Hal Roach, who teamed Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy on celluloid, discovered Harold Lloyd and created the beloved "Our Gang" comedies that endure on TV as "The Little Rascals," has died at 100.
The filmmaker died Monday at UCLA Medical Center after contracting pneumonia.Starting in films as a cowboy extra at $5 a day, Roach rose to command a comedy factory that produced hundreds of shorts, beginning in the silent era.
"Our Gang" and the teaming of Laurel and Hardy proved his greatest successes, winning him two Oscars for short subjects: Laurel and Hardy's "The Music Box" in 1932 and Our Gang's "Bored of Education" in 1936.
He believed the formula for comedy was simple.
"It's portraying things a child does," he once said. "But it takes a great artist to do it - like Stan Laurel crying or scratching his head, or Oliver Hardy playing with his tie. They were adults playing children. The reverse was the `Our Gang' series with children playing grown-ups."
George McFarland, who played pudgy, beanie-wearing Spanky in the "Our Gang" series, said Monday: "I didn't know the man when I was a child. He was the head of the studio and I was an actor, a kid actor, at that."
"But he was always good to us at Christmas and on birthdays," McFarland said.
Born in Elmira, N.Y., in 1892, Roach spent his early years mining for gold and running mule trains in Alaska and driving a truck in Seattle.
Universal hired him at 20 as a stunt man, extra and bit player. He became acquainted with another unknown, Harold Lloyd, whom he saw as a potential comedy star.
When Roach inherited $3,000 in 1915, he started his own company with Lloyd starring in a comedy series called "Willie Work." It was a failure.
Roach later found a backer and rehired Lloyd from Mack Sennett for a series featuring a character called Lonesome Luke. They later dropped "Luke" and developed Lloyd's bespectacled all-American boy character, which made him a star.
In the early '20s, Lloyd went on to produce his own feature films, and Roach continued concentrating on shorts.
His greatest combination came in 1927, when Laurel and Hardy made their first comedy as a team in "Duck Soup."