A two-ton house facade falls toward a man who does not flinch; he passes through the open attic window with inches to spare. This episode reconstructs the life of Buster Keaton, born in 1895 into a traveling vaudeville family whose act, The Three Keatons, involved his father hurling him into scenery, orchestra pits, and audience laps. Authorities repeatedly examined the boy for injuries and never found a bruise, and he later described the experience as an education in kinetic energy.

The conversation follows the birth of the deadpan face, his first film with Roscoe Arbuckle in 1917, the night he dismantled and reassembled a camera in his hotel room, the real locomotive crashed through a burning bridge for The General, and the 1928 MGM contract he called the worst mistake of his life. It then covers his alcoholism, the divorce that changed h ...