It happened that the distributor for Steamboat Bill went to Joe Schenck, my so-called producer, and said: “Keaton can’t shoot the flood sequence because we all lived through the years of the floods and too many people lose their lives. It’s too painful to laugh about”. So Schenck told me: “You can’t do the flood”. I replied: “That’s strange, because during the Great War, Chaplin made a film called Shoulder Arms, that was the greatest box office hit of its time. It’s hard to think of an upheaval worse than the Great War; and Chaplin turned it into his greatest comic film”. Schenck said: “Oh, but that’s different”. I don’t know why it was different. So I asked him if it was ok if I did a tornado, and he agreed, he said it was better. Now, he didn’t know it, but in the United States, tornados and hurricanes claim four times as many victims as floods. But everything was fine since he didn’t know it, so I went ahead with my collaborators and did the tornado.

Buster Keaton