So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM (2004)

SO FUNNY IT HURT: BUSTER KEATON & MGM
    D: Christopher Bird, Kevin Brownlow     (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢
A documentary on the unhappy time Buster Keaton spent making movies at MGM between 1928 and 1933. The reasons for the implosion of Keaton's life and career were various, but it's certain that his move from independent production to a factory studio had a significant negative effect. Keaton himself considered it the worst mistake he ever made, and in interview footage from 1964, he speaks candidly about the lost years that followed. The clips compiled here essentially chronicle the collapse, from "The Cameraman", made when he was still pretty much at his peak, through a series of inferior (but still profitable) films over which he had an ever-decreasing amount of creative control. James Karen spends a little too much time on screen, walking around an empty studio lot playing host, but as a record of a great artist's decline and fall, the movie's both sad and fascinating.