles and several short stories. From 1976-1985 he edited the bi-monthly magazine, American Classic Screen (the publication of the National Film Society). Tibbetts is a regular contributor to The Christian Science Monitor newspaper and Radio Network. He is a Senior Editor for the annual Movie/Video Guides from Ballantine Books and been a Senior consultant and contributor to several major reference works, including the New Film Index, The Encyclopedia of 20th Century and American Cultural Biography. He is the author of “Novels into Film” (Facts on File, NY) and “Mary Pickford and the Growing Girl”, in the JOURNAL OF POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION, Summer 2001, co-editor of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILMMAKERS. Currently John is an Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Kansas.

BILL SHAFFER
Is a Public Television Producer/Director for KTWU - Channel 11 of Topeka, Kansas. He has been working there for over thirty years, participating in the continuing series, “Sunflower Journeys” and “The Aisle Seat” among many projects. Occasionally, his passion for movies has intersected with his television work, resulting in the specials, “Kansas: The Little Hollywood” (Parts 1&2), “A Buster Keaton Celebration”, “Kansas City Jazz”, “The Movie That Wouldn’t Die!” and “Safari Cinema with Martin and Osa Johnson”. In addition to being on the board of the annual Buster Keaton Celebration, Shaffer is also the director of Topeka’s annual Kansas Silent Film Festival which takes place at eh end of February each year.

MARTHA JETT
Martha is the Damfinos representative on the Keaton Committee. She is a researcher, essayist and speaker on silent film and related topics. She has had numerous articles about Buster Keaton published in the Keaton Chronicle and Good Old Days magazine and on the Doughboy Center website. She created a teaching guide for the Muskegon, Michigan School District called the Keaton Almanac. She conducted a silent film workshop series in Central West Virginia and was a research consultant for the restoration of the Metropolitan Theatre on Morgantown, West Va. Martha lives in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

JIM WELSH
Jim earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. During his teaching career at Salisbury University in Maryland he founded the Literature/Film Association (1989) and was co-founding editor of the academic journal, Literature/Film Quarterly, now in its 35th year of production. In 1993 he hosted and moderated a silent film series for the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting that was entitled “The Films of the Gatsby Era,” originally telecast on East Coast stations from Boston to Miami. As a journalist he reviewed films for papers in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina from 1978 to 1998, and for seven years was Media Critic and Arts Editor for television station WBOC, the CBS affiliate for Salisbury, Maryland. He has also written many reviews for Films in Review (New York) and Magill’s Cinema Annual. Winner of multiple distinguished teaching awards, Jim served two terms as a Fulbright lector in Romania (in 1994 and 1998) and was able to facilitate a student exchange program between Salisbury University and the A.. Cuza University in Moldavia. In 2005 he earned the Peter C. Rollins Book Award from the Southwest Popular Culture and American Culture Association in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

ROBERT ARKUS
Robert is a film historian and archivist. He has presented rare film footage at past Buster Keaton Celebrations here in Iola, KS, at past Damfino’s (The International Buster Keaton Society) conventions in Muskegon, MI and at the 75th anniversary of The General in Cottage Grove, OR. Robert has also contributed his talents to film retrospectively at both The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center in NYC, the BFI in London and SLAPSTICON in Arlington, VA. He acted as both Production and Research Consultant for several of Laughsmith Entertainment’s DVD box sets, including The Forgotten Films of Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and Industrial Strength Keaton. Earlier this year, he worked on the production of New Wave Media’s recently released Popeye DVD box set and the upcoming Harry Langton DVD box set from All Day Entertainment. Robert is a also on the board of directors of Silent Cinema Presentations in New York City.

THOMAS PRASCH
Thomas is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Washburn University. He holds a Ph.D. From Indiana University, and a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Nebraska. His research interests include Victorian Britain and film reviews fro the American Historical Review and since 2001 he has edited biannual selections of film reviews on Kansas and Great Plains history for Kansas History. He has been an active member of Kansas Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau and TALK program since 2000.

TRACEY GOESSEL DOYLE, MD
M.D. University of Wisconsin, 1982; Specialty training in Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine, 1982-1986, Northwest University; Assistant Professor Department of Surgery, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, 1986-1991; Adjunct Faculty Towson University, Towson, MD. Taught “American Silent Film”, Media Department; Keaton- relevant publications: “That Stovepipe Hat: The Story of the General’s Abandoned Sequence” The Great Sone Face 1996 Volume 1.; “Character Studies: A Speculation on Production Dates” The Keaton Chronicle, 2005; Fairbanks-relevnat publications: Currently writing a biography of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. titled He Comes Up Smiling. Currently Dr. Groessel is CEO of FairCode Associates.

