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"The Action Is All-Important": Harold Lloyd on the Making of "Safety Last"
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Harold Lloyd remains one of the best-loved comedians of Hollywood's silent film era. After making nearly 200 films in the 1910s and early '20s, Lloyd finally hit it big in 1923 with Safety Last. In this 1959 interview with Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Lloyd talks about how he conceived of and pulled off the movie's most famous sequence, which features the actor hanging from the hand of a clock, high atop a Los Angeles skyscraper. |
Harold Lloyd talks about the making of Safety Last.
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Harold Lloyd: I was walking down 7th Street in Los Angeles, and I noticed at one corner a tremendous crowd. Making inquiries, I discovered that someone was going to scale the side of the building. It was a 10-story building. Being curious, I waited around, and the man came out and was introduced and made a few remarks, etc.--and then proceeded to start to climb up the side of the building. By the time he had climbed up two stories and was starting the third one, I began to feel so sorry for him, and thought, Oh, he can't possibly make it. It was a very difficult building. He really climbed just the windows, went from one window to another. I still don't see how he did it. |
Being a little chicken, I guess you'd call it, I walked on up the block, intending that I wasn't going to watch him kill himself. But my curiosity got the better of me, so that when I was about a block away I went around the corner so that I was out of sight from where they were, but I could peek around the corner every so often to see where he'd gone. There were a lot of people up at that section, too, because by that time the crowd had become very large. |
I watched him scale this whole building, by just occasionally peeking at him, until he finally reached the top. He got up there, and he had a bicycle, and he rode the bicycle around the edge of the building. Then he got on the flagpole, and he stood on his head. Well, it made such a terrific impression on me, and stirred my emotions up to such a degree that I thought, my, if it can possibly do that to an audience--if I capture that on the screen--I think I've got something that's never been done before. |
So back I went, and up to the roof where they were, and made myself known, was introduced to the young man who did the scaling, and gave him a card and told him to come out to the Hal Roach Studios, that we would like to talk to him, we might have an idea that would be beneficial both to himself and to us. |
So he came out the next day, and I explained the idea to Hal. Of course, Hal is an individual that recognized ideas immediately. He was a wonderful idea man, Roach was. So we signed the young man up, and started working, getting this idea for a human-spider type of story. The funny part of it was that we had him signed up, and we didn't really do the picture for a month or longer afterwards, and he came to us and said, "Do you think that you'd mind ..." |
Of course, one thing was that he was to do no more climbs. We wanted to keep him in one piece. He said, "There's a little three-story job, it's a cakewalk. It'll mean quite a bit to me from a money standpoint." |
So we thought, all right, three stories. We gave him permission, and he hadn't got up much more than a story when he slipped, and he fell and broke his leg. |
It seems to me it must have been a month after this happened, and he was still limping, and we thought, well, we're in a position now, because we wanted to use him in the picture. He was going to be my pal in the picture. We had tried him out on the acting, and he was good. He seemed to be one who responded to direction pretty well. So we gave him the title of Limpy Bill. We let him limp in the picture. It was all right, made a character. He was supposed to be a steelworker pal of mine that went into this. |
But, getting to the mechanical end of Safety Last--I remember a scribe, a member of the press, whom I knew well, and he came around to me afterwards and said, "Gee, Harold, I think you got a wonderful effect. Of course, I know you were only a few feet off the ground." |
I said, "Now, just a moment here. We were up just as high in the air as you saw us. When we were four stories up, when we were at 10 stories, we were up that high. The people underneath us that you saw were there at the time when the scene was taken." Now, I'm not crazy enough to get on the side of a building. I haven't that ability that the human spider did. But what we did do is to build platforms. They were at least 20 feet below us, which is quite a distance. They had no railings around them. We put as many mattresses on them as we could, made the platform as large as we could, but there was a limit to what you could do. So consequently, when you got up there, it did look like sort of a postage stamp, when you looked at it from there on down. It meant that if anything happened, you had to jump to this platform, and you had to fall flat, because if you bounced, that would be the end. |
Question: Did you ever fall? |
Lloyd: Not fall, actually, but I was to a point one time where I knew ... I think I could have held on. As I recall, it was only once that I did--though one of the boys working up there, he had to jump, and it was fortunate that we had him. This one time, I was working up there, I believe around the clock, and I thought there was a good chance that I might lose my balance, so I just let go and dropped flat. It was better. We built our own sets up there. |
