SEAL BEACH : Arbuckle, Keaton Skits Shot in City

Seal Beach from 1915 through the 1920s was a popular setting for motion pictures--especially the short silent skits starring such legendary comedians as Buster Keaton and “Fatty” Arbuckle.

To movie audiences of the time, Seal Beach’s teeming pier, Fun Zone amusement park and assorted gambling halls, salons and dance halls were familiar backdrops to movie slapstick.

Arbuckle, a Santa Ana native who is considered Orange County’s first movie star, shot at least half a dozen films in Seal Beach, including “The Seal Beach Bathing Girls’ Parade.” But experts say the exact number is hard to determine because no records were kept of where the movies were filmed.

These “beach comedies”--many of which were also filmed in Newport Beach and Long Beach--inevitably involved women in swimsuits and villains in menacing dark suits. One still photograph in Jim Sleeper’s book “Great Movies Shot in Orange County” shows Arbuckle using an oversize mallet to subdue the villain around the Fun Zone area under the Seal Beach Pier.

As Arbuckle’s popularity grew, so did his influence. By 1917, Arbuckle was producing and directing as well as starring in films. For a while, he based his studio in Long Beach and once considered building a new studio in Seal Beach, Sleeper wrote.

In 1917, Arbuckle directed “The Butcher Boy” in Seal Beach. He starred in the film with Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks, who in 1919 returned to Seal Beach to film “When the Clouds Roll By.”

Arbuckle’s career was ruined by scandal in 1921 when a young actress died during a party in his San Francisco hotel room. But filming in Seal Beach continued through the 1920s, according to the book “Movie Settings and Locations.”

In 1924, newspapers urged people to “go to Seal Beach” to be extras in a “comedy-melodrama” that involved the heroine jumping off the pier only to be rescued by her lover, Sleeper wrote. Fearing that the plot might encourage other women to jump into the ocean, the city placed extra life preservers on the pier, the author said.

Though stories about Seal Beach’s Fun Zone days abound, few Seal Beach historical buffs are familiar with the city’s Tinseltown connection.

Some speculated that filming in the city stopped as the amusement park and pier area declined in the late 1920s and early 1930s.