THOMAS PRASCH:
TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE DESIRABILITY OF THE PHYSICALLY
STRENUOUS LIFE
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the Victorian English conception of “muscular Christianity” (a term invented by Charles Kingsley and given significant promotion by Thomas Hughes of _Tom Brown’s School Days_ fame) found fertile ground in a range of American thought, from Social Gospel theologians like Josiah Strong to political figures like Teddy Roosevelt. Muscular Christianity rejected the ascetic and effeminate models that had been standard in Anglican, and in America in mainstream Protestant, iconography and discourse to emphasize a connection between strong faith and strong bodies. Against what they saw as the threat of urbanization, sedentary labor, immigrant populations, and the woman’s movement to the social, political, and religious health of the nation, proponents of muscular Christianity insisted on the importance of sports, outdoor activities (thus Roosevelt’s promotion of the national parks system), and generally strenuous manliness to the body politic and asserted the consistency of such beliefs with (Protestant) Christian faith. Such ideas find an interesting echo in the projected image of early film stars Buster Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks, whose do-your-own-stunts aesthetics and swashbuckling style reflected a similar prioritizing of the strenuously physical.

TRACEY GOESSEL DOYLE:
WHY DOUGLAS SMILED AND BUSTER DID NOT: AN ANALYSIS OF THE BUSINESS MODELS
ADOPTED BY EACH, AND A PARALLEL ANALYSIS OF THEIR SCREEN PERSONAE.
Douglas Fairbanks embodied on a conscious level the ethos and persona of his beloved Theodore Roosevelt. Keaton, at first glance, seems as far removed from the toothy TR as he was from the grinning Doug. But a deeper examination shows that each used the mythic structure of Roosevelt in some of their film persona: the evolution from the “mollycoddle” (a term coined by Roosevelt and used by Fairbanks as a title for one of his films,) to the selfsufficient hero. Roles adopted by Fairbanks in his pre-1920 films will be compared with those of Keaton in such films as The Navigator and Battling Butler.

At the same time, their paths in the world of reality were on opposing courses. While Fairbanks broke away from the concept of a protective mentor, and moved into the world of controlling not only the production, but the distribution of his films, Keaton depended on the benevolent patronage of Joseph Schenck. When that patronage was withdrawn, both Chaplin and Fairbanks urged him to join them in independent production. Instead he went into the studio system at MGM, and lost all creative control.

An analysis of the parallels in their screen characters will be followed by a review of the business model of films in the teens and twenties, and how each man pursued a perpendicular course. A discussion of the opposing strains between the arts and business resulted in the charming, albeit lesser artist (Fairbanks) having a longer period of creative independence than that of the brilliant artist, albeit lesser businessman (Keaton).

FRANK SCHEIDE: BUSTER KEATON AND DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS: “DISCIPLES” OF TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S PHILOSOPHY FOR PURSUING THE PHYSICALLY STRENUOUS LIFE.
A weak and asthmatic child, it was thought that young Theodore Roosevelt might not survive past the age of four. Little Teddy spent his early childhood aspiring to become a naturalist as he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of wildlife while battling crippling bouts of asthma. When Roosevelt’s father later complemented his eleven-year-old for the discipline of his mind, he balanced his praise by pointing out that Teddy now needed to focus upon the development of his body. The young boy immediately embarked upon an exhaustive physical regiment that expanded his lungs and made him stronger. This enthusiasm for the simultaneous cultivation of mind and body would never leave him. At the age of twenty-five a totally devastated Roosevelt would, in 1884, turn to his faith in the desirability of the strenuous life after both his wife and mother died on the same day. Roosevelt chose to deal with his grief by leaving his comfortable upper class existence in New York, and moved to the Badlands of North Dakota, where he pursued the harsh and demanding existence of a cowboy. Members of his family claimed that had he not experienced this rugged physical challenge, which further molded his philosophy for appreciating the benefits and discipline of the strenuous life, Theodore Roosevelt may never have become President of the United States. The popularity and resonance of Roosevelt’s attitudes would result in his likeness being carved in stone on the Mt. Rushmore National Monument, in South Dakota. During the past fifteen years the Buster Keaton Celebration has repeatedly recognized that this filmmaker was a brilliant athlete who communicated great humanistic insight through nonverbal expression. Unlike other “philosophercomedians” we have focused upon, such as Charlie Chaplin and W.C. Fields, Keaton was reluctant to verbally discuss the intellectual content of his work, even though critics have repeatedly shown its richness. There is one silent cinematic hero and light comedian with whom Keaton can be compared, who had no problem expressing his personal philosophy, both nonverbally and verbally - Douglas Fairbanks.

