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 "Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him... there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story which we all believe. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgement of fourteen men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame." Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was a silent film star in the 1910s, a pioneering film comedian and one of Hollywood's biggest stars during the Silent Age. Today, however, he's best known for being the Trope Maker for celebrity scandals, and for being partly responsible for the development of the Hays Code.Arbuckle was born on March 24, 1887 in Smith Center, Kansas. He had a birth weight of 13 pounds, causing disbelief in his father that he and his wife, who were both slim, could produce such a child. Consequently, his father named him after senator Roscoe Conkling, a man that he despised. This was only the beginning of a long and spiteful relationship between father and son.Arbuckle started a singing career when he was a child, and began working in vaudeville when he was a teenager. He appeared in his first film in 1909, and started doing regular film work in 1913 after moving to Universal Pictures. Despite his size, Arbuckle was surprisingly agile and acrobatic, and his films were known for their fast-paced comedy. One thing that his movies helped to popularize was the Pie in the Face gag — the first known instance of a thrown pie landing in someone's face was in his 1913 short A Noise from the Deep. His comedy proved to be a huge hit — by 1914, Paramount Pictures was offering him and his frequent collaborator Mabel Normand (one of Hollywood's first female writers, producers and directors) an unheard-of contract of $1000 a day, 25% of all profits and Protection From Editors. By 1918, he was getting a 3-year, $3 million contract. In addition to making movies, Arbuckle managed to secure the big breaks of a number of actors whose names have become synonymous with early Hollywood, including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Bob Hope.Arbuckle was always very sensitive about his weight, and refused to let his size be used for cheap fat jokes (such as getting stuck in a doorway or chair). He disliked his nickname of "Fatty", which had been given to him in school, and discouraged people from addressing him as such off-screen. Eventually, his weight, along with his drinking, started to cause him health problems; in 1916 he got an infection on his leg that was so bad that the doctors considered amputating it. While Arbuckle recovered with both legs intact, he had lost 80 pounds and had become addicted to morphine.On the night of September 5, 1921, Arbuckle attended what would become the most fateful party of his life. The morning after, an aspiring young actress named Virginia Rappe suffered a ruptured bladder in one of the hotel rooms that he and his friends had rented for a night of festivities, and died four days later. Before she collapsed, Rappe claimed that "Arbuckle did it" and "He hurt me" during the party. Rappe suffered from chronic cystitis, a condition that flared up whenever she got drunk — a problem that could not have been helped by her heavy drinking habits or the low quality of Prohibition-era booze. In addition, she had gotten several crudely-performed back-alley abortions in the past, leaving her reproductive organs in poor shape. There exist two stories about what exactly happened to Rappe at the party:—The jury's statement during Arbuckle's third trial
 , even though the blacklist was ended within a year, he only had small parts in two movies during the rest of the decade, and in 1924 started directing under the pseudonym of William Goodrich. He finally returned to acting in 1931... only to die at a party two years later.A biopic about Arbuckle has been stuck in Development Hell for nearly thirty years, and some have suggested that the project is cursed. The first actor they had lined up to play the original "live fat, die young" comic was John Belushi... in 1982. Then John Candy was attached to it... in 1994. And then Chris Farley stepped up... in 1997. (The film version of A Confederacy of Dunces seems to be condemned to the same fate because those same actors had also been considered to play Ignatius J. Reilly before they died.)Fatty Arbuckle Shout Outs in fiction:
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