Blake Wagner

Biography

Blake Wagner was one of four brothers involved in the motion picture business beginning around 1910. He was born on 3 September 1892 in Los Angeles, but spent most of his childhood and teen years in Mexico where his father, William, was a train conductor, and his mother, Edith Wagner, a newspaper correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. His brothers were Jack, a writer, Max, an actor in more than 300 movies, and Bob, an assistant cameraman. Blake witnessed first hand the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and his father's death at the hands of Mexican rebels. As early as 1910 he went to Hollywood with his brother, Jack, to work as painters and later cameramen for D.W. Griffith. Both Blake and Jack later moved to Mack Sennett Studios where they were better suited for short comedies. Blake worked as a cameraman while Jack was a gag and title writer. Following a stint from 1917 to 1919 as cameramen for the U.S. Army's first Motion Picture Unit in France during World War I, both brothers worked steadily for Sennett, Fox Studios and Hal Roach. Blake filmed several of the original "Our Gang" comedies as well as shorts featuring Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon and other slapstick comedy stars of the day. With the advent of talkies, Blake moved from cinematography to producing film shorts for Paramount Studios. He also held a number of patents in film developing and stage/film makeup. As a sidelight to his movie work, Blake was an avid puppeteer, a popular art form in the 1920s and '30s. Several of his puppets and stages were incorporated into films. By the mid-1930s, Blake joined Max Factor as a makeup man and worked primarily on films for MGM Studios.