Hal Roach
Founded the studio behind Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy. Worked from the 1910s to the 1990s.
Hal Roach founded Hal Roach Studios and was active in the industry from the 1910s into the 1990s, which is a working life of roughly eighty years and is close to unmatched.
The studio produced Our Gang and the Laurel and Hardy films, two of the most durable comedy properties of the era. His method with the children was to let them behave like children and shoot what happened, which is why the silent shorts still play.
For an archive his name is on the back of an enormous number of prints. A Roach studio stamp is one of the more reliable provenance marks of the period.
He started as a bit player. The Rolin Film Company was incorporated on July 23, 1914, with Harold Lloyd soon its principal asset, and sold its first film, Just Nuts, to Pathé in 1915. The Culver City lot at 8822 Washington Boulevard was built in 1920. Our Gang came out of it: Roach said he watched a group of children arguing over a piece of lumber outside his office window in 1921 and decided that children being themselves would sell. The first short to reach screens, One Terrible Day, opened on September 10, 1922. The series ran to 220 shorts by 1944.
The studio's decline was slow and then fast. Roach sold Our Gang to MGM on May 31, 1938, for $25,000. Laurel and Hardy left in 1940. During the war the lot was leased to the Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, known as Fort Roach, and made training films. His son ran the company into bankruptcy in April 1959; the lot was demolished in August 1963. Roach outlived all of it. He took an honorary Oscar in 1984 and stood up at the Academy Awards on March 30, 1992, aged one hundred, to speak without a microphone. He died that November.
Facts on this file are checked against the Wikipedia article Hal Roach. The wording is ours. Nothing about the photograph is asserted beyond the credit the file itself carries, and that credit is usually a studio rather than a person: stills departments were staff jobs and the photographer's name went unrecorded. Confident attributions in the trade are mostly inherited guesses.
About Hal Roach
How old was Hal Roach when he died
One hundred. He was born in Elmira, New York, on January 14, 1892, and died of pneumonia at his home in Bel Air on November 2, 1992. Seven months earlier he had appeared at the Academy Awards, where he stood in the audience and spoke without a microphone, and Billy Crystal remarked that it was fitting because he had started in silent pictures. He had been active in the business, in one form or another, for close to eighty years.
Did Hal Roach create the Little Rascals
He created Our Gang, which began in 1922 and became The Little Rascals only on television. Roach sold the series to MGM in May 1938, and MGM kept the Our Gang name. When the Roach-era shorts were syndicated to television from 1954 they had to be retitled, and The Little Rascals is what the syndicator chose. The origin story Roach told was of children fighting over lumber outside his office window in 1921. The first short shown was One Terrible Day, in September 1922.
Did Hal Roach really go into business with Mussolini
On September 11, 1937, Roach formed a company called R.A.M. with Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator's son, to make films in Italy with a proposed $6 million of Italian money. The reaction in Hollywood was immediate. MGM, which distributed his pictures, forced him to unwind the deal, and its president Nicholas Schenck then cancelled the distribution contract anyway. Roach moved to United Artists in 1938. The episode is documented in detail and he did not deny it.
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