Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach, Sr. (January 14, 1892 – November 2, 1992) was an American
film and
television producer and
director, and
actor from the 1910s to the 1990s.
Early life and career
Hal Roach was born in
Elmira, New York, the grandson of Irish Immigrants.
[1] 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,
California in 1912 and began working as an
extra in
silent films. 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.
Also in 1915, Roach married actress
Marguerite Nichols. They had two children,
Hal, Jr. (June 15, 1918 – March 29, 1972) and Margaret M. Roach (March 15, 1921 – November 22, 1964). In 1941, his wife of 26 years,
Marguerite, died.
After Marguerite's death Roach married a second time on September 1, 1942 to Lucille Prin (January 20, 1913 – April 4, 1981), a Los Angeles secretary.
[2] They were married at the on-base home of
Colonel Franklin C. Wolfe and his wife at
Wright-Patterson Airfield in
Dayton, Ohio where Roach was stationed at the time while serving as a
Major in the
US Army Air Corps.
[2] They had four children, Elizabeth Carson Roach (December 26, 1945 – September 5, 1946), Maria May Roach (April 14, 1947), Jeanne Alice Roach (October 7, 1949), and Kathleen Bridget Roach (January 29, 1951).
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 (his top money-maker until his departure in 1923),
Will Rogers,
Max Davidson, the
Our Gang kids,
Charley Chase,
Harry Langdon,
Thelma Todd,
ZaSu Pitts,
Patsy Kelly and, most famously,
Laurel and 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 Exchange until 1927, when he went to
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 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 in the Spanish, French, and sometimes Italian and German languages. Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang kids (some of whom had barely begun school) were required to recite the foreign dialogue phonetically, often working from blackboards hidden off camera.
In 1931, with the release of the Laurel & Hardy film
Pardon Us, Roach began producing occasional full-length features alongside the short product. Short subjects became less profitable and were phased out by 1936, save for
Our Gang. In 1937, Roach conceived a joint business venture partnering with
Vittorio Mussolini, son of fascist Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini to form a production company called "R.A.M" (Roach and Mussolini). This proposed business alliance with Mussolini caused MGM to intervene and force Roach to pay his way out of the venture. This embarrassment, coupled with the underperformance of much of Roach's new feature product (save for Laurel & Hardy films and the odd non-L&H hit such as 1937's
Topper), lead to the end of Roach's relationship with MGM.
[3] In May 1938, Roach ended his distribution contract with MGM, selling them the production rights to and actors' contracts for
Our Gang in the process, and signed with
United Artists.
[3]
From 1937 to 1940, Roach concentrated on producing glossy features, abandoning low comedy almost completely. Most of his new films were either sophisticated farces (like
Topper and
The Housekeeper's Daughter) or rugged action fare (like
Captain Fury and
One Million B.C.). Roach's one venture into heavy drama was the acclaimed
Of Mice and Men. The Laurel and Hardy comedies, once the Roach studio's biggest drawing cards, were now the studio's
least important product and were phased out altogether in 1940.
In 1940, Roach experimented with medium-length
featurettes, running 40 to 50 minutes each. He contended that these "
streamliners", as he called them, would be useful in
double-feature situations where the main attraction was a longer-length epic. Exhibitors agreed with him, and used Roach's mini-features to balance top-heavy double bills. United Artists continued to release Roach's streamliners through 1943. By this time Roach no longer had a resident company of comedy stars, and cast his films with familiar featured players (
William Tracy and
Joe Sawyer,
Johnny Downs, Jean Porter,
Frank Faylen,
William Bendix,
George E. Stone, etc.).
World War II and television
Hal Roach, Sr. was called to active military duty in June 1942, at age 50, and the studio output he oversaw in uniform was converted from entertainment featurettes 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 W. Reagan and
Alan Ladd.
In 1947, Hal Roach resumed production for theaters, with former Harold Lloyd co-star
Bebe Daniels as an associate producer. Roach was the first Hollywood producer to go to an all-color production schedule, making four streamliners 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,
Steve Donovan, Western Marshal,
Racket Squad,
The Public Defender,
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.
[4]
The visionary Roach also recognized the value of his film library. Beginning in 1943 he licensed revivals of his sound-era productions for theatrical and home-movie distribution. Roach's films were also early arrivals on television; the Laurel & Hardy comedies in particular were a smashing success in television
syndication.
Later years
In 1955, Roach sold his interests in the production company to his son, Hal Roach, Jr., and retired from active production. Unfortunately, the younger Roach lacked much of his father's business acumen, and soon lost the studio to creditors. It was finally shut down in 1961.
For two more decades Roach Sr. occasionally worked as a consultant on projects related to his past work. Extremely vigorous into an advanced age, Roach contemplated a comedy comeback at 96. He 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.
In 1984, 92-year old Roach was presented with an honorary
Academy Award. Former
Our Gang members
Jackie Cooper and
George "Spanky" McFarland made the presentation to a flattered Roach, with McFarland thanking the producer for hiring him 53 years prior.
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 "I think that's fitting, after all — Mr. Roach started in silent film..." At the
42nd Berlin International Film Festival, Roach was given the honorary award of the Berlinale Camera.
[5]
Death
Hal Roach died from
pneumonia on November 2, 1992, two months short of his 101st birthday, at his home in
Bel Air, California. He was married twice, and had four children (two of whom he outlived by more than twenty years) and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Roach is buried in
Woodlawn Cemetery in
Elmira, New York, where he grew up. Roach outlived many of the
Our Gang children who starred in his pictures.
Hal Roach Studios
The 14.5 acre (58,680 m²) studio once known as "The Lot of Fun," containing 55 buildings, was torn down in 1963 (despite tentative plans to reopen the facilities as "Landmark Studios") and replaced by light industrial buildings, businesses, and an automobile dealership. Today, Culver City's "Landmark Street" runs down what was the middle of the old studio lot, with the two original sound stages having been located on the north side of Landmark Street, and the backlot/city street sets had been located at the eastern end of Landmark Street. A plaque sits in a small park across from the studio's location, placed there by
The Sons of the Desert.
[6]
Most of the film library was bought in 1971 by a Canadian company that adopted the "Hal Roach Studios" name. It primarily handled the business of keeping the library in the public eye and licensing products based upon the classic film series.
In 1983, 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,
Night of the Living Dead, and other popular films. In the 1980s, Hal Roach Studios produced
Kids Incorporated in association with old business partner MGM. During the 1980s, Hal Roach Studios distributed its classic film library, as well as films in the
public domain, on home video. From 1988 to 1990, while producing
Kids Incorporated, Hal Roach Studios was known as
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 in 1994, but Halmi, Robert Halmi Jr. and affiliates of
Kelso & Company reacquired the company in 2006. Hallmark Entertainment was absorbed into RHI Entertainment (with
Vivendi as the current 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.
References
- ^ "Hal Roach". Laurelandhardycentral.com. Retrieved 2012-06-13.
- ^ a b "Movie Producer Married At 50 To Secretary, 29". Coshocton, Ohio: The Coshocton Tribune. September 1, 1942. p. 5.
- ^ a b Ward, Richard Lewis (2005). A History of Hal Roach Studios. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Pg. 97-102, 116, 225. ISBN 0-8093-2637-X.
- ^ "Hollywood Is Humming", Time, October 29, 1951.
- ^ "Berlinale: 1992 Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2011-03-27.
- ^ Culver City History: Hal Roach Studios, culvercity.org. Retrieved August 23, 2008
Further reading
- Richard Lewis Ward. A History of the Hal Roach Studios. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.
External links
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