Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition

Keystone's method, reduced to its purest form: send a camera and two stars to a real event and invent the movie on the ground. Roscoe Arbuckle directed and starred with Mabel Normand as a married couple at the Panama-California Exposition, which had opened in Balboa Park on 1 January 1915. Released three weeks later, the one-reeler is half slapstick and half actuality: Electriquette wicker cars, a hula pavilion, the Spanish Colonial buildings that still stand. Arbuckle flirts with Minta Durfee (his real wife), ducks into the dancers, and ends in a fountain with the Keystone cops. What survives here, besides the chemistry, is the fair itself, comedy used as a reason to record a world's fair that would otherwise have vanished.