Prior to coming to silent film from Broadway in 1915, Douglas Fairbanks gained particular fame on stage for his role of “Bertie, ‘the Lamb”, in the play The New Henrietta. In this narrative Bertie, who is a seemingly shallow and ineffectual upper class youth, suddenly reveals incredible internal strength and resolve which results in saving his previously exasperated father from bankruptcy. Personable and athletic, Fairbanjs especially enjoyed stage and screen roles that demanded a physical exuberance. Douglas Fairbanks was born in Denver, Colorado in 1882, so he also knew something of the westerener’s life that fascinated Teddy Roosevelt. As a popular filmmaker, Fairbanks sometimes had his character of the “all American boy” appear in films set in the west as opposed to the east. In an interesting parallel to Teddy Roosevelt, Fairbanks would also play, with comic results, an upper class easterner in the wild west. Beginning in 1917, film star Douglas Fairbanks wrote five popular “self-help” books that stressed the benefits of positive thinking and the pursuit of “physical culture” – attitudes very much in keeping with his hero, Theodore Roosevelt. In his second book, Making Life Worthwhile, which was published in 1918, Fairbanks included a chapter entitled “The Big Four”. Theodore Roosevelt was one ot the four men whose moral courage Fairbanks felt was particularly needed during this time of the “Great War”.

By 1920 Fairbanks was replacing his familiar “all American boy” character of light comedy with “action heros”, in costume pictures like The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Three Musketeers (1921). When MGM was planning a film of The New Henrietta, Fairbanks was asked who might play Bertie, the lamb. The actor Fairbanks recommended to play this upper class character was a “baggy pants comedian” who supported Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in his slapstick pictures. Buster Keaton played Bertie exceptionally well in this film adaptation of the play, now entitled The Saphead. Keaton’s achievement, and the fact that he would later become known for similar portrayals in such features as The Navigator (1924) and Battling Buster (1926), is indicative both of the parallels that Fairbanks saw between himself and Buster, and his appreciation for Keaton’s talent.

Guided by respected humanists who are also Keaton and Fairbanks specialists, the 2007 Buster Keaton Celebration will explore how the nuances of Teddy Roosevelt’s “philosophy of the strenuous life” related to American culture at the the beginning of the twentieth century. To do this well we will examine the parallels between the art and philosophy of Buster Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks, and show how these two exceptionally popular film comedians can be characterized as “Roosevelt disciples”. From this examination we will not only obtain a greater appreciation for Keaton and Fairbanks, we will also have a better understanding of a philosophy that continues to reflect an important part of America’s sense of self.

JOHN C TIBBETTS; “THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF HOPE: THE CONTEMPORARY SATIRES OF DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, JR.”
During his screen career, 1915-1934, Douglas Fairbanks epitomized the American experience. He embodied the poetry of pose, the strut of sentiment. He was an equal opportunity enthusiast who played no favorites in the democracy of delights. He pulled high-fives with the world and claimed its privileges. Plucked out of the slipstream of time, out of the prevailing contexts of his day, this one-time “apostle of optimism” may seem to us today at times more like a gate crasher of lunacy, a jester of gesture. But seen in proper perspective, he was a flying wheel of legs, moving with the rattling rapidity of a Time Machine in forward drive. As this presentation demonstrates through commentary and film clips, his first cycle of films, in particular, from 1915-1920 – with their contemporary topics, their fist-pounding, high jumping acrobatic sermons modeled after the flamboyance and physical ideals of his idols and contemporaries, thos prophets of grinning self-reliance, Billy Sunday and Teddy Roosevelt – established him as the definitive New American. Embodying the character type defined by humanist/historian Henry Adams, he worshipped the Dynamo of a New World, a new universe driven by the forces of steam, electricity, and rail. And the results on screen captured aspects of the American character still prevalent today: In The Matrimaniac he proposes to his girl friend via a three-way telephone hookup, anticipating today’s internet and cell phone romances. In His Picture in the Papers he satirizes America’s fastgrowing preoccupation with celebrity status and media exploitation. In Down to Earth he pokes fun at diet fads and health fitness. And in The Mollycoddle he leaps into the saddle and gallops off to Arizona, where he triggers collisions between those essential antinomies of the American Experience, East and West, effete dudes and dime-novel cowboys, experience and innocence, memory and hope. The quintessential American, Doug’s art was like his own life – it cared for nothing outside itself, and it went its own way, rejoicing.

