Lloyd and Roach on Their Way

Harold Lloyd

Hal Roach

In early 1913, silent movie superstar Harold Lloyd, then unknown, popped into a rehearsal for The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, but decided not to audition, as detailed in my book on the history of the show, All Wound Up. In July 1914, Lloyd and his good friend Hal Roach, later a major Hollywood movie producer, acted in the Oz Film Manufacturing Company’s first feature film, The Patchwork Girl of Oz. As Lloyd later told the story in the San Francisco Call and Post on October 9, 1925:

Finally Hal Roach and I caught on with the “Wizard of Oz” Company. . . . I played things nobody ever heard of—Gillikens [sic, Gillikins] and Mauchkims [sic, Munchkins] and Kalidahs.

One day Hal and I were sitting on a little bench in the sun made up as Hottentots [sic, Tottenhots]. All we had on was a lot of terrible colored grease paint and some grass skirts. He said to me, “Some day I’m going to make a picture myself. I’m going to make a comedy. People like to laugh and there’s always room for real comedy.” I was terribly impressed, though I couldn’t show it through my makeup. “And when I do, Harold,” he said, “you’ll be in it.”

I was. A couple weeks later he called me up and said that some distant relative of his had died and left him some money. I suspected for a while that he had robbed a bank or something, but I found out eventually that it was on the level. It was only a few hundred dollars, but it was the beginning of things for us.

Thus began the movie careers of two early Hollywood giants.

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