The true original ‘King of Comedy.’ In 1912, while as an actor-director in D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Studio in New York, Mack Sennett lost a $100 bet to ex-bookies and now movie exchange operators Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann, in the 1912 Preakness horse race. As payment, he proposed to them that he set up a comedy company in Glendale, California that would make them all rich. To his amazement, they accepted and Keystone Studio was born. He brought the beautiful Mabel Normand (his girlfriend) to California. She, Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin, and many others got their start with Mack. In 1913, the first custard pie ever thrown in a movie was thrown by Mabel Normand into the face of Fatty Arbuckle. Sennett discovered and hired Charlie Chaplin, whom he saw in a traveling vaudeville show, and of course the ‘Keystone Cops’ were his short comedy trademarks. Buried in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.
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