FRED KREBS; MEN IN THE ARENA: BUSTER KEATON AND DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS
The early 20th Century saw the emergence of a new thic of citizenship in the United States. Following the Roosevelt doctrine of “the strenuous life” was tied to a new idea of citizenship centered around self-reliance, courage, the pursuit of excellence, service to the poor and weak. This was “the man in the arena”, the democratic hero who never fled a challenge, danger or struggle and who never compromised virtue or nobility. Using the writing of Theodore Roosevelt, William Allen White, and Elbert Hubbard along with the histories of the Progressive Era, this new concept will be explained and applied to Keaton’s films “The General” and “The Navigator” and Fairbank’s films “Zorro” and “The Black Pirate”.

HOOMAN MEHRAN PHYSICALLY UNFIT: ‘SNITZ’ EDWARDS AS COUNTERPOINT IN THE FILMS OF KEATON AND FAIRBANKS
Edward Neumann, known professionally as Snitz Edwards, is a character actor who worked with both Keaton and Fairbanks. The theme of this year’s conference is energy and physical fitness as outlined by President Theodore Roosevelt and exemplified in the silent films of Keaton and Fairbanks. In many ways, Edwards epitomized the exact opposite of that doctrine. On the screen, he always played mild and weak characters. Off screen, his poor constitution eventually led to his early and long retirement, which was spent as a homebound invalid. Edwards life and career will be presented as the antithesis of this year’s theme of physical vigor, a stark contrast to the Keaton and Fairbanks characters, which both stars recognized and fully exploited through their repeated use of his services.

JAMES WELSH: “AMERICAN ICONS OF ENERGY AND OPTIMISM: FAIRBANKS AND KEATON I THE SHADOW OF T.R.”
Even more than Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks was the poster boy for the new hustling American comedy emerging before World War I, but the prophet of American Vigor who inspired both of these screen comedians was Theodore Roosevelt, transformed in the popular imagination from a 97-pound weakling to the Rough Rider of the Spanish-American War, an adventurer and big-game hunter. Both Fairbanks and Keaton were astonishingly fit and capable of acrobatic wonders.

Keaton was the master of the comic chase, pursued by policemen (a la Chaplin) or gangsters, or boulders, or even hordes of women intent upon marrying him in Seven Chances. The Fairbanks chase was perfected in the 1920’s, during the actor’s wonderful costume/swashbuckling period. Keaton was typically victimized by the chase, while Fairbanks invited, often instigated, and relished it. Once he became aware of it, Keaton would be worried by the chase, and the dramatic irony of camera perspective gave evidence why he should be worried. By contrast, Fairbanks never seemed happier than when he was pursued by Pirates (in The Black Pirate), Captain Ramon or Sgt. Gonzales (in The Mark of Zorro), the soldiers of the usurper Ruiz (in The Gaucho), the Sheriff of Nottingham (in Robin Hood), or Cardinal Richelieu’s men (in The Three Musketeers or The Iron Mask). What Fairbanks encapsulates so wonderfully is the joy of the chase, the ecstasy of adventure, the can-do derring-do confidence of the American hero, an amazing popular culture reflection of Teddy Roosevelt.

The Fairbanks persona of the earlier comedies (29 of them, no less) was maybe less flamboyant than that of the costume films, farcical, good-natured (one of his earliest films in 1915 was entitled The Pursuit of Happiness), and goodhumored, while at the same time striving for betterment and trying to establish something like An American Aristocracy (the title of the 1916 film foreshadowing the achievements of Pickfair in the 1920’s). Teddy Roosevelt was certainly one of Fairbank’s heroes. The Fairbanks character, a pampered eastener who goes west to Arizona in The Mollycoddle, is obviously costumed to resemble T.R., who in fact coined the word “mollycoddle.” Fairbanks was the screen embodiment of Roosevelt’s obsession with fitness and physical culture. As Roosevelt once said, “For good, healthy exercise I would strongly recommend some of our gilded youth to go west and try a short course of riding bucking ponies and assisting at the branding of a lot of Texas steers.” Such words might have might have inspired several of the early Fairbanks plots. The Fairbanks “mollycoddle” type resembled the “glasses character” of Harold Lloyd, before Fairbanks later turned himself into a spectacle in the costume films. Elements of Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd, combine with cultural icons such as Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday to shape the essential Fairbanks persona. More than simply a stage comedian turned movie star, the Fairbanks character was culturally inscribed in ways that may not be so obvious in the 21st Century.