Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach Sr. (January 14, 1892 – November 2, 1992) was an American film and television producer, director, and screenwriter, who was the founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios.
Roach was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s. He is known for producing a number of early media franchise successes, including Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang kids.
Roach was born in Elmira, New York, to Charles Henry Roach, whose father was born in Wicklow, County Wicklow, Ireland, and Mabel Gertrude Bally, whose father John Bally hailed from Switzerland. A presentation by the American humorist Mark Twain impressed elementary-school student Roach. Hal's first job was delivering newspapers. One of the subscribers lived at Quarry Farm - Samuel Clemens, more widely known as "Mark Twain".
After an adventurous youth that took him to Alaska, Roach arrived in Hollywood in 1912 and began working as an extra in silent films.
When Hal Roach came to Southern California at the age of 20, he had reached the tail end of a four-year trek across America, which took him from his hometown of Elmira, New York to Alaska, and down the Pacific Coast. Along the way, he picked up the know-how necessary to land work as an extra in a J. Warren Kerrigan western, which was being filmed on location in the desert. It was here that he first met fellow player Harold Lloyd, the first of many talents whom Hal Roach would nurture and build a fortune on. During the filming of a roulette sequence, Roach got himself promoted to the position of technical advisor by pointing out that the ball has to travel in the opposite direction of the wheel – knowledge he had gained in San Francisco's Barbary Coast.
On July 23, 1914, Roach incorporated Rolin Film Company with partners Dan Linthicum and I.H. Nance. The brand name Rolin combined the names of partners Roach and Linthicum.
In 1914, the Lewis Leonard Bradbury (November 6, 1823 – July 15, 1892) mansion, on the corner of Court Street and Hill Street, Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California, was Roach's film studio.
In 1915 Roach inherited $3000 (about $100,000 in 2026). Now solvent, he began producing short film comedies with his friend Harold Lloyd, who portrayed a tramp character known as Willie Work, as in Willie Runs the Park.
In 1915, Roach sold his production Just Nuts to Pathé Exchange, leading to a long-standing distribution arrangement.
Unable to expand his studios in Downtown Los Angeles because of zoning, Roach leased several studio sites in the Los Angeles area until he purchased what became the Hal Roach Studios from Harry Culver in Culver City, California, at 8822 Washington Boulevard, and built by 1920.
Success with Harold Lloyd and others
Harold Lloyd created Lonesome Luke, a fresh-kid comedy character in an ill-fitting suit, having slapstick misadventures much as Charlie Chaplin had in the Keystone comedies. The Lonesome Luke comedies were so ubiquitous -- Roach made a new single-reel comedy every week -- that they caught on with moviegoers, and Pathé asked for more of them at double the length. Finally, in 1917, Lloyd created his most famous screen character, the hapless young man in the horn-rimmed glasses. These new comedies were Roach's most popular of all, and Roach and Lloyd collaborated on short subjects, featurettes, and feature films until 1923, when Lloyd became his own producer.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Roach starred Snub Pollard, Charley Chase, Chase's brother Jimmie Parrott, Will Rogers, Max Davidson, the Our Gang kids, Harry Langdon, Thelma Todd, ZaSu Pitts, Patsy Kelly and, most famously, Laurel and Hardy. During the 1920s, Roach's biggest rival was producer Mack Sennett. In 1925, Roach hired Sennett's supervising director, F. Richard Jones.
Roach had been releasing his films through Pathé Exchange -- and so was his chief competitor Mack Sennett. Each producer was unwittingly cutting into the other's business. Roach resolved the situation in June 1927, by striking a distribution deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which wanted to add a line of short comedies to its offerings. This was mutually beneficial: MGM got proven short-subject attractions, and Roach got more exposure for his productions. Roach converted his silent-movie studio to sound in late 1928 and began releasing talking shorts in early 1929.
Roach fulfilled the remainder of his Pathé contract by cobbling together new releases taken from uncompleted or unreleased films sitting on the shelf. For example, a Snub Pollard comedy made in 1923, The Old War-Horse, finally saw the light of day in 1926, after Pollard had left Roach's employ. Pathé, noticing how Roach's new MGM comedies were catching on with the public, took its time releasing Roach's Laurel and Hardy subjects to capitalize on the actors' increasing name value. The last of the team's Pathé comedies, Flying Elephants, was filmed in May 1927 but held back from release until February 1928.
Hal Roach was always thinking ahead, as demonstrated by his many innovations in motion-picture production and salesmanship. In the spring of 1929 he planned to make a talking western feature film -- Roach had made the occasional outdoor adventure in the mid-1920s, in silent pictures, but this would be his first attempt at a talking feature. Roach offered the leading role to cowboy superstar William S. Hart, who had been in retirement since 1925. Hart signed a $75,000 contract with Roach in May 1929, with the expectation that Hart's old colleague Lambert Hillyer would be on hand to direct. The project was canceled when Roach's distributor, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, intervened. MGM executive Nicholas Schenck wired Roach: "Sorry you have undertaken to produce a talking western picture, because we would not be interested in it, and we do not think you should undertake to make pictures for anybody else. If you have already signed, then you have our consent to release this one elsewhere, but we do not expect you to do this again." Hart consented to the cancellation and forfeited the salary agreed upon. According to columnist Louella Parsons, "The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer officials explained it was not a personal reflection against Hart, but rather an earnest belief that these western thrillers were no longer what the public wanted." Schenck's opinion is puzzling because Fox had already made a successful talking western, In Old Arizona (released in January 1929 and nominated for five Academy Awards); however, MGM had already dismissed its own western star Tim McCoy, so Schenck appears to have followed company policy in declining Hart's services.
Hal Roach also instituted a lucrative sideline: selling his comedies to international exhibitors by making special, all-talking versions in different languages. Each American film was reshot in Spanish, French, and occasionally Italian and German. Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, and the Our Gang kids (some of whom had barely begun school) were required to recite the foreign dialogue phonetically, often reading from blackboards hidden off-camera. The supporting casts would usually be actors from other nations, speaking their native languages. MGM, seeing Roach's proficiency with these international releases, asked him to direct -- but not produce -- its own outdoor talking feature, Men of the North (1930). Roach staged the film in five different languages: English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.
Roach was delighted by the response to his continental comedies. International exhibitors welcomed them, and moviegoers were pleased and amused to hear the comedians speaking the native language of the audience. "It was an expensive operation to do every scene four times," recalled Roach. "It cost us three times as much. But the prices we got in South American countries and Spain were fantastic. A Laurel and Hardy short in the Argentine would be [treated] like a feature picture. But finally Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made us quit, because the other countries said, 'We don't want dubbed pictures from Metro. We get them not dubbed from Hal Roach,' So I stopped. The people in the Argentine were very indignant, but then they began dubbing the pictures, as they did in the other countries."