Eddie: Absolutely amazing thread!!! Thanks!

Harold Pinter claimed that Beckett once saved his life.

When they were dining a restaurant in Paris, a plate of dodgy onion soup gave Pinter severe indigestion, leaving him gasping and sweating and quite unable to move. Sam rose from the table and silently diappeared into the night, returning a few minutes later with a glass of bicarbonate of soda.

The two Nobel Prize for Literature laureates shared a passion for cricket. Beckett holds the unique distinction of being the only Nobel Prize winner to be listed in Wisden (the Cricketers' bible) for his appearances with the Gentlemen of Ireland.

In the course of rehearsals for the premiere of Beckett's stage play "Footfalls" (in which a woman, May, endlessly paces the same narrow strip of flooring, tormented by painful memories), the stage technicians were having difficulty achieving the exact sound of footsteps requested by the author...

Until Beckett arrived at one rehearsal and silently handed the wardrobe mistress a pair of his old carpet slippers.

On another occasion, Beckett was working on one of his TV plays and was discovered by the set designer examining the workshop's colour charts and pondering the choice of the EXACT shade of grey...

Beckett appears in these accounts to behave more like a musician or a painter than a conventional dramatist.

Billie Whitlaw compares the process of rehearsing with Beckett as that of learning a tune the composer hears in his head.

And Beckett was friends with the Dutch abstract painter Bram van Velde, referencing his work in the closest he ever came to producing an artistic manifesto, "Three Dialogues with George Duthuit".

Back to Buster Keaton, for a moment.

The influence of the American silent screen vaudevillians on Beckett's work appears most obvious in "Waiting For Godot", where the stage business with boots and the exchange of bowler hats is pure Laurel & Hardy. Indeed, in the early drafts of the play, two characters -nameless at that stage- are simply designated "Le Grand" and "Le petit".

And Krapp (white face, red nose, white shoes) always seems to me to have clownish qualities. I once saw the English vaudevillian Max Wall play the role at the Riverside studios, London and he was perfect in the role.

The character of Clov in Endgame- all the stage business with ladders, telescopes etc- is yet another of Beckett's stage clowns.

It's not exactly Steamboat Bill, Jr. is it....

Cheers, Uzi. Part 2?

And now, the shattering conclusion to "Film" in which Buster outsmarts the All Powerful Eye using a steam engine, a shovel, a bucket and Harold Lloyd.

So, long story short: we start with the trilogy?

One critic called "Film" a shameful waste of Keaton's greatest asset: his great stone face, which you only see when Bishop Berkeley's All-Seeing Eye gets him in the end. I don't entirely agree; nobody scuttles like Buster, even when viewed from the rear.

How many parts are there to this?

Da Tagte Es

Redeem the surrogate goodbyes
The sheet astream in your hand
Who have no more for the land
And the glass unmisted above your eyes

In the final part of "Film: The Movie" Buster is chased into an umbrella factory by the All Powerful Eye and a gaggle of geese.

Thanks again, Uzi.

You might be interested to learn that "Film"'s director Alan Schneider - who also directed such late-period Beckett stage plays as "Rockabye" with Billie Whitelaw- came to a tragically Beckettian end on a visit to London.

After posting a letter to Beckett, he went to cross the road but, being an American, forgot that we drive on the other side of the road- and was knocked down and killed by a car.

Here is you a ATU approved appropiately sized Beckett avatar if you so ever desire to have one.