In the 1928 film Steamboat Bill, Jr., a falling facade threatens to flatten Buster Keaton, but he’s spared by the fortunate placement of an open attic window. “As he stood in the studio street waiting for a building to crash on him, he noticed that some of the electricians and extras were praying,” writes Marion Meade in Cut to the Chase, her biography of Keaton. “Afterward, he would call the stunt one of his greatest thrills.”

It’s often said that the falling wall missed Keaton by inches. Is that true? James Metz studied the problem in Mathematics Teacher in 2019. Keaton was 5 feet 5 inches tall; if that the “hinge” of the facade is 5 inches above the surface of the ground, the attic window is 12 feet above that, and the window is 3 feet high, he finds that the top of the window came only within about 1.5 feet of Keaton’s head.

“The window was tall enough to allow an ample margin of safety, so the legend about barely missing his head cannot be true,” Metz writes. “Apparently, Keaton had more headroom than was previously suspected.”

(James Metz, “The Right Place at the Right Time,” Mathematics Teacher 112:4 [January/February 2019], 247-249.)