As the film descriptions above indicate, silent comedies were a great training ground for young actors, director and writers. Of course, most of the people making silent films, particularly in the early years of the 20th century, had to learn the business from the ground up. There were no filmmaking schools at the time and even accomplished stage performers like Keaton and Chaplin had to learn the new language of film.

Training was done on the job. For actors like Chaplin and Keaton, that meant starting out with supporting roles before they developed the skills and characters that would make them film stars. Their move into leading roles in slapstick comedies was actually rare in the business. Many of the actors who started out working for Mack Sennett, Hal Roach and other comedy producers, moved into a wider variety of films after getting exposure and screen training in silent comedies. Sennett's studio helped make stars of Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery. He also maintained a stable of "Bathing Beauties," beautiful girls who served as set dressing for his films. One of them was Carole Lombard, who rose from the ranks of the bathing beauties to star in her own shorts for Sennett and then became one of the biggest female stars of the '30s. For his part, Roach provided early roles for stars like Jean Harlow, Bebe Daniels and Paulette Goddard.

But it was behind the camera that the silent comedy did its best job of molding Hollywood's future power players. Silent slapstick provided invaluable training in building jokes and constructing plots. Leo McCarey started out writing and directing for Hal Roach, working on the comedies of Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase before moving on to direct a series of hit features. He would win Oscars® for directing Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth (1937) and for directing and writing Going My Way (1944), starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. Frank Capra started out writing silent comedies for Sennett, which led to his writing for silent comic Harry Langdon. When Langdon set up his own production company, he brought Capra along to write and direct. From there, Capra directed a string of hits for Columbia Pictures, winning directing Oscars® for It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You Can't Take It with You (1938). Al Boasberg wrote for Buster Keaton before contributing to some of the Marx Brothers' best scripts, while Edward Cline, who started in the Keystone Kops before writing and directing for Sennett and Keaton, became W.C. Fields's favorite director. And Harold Lloyd writer Sam Taylor went on to win one of the most famous credit lines in film history: The Taming of the Shrew (1929), written by William Shakespeare, additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.

By Frank Miller