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Harold Eugene " Hal" Roach Sr.Randy Skretvedt (2016), Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies, Bonaventure Press. p.608. (January 14, 1892 – November 2, 1992) was an American film and television producer, director and screenwriter, who was the founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios.
Roach was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s. He is known for producing a number of early Media franchise successes, including the Laurel and Hardy franchise, Harold Lloyd's early films, the films of entertainer Charley Chase, and the Our Gang short film comedy series.
Hal's first job was as a newspaper deliverer. One of his customers lived at Quarry Farm - Samuel Clemens, more widely known as Mark Twain."
When Hal Roach came to Southern California at the age of 20, he had reached the tail end of a four-year trek across America, which took him from his hometown of Elmira, New York to Alaska, and down the Pacific Coast. Along the way, he picked up the know-how necessary to land work as an extra in a J. Warren Kerrigan western, which was being filmed on location in the desert. It was here that he first met fellow player Harold Lloyd, the first of many talents whom Hal Roach would nurture and build a fortune on. During the filming of a roulette sequence, Roach got himself promoted to the position of technical advisor by pointing out that the ball has to travel in the opposite direction of the wheel – knowledge he had gained in San Francisco's Barbary Coast.
In 1914, the Lewis Leonard Bradbury (November 6, 1823 – July 15, 1892) mansion, on the corner of Court Street and Hill Street, Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California, was Roach's film studio.
Upon coming into an inheritance, in 1915 he began producing short film with his friend Harold Lloyd, who portrayed a character known as Willie Work, as in Willie Runs the Park and Lonesome Luke, as in Lonesome Luke, Social Gangster.
In 1915, his first success, Just Nuts (1915), landed a long-standing distribution deal with Pathé Exchange.
Unable to expand his studios in Downtown Los Angeles because of zoning, Roach leased several studio sites in the Los Angeles area until he purchased what became the Hal Roach Studios from Harry Culver in Culver City, California, at 8822 Washington Boulevard, and built by 1920. During the 1920s and 1930s, he employed Harold Lloyd (his top money-maker until his departure in 1923), Will Rogers, Max Davidson, the Our Gang children, 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 Recruitment Sennett's supervising director, F. Richard Jones.
In 1931, with the release of the Laurel & Hardy film Pardon Us, Roach began producing occasional full-length features alongside the short subjects. Two-reel comedies were less profitable than features, and Roach phased most of them out by 1936. When the Our Gang feature film General Spanky did not do as well as expected, Roach intended to disband Our Gang entirely. MGM still wanted the Our Gang short subjects, so Roach agreed to supply them in single-reel (10-minute) form.
Roach was also a good friend to Walt Disney, who was a fan of Laurel and Hardy at the time. A monkey dressed in a Mickey Mouse costume as well as actors in Three Little Pigs costumes appeared in the 1934 Laurel and Hardy film March of the Wooden Soldiers. Mickey Mouse also appeared in Hollywood Party, also from 1934 and featuring Laurel and Hardy.
Roach claimed the scheme involved Italian bankers providing US$6 million that would enable Roach's studio to produce a series of 12 films. Eight would be for Italian screening only while the remaining four would receive world distribution. The first film for Italy was to be a feature film of the opera Rigoletto.Graham, Sheila, Hollywood Today: Hal Roach Defends Mussolini Deal p. 4 The Milwaukee Journal, October 5, 1937.
The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy (2013). 9780292750135, University of Texas Press. ISBN 9780292750135 resented Mussolini's presence and placed notices in various trade magazines: "He asked for - and received - the privilege of being the first aviator to bomb helpless Ethiopians . . . his presence here is not an occasion for celebration or social fetes. Those who welcome him are opening their arms to a friend of Hitler and an enemy of democracy."Il Duce's Son Reaches Hollywood By Plane. The New York Times, September 26, 1937.
Roach defended himself by saying:
You don’t know, but that I might have dinner with Mussolini when I go back to Italy. Maybe I can suggest to him that Hitler is not going quite right about things and maybe Mussolini will write Hitler a note and tell him so... I never made a move in Europe in this matter at any time without the advice and cooperation of some of the most prominent Jews there who told me I was doing the finest thing ever done in their estimation — tying up with Mussolini’s son and taking the boy back to Hollywood...
