Keystone Studios

The studio is especially remembered for its silent film era under Mack Sennett, the Canadian-American film actor, director, and producer, who became known as the 'King of Comedy'. With financial backing from Adam Kessel and Charles O. Bauman of the New York Motion Picture Company, Sennett founded Keystone Studios in Edendale, California – now a part of Echo Park – in 1912. The original main building which was the first totally enclosed film stage and studio ever constructed, is still there today. Known as Sennett's Fun Factory, it was here that he created the slapstick antics of the Keystone Cops (from 1912) and the Sennett Bathing Beauties (beginning in 1915). Keystone comedies were noted for their hair-raising car chases and custard pie warfare, especially in the Keystone Cops series. Charlie Chaplin got his start in films at Keystone when Sennett hired him in 1914, fresh from his vaudeville career, to make silent films, in which he rapidly became a star performer and film director, participating in thirty-five films within the single year he worked there. Other actors who worked at Keystone toward the beginning of their film careers include Marie Dressler, Harold Lloyd, Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, Gloria Swanson, Louise Fazenda, Raymond Griffith, Ford Sterling, Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon, Al St. John and Chester Conklin.

In 1915, Keystone Studios became an autonomous production unit of the Triangle Film Corporation with D. W. Griffith and Thomas Ince. Sennett left in 1917 to produce his own independent films (eventually distributed through Paramount), after which Keystone's business declined. Keystone Studios eventually closed after bankruptcy in 1935.