Try to find a picture of Clyde Bruckman and you come up with pictures of his pictures or Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd or now even Peter Boyle. But no Clyde! He seems to have disappeared into his body of work.

With a pen in his hand, Clyde Bruckman was a very funny guy. And he made a lot of other guys very funny, too. When he got out of high school, he tried sports writing for a while but that didn’t satisfy him. So he went to Hollywood and jumped headlong into the fledgling movie industry as a “gag” man for the popular comedies being churned out by the movie studios He wrote for most of the famous comedians of that era…Keaton, Lloyd, the Three Stooges and W.C. Fields. In 1921 Clyde began to work exclusively for Buster Keaton. They did at least 10 films together and then, in 1926, he jumped on board with Harold Lloyd where he wrote and directed films. Within a year, he was writing and directing for the Laurel and Hardy comedy features.

Clyde was tops in his field and relied on by the comedians of his day to provide new material for their talents. But somewhere along the line, Clyde himself stopped believing in his talents. He simply lost faith. The more depressed he got., the more he drank. He began to miss assignments and disappear for weeks. Clyde began work on W.C. Fields’ “Man on the Flying Trapeze” in 1935 but, when he failed to show up, Fields did the job himself. Soon the irreplaceable Clyde Bruckman was being replaced and virtually unemployable.

Trying to pull himself together, Clyde found work with Jules White’s short subject unit at Columbia. But it was soon evident that he was using old material. When he copied from a routine he had written for Harold Lloyd in “Movie Crazy” (1932) for a 3 Stooges film “Loco Boy Makes Good” (1942), Lloyd sued Columbia. Soon Bruckman was out on the street again, broke and broken.

"Movie Crazy" 1932

"Loco Boy Makes Good" (1942)

Then, one day, he looked up his old pal, Buster Keaton, and supposedly talked about getting on his feet both emotionally and physically. He asked Buster if he could borrow his pistol for some target practice and Buster obliged.

Peter Boyle gets an Emmy for "Clyde.."

A few days later Clyde went into a Santa Monica restaurant and had a sumptuous meal even though he couldn’t pay for it. After he finished, he left the table and went to the men’s room. Inside one of the stalls, Clyde Bruckman shot himself to death with Buster’s pistol.

In 1995, the television series “The X-Files” used his death as the inspiration for one of their episodes. Written by Darin Morgan, it was called “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” . Peter Boyle played the title role and won an Emmy for his performance.

........ In August 1953, sex goddess Marilyn Monroe found herself on the cover of “Confidential” over a caption that read “Why Joe DiMaggio is striking out with Marilyn Monroe!”. But apparently “Joltin’ Joe” must have hit a grand slam because the two were married on January 14 th, 1954. However in October, 1954, Marilyn traded him in for a guy who made plays of another kind…Arthur Miller!

Marilyn and Joe!

Marilyn and Art!

.....When he was starting out in New York and the pickin’s were slim, aspiring actor Gregory Peck found many ways to keep body and soul together. He was a barker at the New York World’s Fair, modeled for Montgomery Ward catalogs and, when things got really hard, he sold his blood!

Gregory Peck

......Television? Nah, just a passing fancy, the movie studios would say! In 1947, there were only 70 television stations in the country …and only 136,000 sets. But it soon became the monster threat that gave studio heads insomnia. They counterattacked with 3-D, Cinemascope and contracts barring their stars from appearing on the small screen. But the march of the television Goliath went on…with stars who quit the big screen to produce, direct and star for the small one.. And they also had “Uncle Miltie”! By 1969 the studio system collapsed and the studios fell one by one. Movies are now made by independent companies that make films for both the big screen and the little one (that keeps getting bigger!) And today we never count the houses with a television set, we count the television sets in the houses!

“Uncle Miltie” in drag!