He started at the Selig Polyscope Company and eventually moved to Keystone Studios, where he worked with Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd as well as with his nephew, Al St. John.

At the behest of Adolph Zukor, president of Famous Players–Lasky, his films were banned by motion picture industry censor Will H. Hays[1] after the trial, and he was publicly ostracized.

[9][10] He then joined the Pantages Theatre Group touring the West Coast and in 1906 played the Orpheum Theater in Portland, Oregon, in a vaudeville troupe organized by Leon Errol.

He appeared sporadically in Selig one-reelers until 1913, moved briefly to Universal Pictures, and became a star in producer-director Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops comedies.

After famed operatic tenor Enrico Caruso heard him sing, he urged the comedian to "give up this nonsense you do for a living, with training you could become the second greatest singer in the world.

The earliest known pie thrown in film was in the June 1913 Keystone one-reeler A Noise from the Deep, starring Arbuckle and frequent screen partner Mabel Normand.

[17] In 1914, Paramount Pictures made the then unheard-of offer of US$1,000 a day plus twenty-five percent of all profits and complete artistic control to make movies with Arbuckle and Normand.

Although Comique produced some of the best short pictures of the silent era, Arbuckle transferred his controlling interest in the company to Buster Keaton in 1918 and accepted Paramount's $3 million offer to make up to 18 feature films over three years.

"[21] On Monday, September 5, 1921 (Labor Day), Arbuckle took a break from his hectic film schedule and, despite suffering second-degree burns to both buttocks from an on-set accident, drove to San Francisco with two friends, Lowell Sherman and Fred Fishback.

During the carousing, a 30-year-old aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe was found seriously ill in room 1219 and was examined by the hotel doctor, who concluded that her symptoms were mostly caused by intoxication and administered morphine to calm her.

[28][29] The prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney Matthew Brady, an intensely ambitious man who planned to run for governor, made public pronouncements of Arbuckle's guilt and pressured witnesses to make false statements.

After hearing testimony from party guest Zey Prevon that Rappe said "Roscoe hurt me" on her deathbed, the judge decided that Arbuckle could be charged with first-degree murder.

[31] Brady's first witnesses during the trial included model Betty Campbell, who attended the party and testified that she saw Arbuckle with a smile on his face hours after the alleged rape occurred.

Dr. Heinrich's claim to have found fingerprints was cast into doubt after McNab produced a maid from the St. Francis Hotel who testified that she had thoroughly cleaned the room before the investigation took place.

Researcher Joan Myers suggests that Arbuckle's defense team targeted Hubbard as a villain because there had been a great deal of media attention on women serving in juries, a practice that had been legalized only four years earlier.

[3] By the time of Arbuckle's third trial, his films had been banned and newspapers had been filled for the past seven months with stories of Hollywood orgies, murder and sexual perversion.

[citation needed] The third trial began on March 13, 1922, and McNab took a forceful approach, attacking the prosecution's case with long and aggressive examination and cross-examination of each witness.

We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and woman who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.Some experts[who?]

At the time of his acquittal, he owed more than $700,000 (equivalent to $13 million in 2023[15]) in legal fees to his attorneys for the three criminal trials, and he was forced to sell his house and all of his cars to pay some of the debt.

Will H. Hays, who served as the head of the newly formed Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America censor board, cited Arbuckle as an example of Hollywood's poor morals.

In 1925, Carter DeHaven's short Character Studies, filmed before the scandal, was released, featuring Arbuckle along with Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and Jackie Coogan.

[31]Among the more visible directorial projects under the Goodrich pseudonym was the Eddie Cantor feature Special Delivery (1927), which was released by Paramount and costarred William Powell and Jobyna Ralston.

features grocery-store gags reminiscent of Arbuckle's 1917 short The Butcher Boy, with vaudeville comic Fritz Hubert as his assistant, dressed like Buster Keaton.

However, it is likely that due to the reputation Arbuckle received around the death of Virginia Rappe, that many studios wished to avoid any negative backlash and purposely destroyed any surviving films in which he had a starring role.

[54] Neil Sedaka refers to Arbuckle, along with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, and Oliver Hardy in his 1971 song "Silent Movies", as heard on his Emergence album.

In the scene, Valentino picks up starlet Jean Acker (played by Carol Kane) off a table in which she is sitting in front of Fatty and dances with her, enraging the spoiled star, who becomes apoplectic.

[63] In April and May 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a 56-film, month-long retrospective of all of Arbuckle's known surviving work, running the entire series twice.

[69] The 2021 French graphic novel Fatty : le premier roi d'Hollywood, by Nadar and Julien Frey, portrays the period from Arbuckle's early days in Hollywood to his death.

[71] In Curb Your Enthusiasm's Season 12 Episode 8, "The Colostomy Bag," Larry David in discussion with Conan O'Brien claims that Arbuckle attacked a stranger with a beer bottle after being spoken to in public.

[citation needed] During the third season of Hacks, a biopic about Arbuckle becomes a central part of the plot starting with episode 7, "The Deborah Vance Christmas Spectacular."