"From 1912 to 1917, Sennett produced nearly 650 Keystone Comedies, distributed by the Mutual and Triangle organizations. All three of the companies in this equation—Keystone, Mutual and Triangle—had ceased to exist as functioning organizations by 1920. Many Keystone Comedies were reissued in the late 1910’s by companies such as W.H. Productions, Tower Productions and Keystone-Eagle Films. Many more Keystones reissues followed in the 1920’s and beyond (particularly those featuring Charlie Chaplin), and many of the films were subsequently issued in home gauges—with no one around to enforce their copyrights.

Actually, Mack Sennett and his bosses at the New York Motion Picture Company did not even begin copyrighting their films until late 1914 (in response to the bootlegging activities of film pirates). Ironically, when Sennett did begin copyrighting his films, he also submitted paper prints to the Library of Congress—even though this copyright requirement had ended in 1912. As a result, thanks to these paper prints, nearly every 1915 Keystone-Mutual survives today. Because of these prints, and the films that were reissued without legal challenge, around 300 Keystones survive today in one form or another.

Contrast this with the films Mack Sennett produced during the years 1917 to 1921 for his next distributor, Paramount Pictures—an entity which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in about two years. During this period, Sennett made 78 two-reelers for Paramount, which were sold back to Paramount at the end of Sennett’s contract. Most of them were likely later dumped into the sea by Paramount with its other silents. Paramount still owned the copyright, but if it couldn’t be bothered to preserve “more prestigious” feature films produced by the company itself, it certainly wasn’t going to doing anything with “lowly” two-reel comedies from an outside producer.

As a result, Mack Sennett’s Paramount era is his period with the worst survival rate. Maybe slightly more than a dozen of these 78 films survive today, many only in partial increments. Charles Tarbox is to be credited with saving a number of these (most of which came from a small handful of Sennett-Paramounts that were reissued in 1923) and releasing them in 16mm and 8mm through his company Film Classic Exchange. Others survive in film archives, though not all have been preserved. For instance, a nitrate 35mm print of the second reel (the first reel is not known to exist) of UP IN ALF’S PLACE—a wild 1919 comedy featuring Charlie Murray, James Finlayson, Kalla Pasha and Ben Turpin, which sends up cloak and dagger secret societies and Bolsheviks—exists at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, but is still awaiting a transfer to safety film.

Sennett followed his Paramount tenure by distributing through First National, a company that later merged with Warner Brothers. Unlike Paramount, Warner Brothers was active enough with the Sennett material to reissue footage from Sennett’s 17 two-reelers and several features owned by the company in a series of Vitaphone two-reelers in the 1940’s. These Vitaphone reissues constitute much of the extant material from this 1921-22 Sennett period (in addition to a few complete prints, mostly again courtesy Charles Tarbox).

From 1923 to 1929, Sennett distributed his final silent two-reelers through the Pathé Exchange—one of several companies that were an offshoot of the original French organization founded by Charles Pathé. Though the American Pathé company ceased to be an operating entity by the early 1930’s (excepting its newsreel brand, had been sold off as a separate entity), most of Mack Sennett’s Pathé comedies were issued for home and non-theatrical use under such labels as Pathé Baby, Pathéx and Pathéscope (many of them in 9.5mm)—whether in complete prints or excerpts. This has resulted in a survival rate of about 70% of Sennett’s 210 two-reelers for the company."