No cut-aways, one take.
Crew members threatened to quit and begged him not to do it.
The cameraman looked away while rolling.
A six ton prop.
It brushes his arm as it comes down.
And he doesn’t even flinch.
Will always reblog
Buster Keaton, man.
From Mental Floss:
After being blown around by a cyclone in this film, a dazed Buster Keaton stops in the middle of a street to catch his breath. As he stares unblinking at the camera, the front wall of a two-story house crashes down on him. But he escapes unhurt because his body is perfectly framed by an open window. Eighty years on, it still looks impossible. And dangerous. The 4,000-lb. house front was on a hinge, and Keaton drove a nail in the ground to mark his position. The window was just big enough to give him two inches of clearance on either side. Minutes before shooting, Keaton noticed a few crew members praying. He also saw the cameraman turn away as the shot rolled. Buster later called the stunt one of his “greatest thrills,” then added, “I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing.”
Joseph Frank Keaton did not risk his life on lining up this stunt to make cinematic history so that you could make shitty AI videos of anthropomorphic cats belly dancing for likes on Instagram.
It's the fact he was told some life shattering news moments before he filmed this stunt aswell. Could have been the worst and last day of his life 😭
