Gregg Rickman wrote:Hi, a question for David Pearson. Where did Karl Thiede publish the real amount of money Keaton's UA releases made?
Thiede released the numbers regarding Steamboat Bill Jr. for an article in the Keaton Chronicle in 2005. As the actual gross ($722,000) was slightly twice what Dardis posted ($358,000), it seems logical that The General and College would have comparable domestic vs. foreign grosses. Using the same scale -- 49.6D vs. 50.4F -- The General (Dardis $474,264) would have a projection number of $956,177, and College (Dardis $423,000) would be projected at grossing $852,822.
Now, these numbers of The General are only an educated guess... but they would be in line with the numbers Buster had been consistently grossing until Battling Butler, and from The Cameraman onward. Because we can't be sure until Theide should grace us with the final numbers -- I tend to place the estimate towards the conservative side, and therefore lowered the estimate to $900,000 for The General. But $1,000,000 estimate is just as likely (if not more so), with a bell curve probability working either way. Therefore, it most probably topped Battling Butler's $749,000.
Regardless, The General is bound to have made a hell of a lot more money claimed Dardis claimed, as the one certainty in all this is that we know Dardis released incomplete numbers on the Keaton UA silents. Considering Dardis repeatedly tries to hammer home the point that The General and other Keaton UA silents were financial "failures," and then uses these "failures" as the basis for Buster losing his independence, his drinking, and ultimately his ruin as a Hollywood film star -- it looks like Dardis had one serious agenda going on. It looks like Dardis, finding no major reason for the major crisis in Keaton's life for his bio (ergo novel), decided to create one of his own with "creative accounting."
Gregg Rickman wrote:I appreciated the info in your post very much. As Keaton always said in his interviews that THE GENERAL made about a million, it's good to know that he wasn't that wrong. Where did Dardis admit that his info in his bio was misleading?
"All earnings reported for the Keaton films distributed by MGM are worldwide; the figures for the United Artists releases are for the United States, Canada, Cuba and all of Central and South America."
-- Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down, page vii (in the "Acknowledgments," directly following five long paragraphs of the typical thank yous.)
Looks like Dardis was trying to hide that little tidbit, doesn't it?
And the note is only in the later editions of the book, such as the infamous 1996 Limelight edition with "numerous factual corrections" that STILL misspells the name of the town Buster was born in, even though Rudi Blesh's bio spelled it right 14 years earlier.
If you only have an earlier edition of Dardis, such as the 1979 edition Scribner, you are out of luck. He hadn't slipped it in the book yet.
Anyway, I regret going on about a VERY BAD book on a thread that should be praising a VERY GOOD one.