Hal Roach
Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach Sr. was an American film and television producer, director and screenwriter, who was the founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios.
Roach was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s. He is known for producing a number of early media franchise successes, including the Laurel and Hardy franchise, Harold Lloyd's early films, the films of entertainer Charley Chase, and the Our Gang short film comedy series.
Early life
Roach was born in Elmira, New York, to Charles Henry Roach, whose father was born in Wicklow, County Wicklow, Ireland, and Mabel Gertrude Bally, whose father John Bally being from Switzerland. A presentation by the American humorist Mark Twain impressed Roach as a young grade school student.Hal's first job was as a newspaper deliverer. One of his customers lived at Quarry Farm - Samuel Clemens, more widely known as Mark Twain."
Early career
After an adventurous youth that took him to Alaska, Roach arrived in Hollywood in 1912 and began working as an extra in silent films.When Hal Roach came to Southern California at the age of 20, he had reached the tail end of a four-year trek across America, which took him from his hometown of Elmira, New York to Alaska, and down the Pacific Coast. Along the way, he picked up the know-how necessary to land work as an extra in a J. Warren Kerrigan western, which was being filmed on location in the desert. It was here that he first met fellow player Harold Lloyd, the first of many talents whom Hal Roach would nurture and build a fortune on. During the filming of a roulette sequence, Roach got himself promoted to the position of technical advisor by pointing out that the ball has to travel in the opposite direction of the wheel – knowledge he had gained in San Francisco's Barbary Coast.
Pathé Exchange
On July 23, 1914, Roach incorporated Rolin Film Company with Dan Linthicum and I.H. Nance.In 1914, the Lewis Leonard Bradbury mansion, on the corner of Court Street and Hill Street, Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California, was Roach's film studio.
Upon coming into an inheritance, in 1915 he began producing short film comedies with his friend Harold Lloyd, who portrayed a character known as Willie Work, as in Willie Runs the Park and Lonesome Luke, as in Lonesome Luke, Social Gangster.
In 1915, his first success, Just Nuts, landed a long-standing distribution deal with Pathé Exchange.
Unable to expand his studios in Downtown Los Angeles because of zoning, Roach leased several studio sites in the Los Angeles area until he purchased what became the Hal Roach Studios from Harry Culver in Culver City, California, at 8822 Washington Boulevard, and built by 1920. During the 1920s and 1930s, he employed Lloyd, Will Rogers, Max Davidson, the Our Gang children, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Thelma Todd, ZaSu Pitts, Patsy Kelly and, most famously, Laurel and Hardy. During the 1920s, Roach's biggest rival was producer Mack Sennett. In 1925, Roach hired away Sennett's supervising director, F. Richard Jones.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Roach released his films through Pathé Exchange until 1927, when he struck a distribution deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He converted his silent-movie studio to sound in late 1928 and began releasing talking shorts in early 1929. In the days before dubbing, foreign-language versions of the Roach comedies were created by reshooting each film in Spanish, French, and occasionally Italian and German. Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang kids were required to recite the foreign dialogue phonetically, often working from blackboards hidden off-camera.In 1931, with the release of the Laurel & Hardy film Pardon Us, Roach began producing occasional full-length features alongside the short subjects. Two-reel comedies were less profitable than features, and Roach phased almost all of his shorts production in 1936 in favor of focusing on feature production. Some of Roach's stock company, such as Laurel & Hardy and Patsy Kelly, were moved into features full-time, while Charley Chase was let go and moved to Columbia Pictures. Roach also borrowed A-list actors from other studios to star in his new features, such as Robert Young and Jack Haley. The most successful non-Laurel & Hardy Roach-MGM features both starred Constance Bennett: Topper, which also starred Cary Grant, and Merrily We Live, co-starring Brian Aherne.
The only exception to the termination of Roach's shorts program was Our Gang, which MGM wanted Roach to continue producing. Roach agreed to continue the kid-comedy series in a shorter single-reel format if MGM would release an Our Gang feature, General Spanky. The feature was not a success and the Our Gang series remained in short-film format.
Roach was also a good friend to Walt Disney, who was a fan of Laurel and Hardy at the time. A monkey dressed in a Mickey Mouse costume as well as actors in Three Little Pigs costumes appeared in Roach's 1934 Laurel and Hardy film March of the Wooden Soldiers. Mickey Mouse, in animated form, also appeared in the MGM feature Hollywood Party, also from 1934 and also featuring Laurel and Hardy.
Mussolini
In 1937, Renato Senise, nephew of Carmine Senise, the then deputy chief of the Italian police, conceived a joint business venture of Roach partnering with Vittorio Mussolini, son of fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, to form a production company called "R.A.M.". On 11 September 1937, Roach and Vittorio Mussolini formed R.A.M. Productions.Roach claimed the scheme involved Italian bankers providing US$6 million that would enable Roach's studio to produce a series of 12 films. Eight would be for Italian screening only while the remaining four would receive world distribution. The first film for Italy was to be a feature film of the opera Rigoletto.
The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy resented Mussolini's presence and placed notices in various trade magazines: "He asked for – and received – the privilege of being the first aviator to bomb helpless Ethiopians... his presence here is not an occasion for celebration or social fetes. Those who welcome him are opening their arms to a friend of Hitler and an enemy of democracy."
Roach defended himself by saying:
You don't know, but that I might have dinner with Mussolini when I go back to Italy. Maybe I can suggest to him that Hitler is not going quite right about things and maybe Mussolini will write Hitler a note and tell him so... I never made a move in Europe in this matter at any time without the advice and cooperation of some of the most prominent Jews there who told me I was doing the finest thing ever done in their estimation — tying up with Mussolini's son and taking the boy back to Hollywood...
This proposed business alliance with Mussolini alarmed MGM, which intervened and forced Roach to buy his way out of the venture. Loews chairman Nicholas Schenck was so upset with this incident, combined with the underperformance of much of Roach's latest feature-film output to that point, that he ultimately canceled Roach's distribution contract with MGM.
United Artists
In May 1938, Roach sold MGM the production rights and actors contracts to the Our Gang shorts. Roach signed a distribution deal with United Artists at this time.From 1937 to 1940, Roach concentrated on producing glossy features, abandoning low comedy almost completely. Most of his new films were either sophisticated farces or rugged action fare. Roach's one venture into heavy drama was the acclaimed Of Mice and Men, in which actors Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr. played the leading roles. The Laurel and Hardy comedies, once the Roach studio's biggest drawing cards, were now the studio's least important product and were phased out altogether in 1940.
In 1940, Roach experimented with medium-length featurettes, running 40 to 50 minutes each. He contended that these "streamliners", as he called them, would be useful in double feature situations where the main attraction was a longer-length epic. Exhibitors agreed with him and used Roach's mini-features to balance top-heavy double bills. He had intended to introduce the new format with a series of four Laurel and Hardy featurettes, but was overruled by United Artists, which insisted on two Laurel & Hardy feature films instead. United Artists continued to release Roach's streamliners through 1943. By this time, Roach no longer had a resident company of comedy stars and cast his films with familiar featured players.
Recognizing the value of his film library, in 1943 Roach began licensing revivals of his older productions for theatrical distribution through Film Classics, Inc. and home-movie distribution.