"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.

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.

[11] During the 1920s and 1930s, he employed 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.

In the days before dubbing, foreign-language versions of the Roach comedies were created by reshooting each film in Spanish, French, and occasionally Italian and German.

Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang kids (some of whom had barely begun school) were required to recite the foreign dialogue phonetically, often working from blackboards hidden off-camera.

[citation needed] In 1931, with the release of the Laurel & Hardy film Pardon Us, Roach began producing occasional full-length features alongside the short subjects.

In 1937, Renato Senise,[13][14] nephew of Carmine Senise, the then deputy chief of the Italian police,[15] conceived a joint business venture of Roach partnering with Vittorio Mussolini,[16] son of fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, to form a production company called "R.A.M."

[19] The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy[20] 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 .

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...[22]This proposed business alliance with Mussolini alarmed MGM, which intervened and forced Roach to buy his way out of the venture.

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.

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.).

The studios were leased to the U.S. Army Air Forces, and the First Motion Picture Unit made 400 training, morale and propaganda films at "Fort Roach."

[29] In 1946, Hal Roach resumed motion picture production, with former Harold Lloyd co-star Bebe Daniels as an associate producer.

By 1951, the studio was producing 1,500 hours of television programs a year, nearly three times Hollywood's annual output of feature movies.

[34] 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.

[39] 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.

[38] Hal Roach died in his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, from pneumonia, on November 2, 1992, at the age of 100.

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 studio.