Scholars’ Spotlight: Hal Roach

Pre-Hollywood Years

Harry Eugene Roach was born in Elmira, New York on January 14, 1892. Roach was a curious and adventurous child. One of his most cherished childhood memories was attending an event in which Mark Twain gave a lecture while he was still in elementary school. He idolized Twain for the rest of his life after meeting the writer at this performance.

Independently minded, Roach left home as soon as he was old enough to support himself and headed west. During this period, he worked as a gold prospector, horse wrangler, and mule skinner while exploring the American West, as well as the wildernesses of both Canada and Alaska.

Hollywood and Harold Lloyd

At the age of twenty, Roach made his way to Los Angeles. Soon after his arrival, he gained employment as an extra in comedies. It was here in these silent reels that Hal Roach’s life would change forever.

In 1913, while shooting a comedy in San Diego, he met actor Harold Lloyd. Roach recognized the potential in Lloyd and two years later, when he came into some money via inheritance, he decided to start making his own movies with Lloyd as the star.

“Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the finest actor to PLAY a comedian that I ever saw.”

– Hal Roach

Lloyd played two different characters initially “Will E. Work” who flopped with audiences, followed by “Lonesome Luke”, a Chaplin-esque character, which was a success. By 1917, Lloyd was completely dissatisfied with Luke, which led to tension with Roach that almost severed their relationship.

It was here that Lloyd would go on to create his legendary and iconic “Glasses” character. The short features were a stratospheric success, making both Roach and his distributor, Pathe, a plethora of money in the process.

“In those days, there was one secret to making good comedy. If it made the audience laugh, it was a good comedy.”

– Hal Roach

By the early 1920s, Lloyd was a superstar who wanted more freedom and money than Roach was willing to offer. In 1923 Lloyd and Roach parted company with the actor heading for greener pastures at Paramount. Their relationship suffered permanently from the split.

The studio continued to sign and develop comedy teams throughout the 1920s and 1930s including Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, and Pitts and Todd. These two-reel comedies continued to earn the studio acclaim throughout the peak period of the studio.

“Stan (Laurel), next to Chaplin was the best gag man in the business but as for writing a story he wasn’t worth a nickel.”

– Hal Roach

Something that occurred at Roach’s studio that was a rarity in Hollywood was that he encouraged the use of the stars’ real names in their movies. This helped Roach suitably promote his actors so audiences would be aware enough to seek out their latest releases. The actors also found this arrangement beneficial as it helped them to become household names.

“The greatest comedies that were made by anybody were made in two reels; I don’t care who it was.”

– Hal Roach

Success and Lifestyle

In 1916, Roach married actress, Marguerite Nichols. The couple was married for 26 years until her untimely death from pneumonia in 1941. A year after the marriage Roach, then 25, was a very wealthy man. He spent less time at the studio and more time enjoying himself by finding time to travel, especially to Europe.

As the 1920s began Roach wanted to expand his Bunker Hill-based studio in Downtown Los Angeles. However, zoning laws and bureaucratic red tape prevented Roach from realizing this plan. Undeterred, Roach ponied up $10,000 (approximately $160,000 in current dollars) to buy ten acres of land in Culver City to build a new studio.

Roach would eventually expand the studio to seventeen acres which included fifty-two buildings and seven sound stages, a back lot and technical facilities, a laboratory for processing film, and a commissary called The Our Gang Cafe, which was open to the public.

In 1927, Pathe, which was based out of France shut down its American distribution arm. Roach then went to MGM and landed an even bigger deal than he ever had with Pathe. For the next eleven years, the two-reel comedies created by Roach’s studio shored up MGM’s bottom line.

Our Gang

Arguably the most iconic series produced by Roach during his lifetime was the Our Gang shorts. The series would run in varying incarnations from 1922 until 1944, with Roach’s involvement lasting until 1938 when he sold production rights and the actor’s contracts to MGM.

The idea for the series came to Roach in 1921 when he auditioned a young girl for a role in one of his comedies. The girl was, by all accounts, not very good in this audition. However, after the audition ended, something happened that sparked Roach’s imagination.

Roach looked out his window to a lumberyard across the street and observed a handful of children having an argument. The children had taken sticks from the lumberyard to play with including the smallest child, who had the biggest stick. All of the other children wanted the runt of the group to trade sticks with them.

After realizing that he had been watching the children argue amongst themselves for fifteen minutes, Roach conceived the idea of a short film series about children just being themselves. This idea would bear fruit the following year in the form of Our Gang.

Over the years the tremendously successful series would have an ever-changing cast of children of mixed gender and race. In fact, the first person cast for the series was Ernie Morrison, who played a character named “Sunshine Sammy”. This character was originally intended to be the star of his own series of comedies, however, when theatre owners in the South were opposed to showing movies with a black lead, Roach incorporated him into the Our Gang series.

“My dad (Hal Roach) was totally colorblind for his era.”

– Maria Carpenter

The racial integration of the Our Gang cast led to problems for Roach with audiences as well. During the years in which the series was produced Roach received hundreds of pieces of hate mail and death threats. Instead of getting rid of these postal artifacts, the producer kept them in boxes for, essentially, the rest of his life.

On March 4, 1937, Roach would win his second Academy Award for the Our Gang comedy Bored of Education (1936). This was the only movie in that series to win this honor.

In 1949, MGM sold Roach back the rights to the Our Gang shorts he produced from 1927-1938. However, the name of the series was not included in the deal. Roach rebranded the series as The Little Rascals.

“I’ve seen Cary Grant sit and watch those kids for half an hour at a time and marvel at their ability to convey an idea. They were natural little actors. Farina (Allen Clayton Hoskins) could cry big tears in twenty seconds. You’d think his heart was breaking. And one moment later he’d be back playing again. They were a special kind of child. Today you’d have to have a contest to find one like them. They talked and acted exactly like children really do. And that’s what made ‘Our Gang’ so popular.”

