Hal Roach
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- For the Irish comedian, see Hal Roach (comedian)
Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach, Sr. (January 14, 1892–November 2, 1992) was an American film and television producer from the 1910s to the 1980s.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life and career
Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York into an Irish Catholic family. A presentation by the great American humorist Mark Twain impressed Roach as a young grade school student.
After an adventurous youth that took him to Alaska, Hal Roach arrived in Hollywood in 1912 and began working as an extra in silent film. Upon coming into an inheritance, he began producing short comedies in 1915 with his friend Harold Lloyd, who portrayed a character known as "Lonesome Luke." Roach married actress Marguerite Nichols who he was with until her death in 1941.
[edit] Success as a comedy producer
Unable to expand his studios in downtown Los Angeles because of zoning, Roach purchased what became the Hal Roach Studios from Harry Culver in Culver City, California. During the 1920s and 1930s, he employed Lloyd, Will Rogers, Max Davidson, the Our Gang kids, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, Thelma Todd, ZaSu Pitts, Patsy Kelly and, most famously, Laurel & Hardy. During the 1920s Roach's biggest rival was producer Mack Sennett. In 1925 Roach hired away Sennett's supervising director, F. Richard Jones.
Roach released his films through Pathé until 1927, when he went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He would change again in 1938 to United Artists. He converted his silent movie studio to sound in 1928 and began releasing talking shorts early in 1929. In the days before dubbing, foreign language versions of the Roach comedies were created by re-shooting each film to create Spanish, French, and sometimes Italian and German dialogue phonetically. Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang kids (some of whom had barely begun school) were required to learned the foreign dialogue phonetically, often working from blackboards hidden out of camera range.
In 1931, with the release of the Laurel & Hardy film Pardon Us, Roach began producing full-length features. Short subjects became less profitable and were phased out by 1936. The Our Gang series continued until 1938, when Roach sold the contracts of the Our Gang cast members and the series name to MGM. Roach turned wholly to producing features, the most memorable of which were Topper (1937), Of Mice and Men (1939) and One Million B.C. (1940).
[edit] World War II and television
Hal Roach, Sr. was called to active military duty in June 1942, at age fifty, and the studio output he oversaw in uniform was converted from entertainment features to military training films. The studios were leased to the U.S. Army Air Forces, and the First Motion Picture Unit made 400 training, morale and propaganda films at "Fort Roach". Members of the unit included Ronald Reagan, Alan Ladd and others.
In 1947, Hal Roach became the first Hollywood studio to go to an all-color production schedule, making four short features in Cinecolor, although the increased production costs did not result in increased revenue. In 1948, with his studio deeply in debt, Roach re-established his studio for television production, with Hal Roach, Jr. producing shows such as The Stu Erwin Show, The Gale Storm Show, and My Little Margie, and independent producers leasing the facilities for such programs as Amos 'n' Andy, The Life of Riley, and The Abbott and Costello Show. By 1951 the studio was producing 1,500 hours of television programs a year, nearly three times Hollywood's annual output of feature movies.[1]
[edit] Later years
Roach retired in the late 1950s. For two more decades Roach resumed producing, occasionally working on projects related to his past work and was planning a comeback comedy at age 96. Hal Roach was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman in 1982, where he recounted experiences with such stars as Stan Laurel and Jean Harlow; he even did a brief, energetic demonstration of a hula dance.
At age 92, he was presented with an honorary Academy Award. In the spring of 1992, not long after his 100th birthday, Roach once again appeared at the Academy Awards ceremony, hosted by Billy Crystal. When Mr. Roach rose from the audience to speak during the ceremony, the sound system did not pick up his words. Crystal quipped "What do you expect? He started in the silent era!"
Hal Roach was two months away from his one-hundred-and-first birthday, when he died on November 2, 1992, at his home in Bel Air, California from pneumonia. He was married twice, and had a number of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York, where he had grown up.
[edit] Hal Roach Studios
In 1955, Roach sold his share of the debt-ridden studio to his son, Hal Roach, Jr., who in 1962 lost it to creditors. The 14.5 acre (237 m²) studio, once known as "The Lot of Fun", containing 55 buildings, was torn down in 1963 and replaced by light industrial buildings, businesses, and an automobile dealership, where a plaque marks the studio's location. Hal Roach Studios, reduced to a film library, was bought by a Canadian company that primarily handling the business of keeping the library in the public eye and licensing products based upon the classic film series.
In the early 1980s, Hal Roach Studios was one of the first studios to venture into the controversial business of film colorization, creating digitally colored versions of several Laurel and Hardy features, the Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life and other popular films. In the 1980s, Hal Roach Studios produced Kids Incorporated in association with old business partner MGM. From 1988–1990, while producing Kids Incorporated, Hal Roach Studios renamed itself Qintex.
In the years that followed, the Roach company changed hands several more times. Independent television producer Robert Halmi bought the company in the early 1990s, and it became RHI Entertainment. A short time later, this successor company was acquired by Hallmark Entertainment, and today runs as a division of Hallmark (with Lions Gate Home Entertainment as home video output partner). In that same decade, a new incarnation of Hal Roach Studios (operated by the Roach Trust) was established, and today this new version of the company has released classic films on DVD, many of which are from Roach's own archival prints of his films, while others are public domain titles mastered from the best available 35 mm elements.
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- Richard Lewis Ward. A History of the Hal Roach Studios. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
