The story of Buster Keaton’s rise to vaudevillian fame and shift to a career in cinema was definitely an interesting look at the entertainment industry of the time.  That said, Kramer Kramer uses the story to debunk the popular myth that Keaton’s career was started by a chance encounter on the street, and makes claims about why the shift from theater to cinema took place.  I am not sure how much I agree with the latter of Kramer’s arguments.

When reading about the long career of Keaton and his family on stage it is interesting to hear about the strong reluctance the performer(s) had towards a film adaptation of the routine considering how famous he became as a film actor.  The opinion that Buster’s father, Joe Keaton, had about needing to connect with his audience and the manner in which he had perfected their performance but only for a live audience coincides with a lot of what we have been reading for class lately relating to an audiences need to interact with the performance.  I agree with Kramer’s argument that Keaton’s career was not started by an encounter on the street as it is clear from the history that Keaton had a long lasting career, a necessity to shift his audience/act, and a longstanding relationship with many of theater big shots that were moving towards film.

A problem with Kramer’s article that I do have is his claim near the end of the piece where he claims that Keaton’s shift towards film was not necessarily a given choice, and that the balance between stage and film was a very tight and not always decidedly advantageous one way or the other.  It just seemed to me that the entire rest of the article seemed to illustrate that Keaton’s act was struggling on the stage and that actors of his type and caliber were all gaining significantly more respect and money by switching to film.  In this sense, I disagree with Kramer and think that the shift from vaudevillian stage to the film screen was kind of an obvious choice and was a natural progression of the industry and the market.