– Hal Roach

R.A.M.

As the 1930s continued, Roach became less interested in creating two-reel comedies. He instead opted for more profitable feature-length films. The first of these to be made was Pardon Us (1931), which starred Laurel and Hardy. In 1936 Roach made General Spanky, a full-length Our Gang film, which was a disappointment.

The following year Roach joined a business venture with Vittorio Mussolini, son of fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Prior to this Roach had been interested in foreign markets for many years and had re-shot a number of his films (including Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, and Our Gang) in Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

This venture would be known as R.A.M (Roach and Mussolini) and the business plan was to create eight movies specifically for the Italian market with an additional four for worldwide distribution. In September 1937, Vittorio Mussolini visited Hollywood. Roach showed him around introducing him to the stars of the Our Gang shorts.

Initially, MGM was unhappy with this arrangement. However as antisemitic sentiments in Italy grew louder, MGM’s parent company, Loews Inc. canceled Roach’s distribution deal. This effectively killed the R.A.M project completely.

United Artists

After selling MGM the rights to Our Gang in May 1938, Roach signed a distribution deal with United Artists. With this deal in place, Roach decided to concentrate on high-quality full-length features. This is because he had proven success in this format with the comedy Topper (1937) the previous year.

Over the next few years, Roach would produce the following movies: Captain Fury (1939), The Housekeeper’s Daughter (1939) Of Mice and Men (1939), and One Million B.C. (1940). With the exception of The Housekeeper’s Daughter, all of these movies received at least one Academy Award nomination, with Of Mice and Men earning the most with a total of four.

War Years

In 1940, Roach began to experiment with “streamliners” which were longer than a two-reel film but shorter than a full-length feature. These typically were around forty-five minutes long and were intended to be shown as a double feature with a movie that ran over two hours.

In June 1942, Roach was called back into active military duty. The producer had joined the U.S. Army Signal Reserve Corps in 1927. Now at the age of fifty, he was called to serve his country once more. Roach’s studio was leased to the U.S. Army Air Forces. The First Motion Picture Unit, which included Ronald Reagan and Alan Ladd, made approximately four-hundred training, morale, and propaganda films at “Fort Roach.” When the war ended, the Pentagon returned the studio to Roach, with millions of dollars for improvements.

Roach married a second time not long after his military service resumed. On September 1, 1942, he wed Lucille Prin at the on-base home of Colonel Franklin C. Wolfe on Wright-Patterson Airfield in Dayton, Ohio. Roach was stationed at the base while serving as a major in the United States Army Air Corps.

In 1943, with no new entertainment features being produced, Roach began licensing revivals of his older productions for theatrical distribution through Film Classics, Inc. This allowed the studio to gain modest revenue during the war.

Television

After the war, Roach attempted to reestablish his success in the movie industry. He was the first Hollywood producer to adopt an all-color production schedule, making four “streamliners” out of the gate. However, the increased costs of filming entirely in color were not offset by an increase in revenue. This caused the studio debts to mount even higher than during the lean years of World War II.

In 1948, Roach teamed up with his son Hal Roach Jr. to modify the studio for a television production. As T.V. grew rapidly in popularity, Roach’s studio pumped out an astonishing amount of products to keep up with demand. By 1951, the studio was reaching over 1,500 hours of television programming per year.

Roach produced new programming specifically for the new medium such as Amos ‘n’ Andy, Western Marshal, and My Little Margie. However, Roach properties from the previous decades including Laurel and Hardy and The Little Rascals also found renewed popularity with audiences, especially children.

Roach’s own young daughters were no exception. They were watching and trying to emulate the antics of Spanky, Stymie, Alfalfa, and the rest of the gang. Interestingly his young daughters were unaware that their father was the creator of the series. When his name popped up in the credits, they assumed that it was because it was being shown on his T.V. and not that he had anything to do with making the serials they enjoyed.

In 1955, Roach sold a stake in the production company to his son, Hal Roach Jr. who mismanaged the enterprise. The studio was shut down and eventually demolished in 1963.

In the late 1950s, Roach came up with an idea for a “Fourth Network” that would be a pay-based family entertainment service. This product would have exclusive television programming as well as a set amount of movie tickets included as part of the monthly subscription. Roach enlisted his elementary school-aged daughters to work as his secretaries while he developed this endeavor.

Roach took the idea to various businessmen and organizations including Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, and the Catholic Church for financing. Nothing really came of this multimedia venture. However, the Walt Disney Corporation liked the language of the contracts Roach had drawn up so much that they incorporated it into their own contracts, which are still used today.

Final Years

For the next two decades, Roach managed the television rights to his film catalog. He also worked as a consultant on various film and television projects.

On April 9, 1984, Roach was awarded an Honorary Oscar at the 56th Academy Award Ceremony. Former The Little Rascals members Jackie Cooper and George McFarland presented Roach with the honor. Michael Jackson, who was a big fan of The Little Rascals stopped by to meet a few of the surviving actors from the series who were seated at the table. Roach, being 92 years old, had no idea who Michael Jackson was and mistook him for a waiter coming by to bring food and water to the table.

In 1992, when Roach reached his centennial birthday, he appeared on The Tonight Show. He also attended the 64th Academy Awards on March 30th where he decided to give a speech without a microphone. Host Billy Crystal said of the unrehearsed moment:

” I think that’s appropriate because Mr. Roach started in silent films.”

On November 2, 1992, Hal Roach passed away from pneumonia at the age of 100. He was buried in Woodlawn Ceremony in his boyhood hometown of Elmira, New York.

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