This proposed business alliance with Mussolini alarmed MGM, which intervened and forced Roach to buy his way out of the venture. Loews chairman Nicholas Schenck was so upset with this incident, combined with the underperformance of much of Roach's latest feature-film output (except Laurel & Hardy titles and the 1937 hit Topper), that he ultimately canceled Roach's distribution contract with MGM.
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, 1939) or rugged action fare (like Captain Fury, 1939, and One Million B.C., 1940). Roach's one venture into heavy drama was the acclaimed Of Mice and Men (1939), in which actors Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr. played the leading roles. 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 , 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. He had intended to introduce the new format with a series of four Laurel and Hardy featurettes, but was overruled by United Artists, which insisted on two Laurel & Hardy feature films instead. Variety, "UA Orders Hal Roach to Tack On Footage to Laurel-Hardy 4-reelers," November 15, 1939. 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, Bobby Watson, etc.).
Recognizing the value of his film library, in 1943 Roach began licensing revivals of his older productions for theatrical distribution through Film Classics, Inc.MacGillivray, Scott, Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward, iUniverse, 2009, pp. 174-181. and home-movie distribution.MacGillivray, Scott, Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward, iUniverse, 2009, p. 283.
Roach's old theatrical films were also early arrivals on television. His Laurel and Hardy comedies were successful in television syndication, as were the Our Gang comedies he produced from 1929 to 1938.
For two more decades, Roach Sr. occasionally worked as a consultant on projects related to his past work. In 1983 the "Hal Roach Studios" name was reactivated as a video concern, pioneering the new field of colorizing movies. Roach lent his film library to the cause but was otherwise not involved in the new video productions. Extremely vigorous into an advanced age, Roach contemplated a comedy comeback at 96.
In 1984, 92-year-old Roach was presented with an honorary Academy Award. Former Our Gang members Jackie Cooper and Spanky McFarland made the presentation to a flattered Roach, with McFarland thanking the producer for hiring him 53 years prior. An additional Our Gang member, Ernie Morrison, was in the crowd and started the standing ovation for Roach. Years earlier Cooper had been the youngest Academy Award nominee ever for his performance in Skippy when he had been under contract with Roach. Although Paramount had paid Roach $25,000 for Cooper's services in that film, Roach paid Cooper only his standard salary of $50 per week.
On January 21, 1992, Roach was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, guest-hosted by Jay Leno, one week after his 100th birthday. During the interview, Roach recounted experiences with such stars as Stan Laurel and Jean Harlow; he even did a brief, energetic demonstration of the "humble hula" dance. In February 1992, Roach traveled to Berlin to receive the honorary award of the Berlinale Kamera for Lifetime Achievement at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival.
On March 30, 1992, Roach appeared at the 64th Academy Awards ceremony, hosted by Billy Crystal. When Roach rose from the audience to a standing ovation, he decided to give a speech without a microphone, causing Crystal to quip "I think that's appropriate because Mr. Roach started in silent films."
In September 1916, Roach married actress Marguerite Nichols, who worked as an actress in the 1930s and 1940s, and died in March 1941. They had two children, Hal Roach Jr., who followed his father as a producer and director, and Margaret Roach.
Roach married a second time, on September 1, 1942, to Lucille Prin, a Los Angeles secretary. 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 United States Army Air Corps. Roach and Lucille had four children, Elizabeth Carson Roach (December 26, 1945 – September 5, 1946), Maria May Roach (born April 14, 1947), Jeanne Alice Roach (born October 7, 1949), and Kathleen Bridget Roach (born January 29, 1951).
In 2020, Rose McGowan alleged that, in 1937, Roach was responsible for a case of large-scale sexual abuse of actresses. The closest link to such accusations against him is that an infamous sex party was held by MGM at the Hal Roach Ranch, which was used by the company as a Film studio. This is also in relation to one of the earliest reports of rape in Hollywood, filed by blacklisted dancer and extra Patricia Douglas, which was later covered in the documentary Girl 27, a production McGowan herself has praised for educating on sexual abuse in Hollywood.
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