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In his first film for MGM and his last important work, Buster Keaton once again mined the comic possibilities of filmmaking. Blending studio sets with documentary footage and location shooting in New York, Keaton's adventures as a hapless yet inadvertently avant-garde Hearst newsreel man amply demonstrated his signature athleticism and visual cleverness, as he films a Tong War in Chinatown, plays baseball with himself in an empty Yankee Stadium, and gets a little too involved in Charles Lindbergh's tickertape parade. An improvised situation involving a shared Coney Island dressing room and bathing suit showcased Keaton's well-honed gifts for comic timing and unscripted creativity, but that work situation was not to last at bottom line-fixated MGM. Even though The Cameraman was a success, MGM demanded that Keaton give up his looser, off-the-cuff working style and stick to prepared shooting scripts; his penchant for dangerous stunts did not find favor either. With his comic methods curtailed after 1928, The Cameraman was the final film made exactly as Keaton wished--and, perhaps not surprisingly, his last great feature.