Roscoe Arbuckle was the highest-paid entertainer in the world, a mentor to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the man credited with the first on-screen pie in the face. Then, almost overnight, his films were shelved or destroyed, his name became a punchline, and he was banned from the industry he helped build, all for a crime he did not commit. This episode traces his life from a 13-pound birth in Kansas in 1887 and a father who named him after a notoriously philandering senator out of spite, to the amateur vaudeville night when a panicked somersault into the orchestra pit launched his career.

The conversation covers his refusal to do cheap gags about his size, the three million dollar Paramount contract, the morphine prescribed for a severe leg infection, and the Labor Day 1921 party at the St. Francis Hotel where Virginia Rappe fell i ...