Silent shorts and features
Lloyd worked with Thomas Edison's motion picture company, and his first role was a small part as a Yaqui Indian in the production of The Old Monk's Tale. At the age of 20, Lloyd moved to Los Angeles and took juvenile roles in several Keystone Film Company comedies.
He tried to find work at the Universal studio, but "the gatekeeper was a crabby old soul who let me understand that it would be a great pleasure to keep me out", as Lloyd recalled in his 1928 memoir. He solved his problem with the ingenuity of his later screen character: "The next morning I brought a makeup box. At noon I dodged behind a billboard, made up, mingled with the [extras] and returned with them through the gate without challenge."
Lloyd soon became friendly with aspiring filmmaker Hal Roach. Lloyd began collaborating with Roach, who had formed his own studio in 1913. Roach and Lloyd created "Lonesome Luke", a comic character inspired by the success of Charlie Chaplin. Luke was a comic grotesque with loud clothes and a false moustache, similar to many early screen comics, but the young Lloyd gave the character great energy and enthusiasm. His antics won a popular following, and his one-reel, 10-minute comedies were soon expanded to two-reel, 20-minute comedies. Hal Roach hired Bebe Daniels to support Lloyd in 1914; Lloyd and Daniels became involved romantically and were known as "The Boy" and "The Girl".
By late 1917, Lloyd had tired of Lonesome Luke and wanted to develop his screen presence beyond an imitation of his contemporaries. He envisioned an entirely new character, not a costumed clown but an everyday young man in street clothes who faced comic situations with resourcefulness. To make the look of the new character distinctive, he adopted a pair of lensless, horn-rimmed glasses.
Lloyd thought that Pathé, Roach's distributor, would resist the new character because the Lonesome Luke films were proven moneymakers, and the company didn't want to lose that revenue. "Privately I believed that Pathé would conclude to hire another comedian and carry on with Lonesome Luke", wrote Lloyd. "Roach, however, argued my case better than I could have done." Lloyd agreed to a compromise: He would continue to make Lonesome Luke two-reelers, but he would introduce his new "Glass" character in less expensive one-reel shorts. As the new character caught on, Lonesome Luke was phased out.
The "Glass" character (often named "Harold" in the silent films) was a much more mature comedy character with greater potential for sympathy and emotional depth, and was easy for audiences of the time to identify with. "When I adopted the glasses", Lloyd recalled in a 1962 interview with Harry Reasoner, "it more or less put me in a different category because I became a human being. He was a kid that you would meet next door, across the street, but at the same time I could still do all the crazy things that we did before, but you believed them. They were natural and the romance could be believable."
Unlike most silent comedy personae, "Harold" was never typecast to a social class, but he was always striving for success and recognition. Within the first few years of the character's debut, he had portrayed social ranks ranging from a starving vagrant in From Hand to Mouth to a wealthy socialite in Captain Kidd's Kids.
In 1919, Bebe Daniels declined to renew her contract with Hal Roach, leaving the Lloyd series to pursue her dramatic aspirations. Later that year, Lloyd replaced Daniels with Mildred Davis after being told by Roach to watch Davis in a movie. Reportedly, the more Lloyd watched Davis, the more he liked her. Lloyd's first reaction in seeing her was that "she looked like a big French doll". Lloyd and Davis married in 1923.
On August 24, 1919, while posing for some promotional still photographs in the Los Angeles Witzel Photography Studio, he picked up what he thought was a prop bomb and lit it with a cigarette. It exploded and mangled his right hand, causing him to lose a thumb and forefinger. The blast was severe enough that the cameraman and prop director nearby were also seriously injured. Lloyd was in the act of lighting a cigarette from the fuse of the bomb when it exploded, also badly burning his face and chest and injuring his eye. Despite the proximity of the blast to his face, he retained his sight. As he recalled in 1930: "I thought I would surely be so disabled that I would never be able to work again. I didn't suppose that I would have one five-hundredth of what I have now. Still I thought, 'Life is worth while. Just to be alive.' I still think so."
Beginning in 1921, Roach and Lloyd moved from shorts to feature-length comedies. These included the acclaimed Grandma's Boy, which (along with Chaplin's The Kid) pioneered the combination of complex character development and film comedy, the highly popular Safety Last! (1923), which cemented Lloyd's stardom (and is the oldest film on the American Film Institute's List of 100 Most Thrilling Movies), and Why Worry? (1923). Although Lloyd performed many athletic stunts in his films, Harvey Parry was his stunt double for the more dangerous sequences.
Lloyd and Roach parted ways in 1924, and Lloyd formed his own independent production company, the Harold Lloyd Film Corporation, He now made feature films exclusively, releasing them first through Pathé, then Paramount. These included his accomplished comedies Girl Shy, The Freshman (his highest-grossing silent feature), The Kid Brother and Speedy, his final silent film. All of these films were enormously successful and profitable, and Lloyd eventually became the highest-paid film performer of the 1920s.
As the silent era ended, Lloyd issued an autobiography.
