“The urchin who treads on the garden hose”

Film narrative began with the figure of a mischievous child.

The very first movies were “actualités” documenting how people, animals, or machines moved around in real life. The novelty and spectacle of seeing those actions on screen provided all the entertainment.

As one famous example, in early 1895 Louis and Auguste Lumière first exhibited their improved cinématographe with footage of workers leaving their factory. Exciting!

That summer, the brothers decided instead to stage a fictional event for their camera. The result is the oldest known movie with a plot (beginning, middle, and end) and the oldest film comedy.

The Lumières claimed to take inspiration from a prank played by their baby brother Edouard, born in 1884. If so, Edouard may have taken inspiration from comics, since cartoonists had been drawing variations on this prank since he was a baby. Antoine Sausverd rounded up examples in this article for Topfferiana. Lance Rickman discussed their cinematic influence in an article titled “Bande dessinee and the cinematograph: visual narrative in 1895.”

A journalist for the newspaper Les Allobroges published an interview about this movie with the Lumières’ former gardener Jean-François Clerc in 1949. In translation:

Suddenly, one fine summer morning, the two young men came to find me at the end of the garden where I was working, followed by that little rascal Edouard, all three carrying an extraordinary set of equipment. Louis set up the tripod, Auguste added his crank box on top, and Edouard went to get a garden hose a few steps away. Here was a dark lurking mystery in which I was to pay the price, while raising myself to the rank of the world’s leading film actor.

When everything was set up, while Louis was already holding the handle of his curious box, Auguste said to me: “François, take the jet and water in front of you, without worrying about us. Edouard, by pressing with his foot on the hose, will give you or take away water.” Things went as agreed and that’s how I watered in jerky jets, the water sometimes splashing in my face, while Louis and Auguste kept turning their famous handle, continually directing the glass eye of this box at me.

No footage of this action featuring Edouard has survived. Clerc may have misremembered his costar, or that first footage was a test of concept and the brothers came back for a more planned filming. Louis Lumière himself said in a 1948 interview:

Although my recollections are not very accurate, I think I may say that the idea of the scenario was suggested to me by a farce by my younger brother Edouard, whom we unhappily lost while an airman during the 1914-1918 war. He was then too young to play the part of the urchin who treads on the garden hose. I replaced him by a young apprentice from the carpenter’s workshop of the factory, Duval, who died after performing his duties as chief packer of the works for almost forty-two years. As regards the waterer, the part was played by our gardener M. Clerc, who is still alive after being employed at the works for forty years.

Different sources say young Duval’s first name was Daniel or Benoît.

In late 1895 the Lumières began to exhibit a 40-second movie variously titled “Le jardinier (The Gardener),” “Le jardinier et l’espiègle (The Gardener and the Mischief-Maker),” and finally “L’arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled).” That movie has a clear plot. The boy steps on the gardener’s hose. Puzzled, the gardener peers at the nozzle, The boy hops off the hose, making water squirt into the gardener’s face. The gardener chases down the prankster and spanks him. The gardener goes back to work while the chastened boy walks off (with a glance at the camera).

The next year, the brothers filmed another version in a different garden with more depth of scene. This time, the prankster was played by a 22-year-old factory employee named Léon Trotobas. In 45 seconds the action comes full circle with the gardener spraying him back. (Some writers treat this as the first version. I’m agreeing with the sequence described by Movies Silently and others.)

“L’arroseur arrosé” was such a hit that the Lumières commissioned Marcellin Auzolle to draw a poster showing an audience enjoying it—the oldest known movie poster to show part of an actual movie.

Other moviemakers like George Méliès copied “L’arroseur arrosé,” sometimes exactly, sometimes trying to top the action. The 1899 British version, “The Biter Bit,” runs more than a minute and shows the gardener chasing the prankster (another man) around a tree before spraying him. Thus film slapstick grew.

Are You Gonna?

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by WJM (William Lipton, Jeremy Yun, and Max Simas, with guest bassist Collin Simas, uploaded to YouTube on 9 May 2013)

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” performed by The Runarounds (William Lipton, Axel Ellis, Jeremy Yun, Jesse Golliher, and Zendé Murdock, uploaded to YouTube on 10 Feb 2023)

The Runarounds was formed in 2000 for a television show that finally went out on Amazon Prime this month. The five musicians cast as slightly younger musicians for the series have been playing and writing songs together in the meantime, and they’re now touring the east coast.

In the series premiere, the characters bond over the song “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”, originally by Jet. As the cast notes in interviews, and as this pair of videos shows, most of them have had fun playing that song since they were kids.

“To do it exactly like Douglas Fairbanks”

In 1976 Robert Parrish, an Academy Award–winning film editor and less heralded film director, published his first memoir, Growing Up in Hollywood.

Parrish opened his life story with a incident about himself as a seven-year-old in Columbus, Georgia. He was born in 1916, so that would have occurred in 1923 or so.

This lively anecdote, full of evocative detail, starts with an older boy urging little Robert to fetch some curtains so the neighborhood gang can recreate Douglas Fairbanks’s famous stunt in The Black Pirate: sliding down a ship’s sail with a knife stuck into the canvas to slow himself down.

Robert found a sheet, which the gang hung from an oak branch. The older boy supplied a butcher knife. While most of the fellows slapped wooden swords at each other on the ground, they sent the seven-year-old up the tree to try the stunt first. The scene ended [SPOILER!] with a broken arm.

While he recuperated, Robert’s mother took him to her third viewing of D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. During that show, he saw a “coming-attractions trailer for Intolerance,” with a shot of director Griffith setting up the action. From then on, Parrish wrote, he was interested in who was in charge of making the movies.

In 1926, the Coca-Cola Company transferred Robert’s father to Los Angeles. He got the chance to work as a child actor in the background of some significant movies, including a couple of Our Gang shorts, Speedy, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Big Trail, and City Lights.

Performing with Fairbanks in The Iron Mask, he learned the secret of that stunt in The Black Pirate. He even got to try it with all the unseen safety effects working. Thus, as in many well-crafted narratives, the details Parrish laid out early came back to have added meaning later.

However, the dates in Parrish’s story don’t add up. The Black Pirate was released in 1926, the year when the family moved to Hollywood, and not three years before.

Intolerance was released in 1916, and Broken Blossoms in 1919. So would a first-run city theater have shown Broken Blossoms four years after its release, with a “coming-attractions trailer” for a movie that was three years older than that?

It seems clear that Parrish’s memories of early movies ran together in his head. In assembling his memoir, he cited movies that had become part of the film studies canon by the 1970s but probably weren’t what he watched in 1923.

But what about the story of trying to slide down a sheet like Douglas Fairbanks and breaking his arm? That was a more particular and memorable experience than sitting in a cinema. And yet Parrish described that stunt being inspired by a movie that didn’t exist until three years afterward. Furthermore, there’s no sword-fighting melée at that point in the The Black Pirate.

I haven’t found any review that points out that discrepancy. In his 2008 biography of Fairbanks, Jeffrey Vance quoted Parrish from his memoir and an interview without noting the age gap. The Golden Globes website silently changed little Robert’s age from seven to ten to match the release date of The Black Pirate.

I offer a different explanation. The movie that the Columbus gang were trying to emulate wasn’t The Black Pirate but Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, released in 1922 (YouTube). That movie showed Fairbanks sliding down a tall curtain—just as a whole bunch of guards run around with swords. The stunt in The Black Pirate was designed to outshine the earlier scene. And it did, both on screen and in Robert Parrish’s memory.