Keystone Studios

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Keystone Studios was an early movie studio founded in Edendale, California in 1912 as the Keystone Pictures Studio by Mack Sennett with backing from Adam Kessel and Charles O. Bauman, owners of the New York Motion Picture Company. The company shot in and around Glendale and Silver Lake for many years.

The studio is perhaps best remembered for the era under Mack Sennett when he created the slapstick antics of the Keystone Kops and for the "Sennett Bathing Beauties." Charlie Chaplin got his start at Keystone when Sennett hired him fresh from his vaudeville career to make silent films. Charlie Chaplin at Keystone Studios is a 1993 compilation of some of the most notable films Chaplin made at Keystone, documenting his transition from vaudeville player to true comic film actor to director. In 1915 Keystone Studios became an autonomous production unit of the Triangle Pictures Corporation with D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince. In 1917 Sennett gave up the Keystone trademark and organized his own company.

Many other important actors also began their careers at Keystone, including Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Louise Fazenda, Raymond Griffith, Ford Sterling, Fatty Arbuckle, Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon and Chester Conklin.

Sennett, by then a major star, left the studio in 1917 to produce his own independent films (eventually distributed through Paramount). Keystone faded away after his departure, and was finally dissolved after bankruptcy in 1935.

Keystone Studios surfaced again as a production label for Cineville and was used as the fictional studio in the Cineville production Swimming With Sharks starring Kevin Spacey. Keystone Studios became a legal corporate entity again in 2005. The two new owners are Carl Colpaert and Lee Caplin. Keystone obtained its new trademark in 2006.

[edit] The Keystone lot

After the bankruptcy, the movie lot in Studio City was sold to Mascot Studios, then Monogram Studios, which eventually became Republic Pictures. The lot was taken over in 1963 by CBS Television (which filmed Gunsmoke and The Wild Wild West there), and from 1985 to 1992 was owned jointly by CBS and Mary Tyler Moore's MTM Enterprises, which produced numerous other successful TV shows. In 1992 CBS bought back MTM's share and the lot was renamed CBS Studio Center. It is still home to numerous television and feature film shoots (including American Gladiators from 1991-1997). The lot was itself used as the fictional film studio "Sunrise Studios" in the horror film Scream 3.