The Comic

In 1927 Hollywood, a silent film production company and cast make a difficult transition to sound.

A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.

A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, tracing the rise and fall of multiple characters in an era of unbridled decadence and depravity during Hollywood's transition from silent films to sound films in the late 1920s.

A would-be filmmaker and actress shake up the industry with a trick dog who gets discovered by a studio bus driver in the 1920s.

Hollywood, 1927: As silent movie star George Valentin wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion, he sparks with Peppy Miller, a young dancer set for a big break.

Thornton Sayre, a respected college professor - secretly formerly a silent films romantic action hero - is disturbed, feeling his privacy has been violated, and his professional credibility as a scholar jeopardized, when he learns his old movies have been resurrected and are being aired on TV. He sets out to demand this cease. However, his former co-star is the hostess of the TV show playing the films, and she has other plans.

In 1924, stage-struck Boston blueblood Hannah Adams picks up musical star Tim O'Connor and takes him home for dinner. One thing leads to another, and when Tim's show rolls on to Chicago a new Mrs. O'Connor comes along as incompetent chorus girl. Hollywood beckons, and we follow the star careers of the O'Connor family in silents and talkies.

Funloving Pearl White, working in a garment sweatshop, gets her big chance when she "opens" for a delayed Shakespeare play...with a comic vaudeville performance. Her brief stage career leads her into those "horrible" moving pictures, where she comes to love the chaotic world of silent movies, becoming queen of the serials. But the consequences of movie stardom may be more than her leading man can take

In this short film, an elderly cameraman and his camera reminisce about their days shooting silent films and news stories.

A celebration of the life and career of one of America's most influential and celebrated filmmakers and comedians—Buster Keaton—whose singular style and fertile output during the silent era created his legacy as a true cinematic visionary.

Carter DeHaven announces that he will perform a series of "impressions." For each we see him applying makeup and changing the combing of his hair or putting on a wig. When he tilts his head down during each supposed makeover, up pops the actual celebrity (Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle, Valentino, Fairbanks, Coogan) he appears to have been making himself up as.