“I suspected for a while that he had robbed a bank or something”

In 1914, Hal Roach decided to go behind the camera and make his own movies.

Roach’s fellow bit player Harold Lloyd described that transition in an article published by the Los Angeles Record in 1925, one of a series “Harold Lloyd’s Autobiography.” Eric Shanower kindly alerted me to this source.

This is how the 9 September installment begins:

Finally Hal Roach and I caught on with the “Wizard of Oz” Company. I played in animal comedies, all right. I was the animals. I played things nobody ever heard of—Gillikens and Mauchkins [sic] and Kalidahs.

One day Hal and I were sitting on a little bench in the sun, made up as Hottentots [sic]. All we had on was a lot of terrible colored grease paint and some grass skirts. And he said to me, “Some day I’m going to make a picture myself. I’m going to make a comedy. People like to laugh and there’s always room for real comedy.”

I was terribly impressed, though I couldn’t show it through my makeup. “And when I do, Harold,” he said, “you’ll be in it.”

I was. A couple weeks later he called me up and said that some distant relative of his had died and left him some money. I suspected for a while that he had robbed a bank or something, but I found out eventually that it was on the level. It was only a few hundred dollars, but it was the beginning of things for us.

That first picture cost $200 and it was exclusively exteriors.

We didn’t have any studio. Sunshine was free and plentiful, and Westlake park was big and roomy. Finally, we found a vacant house and we worked in it for a week before the owner caught us and threw us out. At last we found another old house, unfurnished, where some other little companies had offices. The only place we could afford was the main hall where everybody had to pass back and forth, but we thought it was pretty swell.

Westlake Park is now MacArthur Park, of melting-in-the-rain fame.

When Lloyd published his autobiography in book form as An American Comedy in 1928, he recounted those events more briskly:

Roach surprised me—though “surprise” is a faint word for it—one day by announcing that he had got hold of several thousand dollars with which he intended making pictures on his own. He would be the director and I could be the first brick in his company at the usual three dollars a day. A few days later he rented a corner in the Bradbury mansion as an office, with the use of a stage in the back yard, and Hal Roach was a producer.

Both versions came more than ten years after the event, and Lloyd was probably more interested in telling an entertaining story than in getting all the details and timing exact. Had Roach come into “a few hundred dollars” from “a distant relative” or “several thousand dollars” from an unstated source? The most reliable fact seems to be that Lloyd was very surprised that Roach suddenly had just enough money to set up a production company.

Legal filings and newspaper clippings from 1914 help us nail down some details.

TOMORROW: The Rolin Film Company starts rolling.