A movie reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote that the new film “drags terribly with a long and tiresome chase of one [train] engine by another.” The film under review was Buster Keaton’s The General, which debuted in the Capitol Theater in New York City 90 years ago today.

The film flopped. Up to this point, Keaton possessed complete creative control over his film comedies, and Metro and United Artists gave him a $750,000 budget to make the Civil War-era film, which tells a true story in a mode that Hollywood―and its audiences―was not yet accustomed to: action-adventure-comedy. The film earned back less than $500,000 at the box office. Keaton’s next contract with MGM restricted him to comedies and did not allow him to direct. He descended into alcoholism.
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A web site, Thefacebook.com, was launched on this date in 2004 on the campus of Harvard University by Mark Zuckerberg and others. It was a successor site to one called “Facemash” that had been created just months before. Within hours of its launch, thousands of Harvard students had registered, and within its first week, the first lawsuits were filed.
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