You see, what we did was this. We started on a one-story building, built sets on there, about two and a half floors, ourselves. Then we went to a three-story building, made sets and built them up on there. Then a five-story building, finally to the last, the highest that we could find in Los Angeles. |
The funny part is that we didn't work on the same streets. One time we worked on Broadway, another time on Spring Street, and the backgrounds were really a little different, but people were so excited at it--and even today, when I look at it, I never notice the difference. You're watching the action; the action is all-important, and the rest doesn't seem to count. |
It took quite a long time to make this sequence. I guess we were a month and a half, two months on it, because we could only work a certain length of time in the daytime. You had to work from eleven o'clock till about one. Then the shadows came in, and of course the shadows would have been very noticeable, but as long as it was bright in there, they didn't see. I remember one place on Broadway they had a big billboard, but nobody paid any attention to that. Over on Spring Street they didn't have a billboard. |
Of course, the cameraman was taking as much chance as I was. He was parallel, and his parallel was built up, too, and he had to climb up to get onto that. The funny part is, when I first started, about the first two days I would do nothing. Of course, I'd done several before this, but in a different way. But your first two days, when you get up on these high things--it's that fear of heights, of even looking over, that people have. You just feel like you want to jump. So I was very careful and did very little. But as you stayed up and got doing things, another situation took place: you got a little overconfident. I would walk clear out beyond the platform, and the boys would say, "There's no need of that, Lloyd"--and of course they would get scared then, because it was silly. But by that time I had developed a great deal of confidence, and I felt I knew what I was doing, and that I could even jump to the platform from there, I thought. Whether I could have or not, I don't know. But I can see now how these people working at great heights walk right over to the edge and stand there and look over, and all those things. They just develop a terrific confidence in their own ability to take care of themselves. |
Q: Did you ever use a stuntman? |
Lloyd: The only time in those days that I used a stuntman was to do something that I actually couldn't do. If it were to do some rodeo work, or some acrobatic feat that I was unable to do--something like that--then we used a stuntman, but that's about the only time. |
It's a very funny thing--when I did Mad Wednesday, working with Preston Sturges, we had two stuntmen at that time. Of course, remember I was several years past that point. I told him, "I'm doing none of these stunts that you've got in here. I've gotten a little past the point where I want to do that." So we had two stuntmen, and the thing was--and this'll give you an idea what they were--one was a chain around my leg, and the other end around a lion's neck, and I'm hanging upside down, swinging about 15 stories in the air, from the lion's neck. Of course, we had a device to hold the lion on, too. But, nevertheless, my part was to swing freely, like a pendulum, on the side of this building, with this chain around my leg. Of course, I said no. |
I watched the stuntman, a very fine acrobat, do it, and Sturges came around and said, "Harold, he doesn't look like you at all. You can do it. Your actions will be different from his and you'll get more out of it." I'd watched it. He said, "Won't you try it?" And I did. |
That's the way it went on through the picture. Everything that these stuntmen would do, I would watch them--and when we finally got through, there wasn't one scene with the stuntmen. He had finally talked me into doing everything that they had done. |
In the old days, I didn't have the benefit of that. I remember one time I jumped off of the top of a battleship, with a wooden anchor, backwards. Of course, I pushed the edge away from me. I didn't like the idea, but I did it. Another time we had a funicular, one of these very steep things. |
This, as you know, was way back in the old days, and the funny part was, the cameraman had shot it from the top, shot straight down, and when we went into the projection room to look at it, it looked like I was rolling on a sidewalk. No illusion at all. It had no depth, no steepness. Then we went back--they talked me into doing it again. He went across the street, and you might as well have had a dummy roll down there, because it didn't make any difference. A dummy would have looked just as good. You couldn't tell it was really a person. So when they suggested that I do it a third time, there was a little objection. I demurred. |
On this side of the building, I think there were probably some scenes that only the human fly did, on a couple of them, where we had absolutely no platform at all. He wanted to do it without any, but I wouldn't let him--I put a very strong thin wire cable on, and we had him do that. Now, that was one where I would have been afraid to take the chance. You have to have a certain knack in holding on and doing certain things, and that was on the real building, not on our building. |
You see, what we did was to pick a certain building in Los Angeles. Then when we built our sets, we built them to match this building, so they were just the same. And we chose a building that had little crevices. |
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