Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in CONEY ISLAND (1917)
Silent Film – Directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
Score arranged by Tony Steve (b.1959) and Bob Moore (b.1962)
Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle (1887-1933) was one of Hollywood's greatest comedic filmmakers of the silent era, and he had an unheard-of, million-dollar-a-year contract at the height of his career. But in real life, in 1921 Arbuckle became a tragic Hollywood character, ostracized and demoralized after being falsely accused of raping and killing a "party-girl" acquaintance who died several days after attending a party that he also had attended. Despite courtroom testimony which clearly demonstrated that the woman had died from a ruptured bladder, and that there was neither any evidence nor death-bed accusation that she had ever been intimate with Arbuckle or had been raped by anyone, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published sensational "accounts" that portrayed Arbuckle as a lecherous monster who forced himself on innocent young women, against the backdrop of a town where debauchery was the norm. But among those who actually knew him, the shy Roscoe was called "the most chaste man in pictures," and even though he was acquitted in 1922, this didn't stop moral crusaders from demanding his execution. One of the very few celebrities who never faltered in publicly showing support for Arbuckle was his protégé and Coney Island co-star, Buster Keaton (1895-1966). Even though Arbuckle and his movies had been so wildly popular, it was perhaps unfortunate that Arbuckle's character in Coney Island is a philandering husband, because this type of on-screen persona may have made it easier for the fickle public to buy into the trumped-up scandal that still casts a shadow over his reputation.