Pour your genius, safety and fortune into one project, watch it bomb so badly it ends your independence, then see history call it a masterpiece. This episode explores Buster Keaton through his 1926 film The General, sparked when collaborator Clyde Bruckman brought him a Union soldier's memoir of the 1862 Great Locomotive Chase. Keaton tried to lease the actual historical locomotive from a Tennessee station, was refused, and instead found narrow-gauge tracks in Oregon and bought vintage logging locomotives.

We cover the decision to make his hero a Confederate engineer as a box-office calculation, the $400,000 budget from Joseph M. Schenck that grew to three quarters of a million, 18 freight cars rolling into Cottage Grove, 1,500 locals hired, pranks on Marion Mack and baseball games that halted production, the cowcatcher and coupling-rod stu ...