Chaplin at 100 years in Film

Developed slowly over time … Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp. Photograph: Alamy

A centenary is more than excuse enough for a party, even if the birthday boy is a work of fiction – a beggar, even, with ill-fitting shoes, a violent streak and bow legs. This is the year of the Tramp. Twenty-fourteen marks 100 years since Charlie Chaplin first appeared on a movie screen as an eccentric fellow with a toothbrush moustache and a derby hat, walking with splayed feet and carrying a cane. Due to the global reach of Chaplin's fame, there will be events to mark the anniversary around the world all year, but this weekend, the corks were popped in Bristol. The city's Slapstick festival, itself celebrating a decade on the job, kicked up its heels with a sumptuous gala screening of Chaplin's late silent masterpiece City Lights, and some searching questions about who exactly we were celebrating.

The Tramp arrived, so the story goes, on a quiet day at Keystone studios in January 1914. Studio boss Mack Sennett fretted that the film they were shooting that day, Mabel's Strange Predicament, was lacking a few killer gags, so he sent Chaplin, who had only recently joined the company, to get decked out in a "comedy makeup", return to the set and inject some laughs. According to Chaplin's much-quoted recollection of the day, the idea for the outfit, and the character of the little Tramp, came to him after only a moment's thought: "On the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large." The moustache was added to age his 24-year-old face without masking his expressions and that, according to Chaplin's autobiography, was that. "The clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born."

Photograph: Allstar/United Artists/Sportsphoto Ltd

But, as Chaplin biographer David Robinson argued on the weekend, there was no such easy birth. While the mischievous "little fellow" character was an instant hit with audiences, granting his creator an unparalled level of fame, he had a more gradual evolution than that story suggests. The character Chaplin plays in those early Keystone one-reelers is not the Tramp of The Kid or City Lights. He's meaner, tougher and certainly not a rough sleeper. He is very often employed (as a piano mover, a waiter, a property man at a film studio), sometimes with a home, a wife and child. He's a pleasure-seeking anti-authoritarian and a flirt, often prone to sneaking a drink, but not because he doesn't have the money to pay for it. If you want to see Chaplin as a bona fide derelict, says Robinson, you have to wait until his 1915 film, The Tramp. By this time, Chaplin was a global success, he had transferred to the Essanay studio for a toothsome $1,250-a-week salary and recruited Edna Purviance as a leading lady. The Tramp is a smart film that folds pathos neatly into the slapstick, with our hero playing a kind-hearted drifter down on his luck who finds welcome and work at a farm. There is plenty of rowdy fun with pitchforks and ladders, but at the film's bittersweet finish, thinking he has been rejected by Purviance, Chaplin waddles off down a dusty road, at first dejectedly and then with a familiar spring in his step.

The genius of the Tramp's long gestation is that Chaplin created a character who was an everyman before he was identified as an outsider – which is partly how he eventually came to win the audience's sympathy for an unlikely leading man. If you look at American films from around the time of Chaplin's screen debut, tramps are the villains: housebreakers, street muggers and train robbers. It was no mean trick to present a vagrant as a hero, or a lover. And it's no coincidence either that all the while that Chaplin was refining his onscreen identity, his own reputation was under attack. In fact, the Tramp was far more popular than he was. At the outbreak of the first world war, Chaplin was already a massive success, but his fame made him a target. As film historian Kevin Brownlow detailed at the festival, even before the introduction of conscription in 1916 there were calls in the British press for Chaplin to return home from the US and enlist in the British army. Press baron Lord Northcliffe joined the throng of "slacker" accusations and Chaplin was mocked in popular songs and cartoons. "I really thought they were coming to get me," he later said. All the while, Chaplin was using hiscelebrity status to sell Liberty bonds in the States, and transferring large amounts of his substantial income to the British government. Cutouts of the Tramp were propped up by soldiers in British trenches "so the Germans would die laughing" and his movies were projected on the ceilings of military hospitals so wounded soldiers could enoy a morale-raising chuckle from their beds.

Photograph: Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd

Chaplin had to strike a delicate balance. His main defence against the barrage of white feathers was that his wealth and influence rendered him more valuable to his country in Los Angeles than at the front – which was placing him at a far cry from the underdog he played on screen. No doubt the scandal was part of his motivation for rendering the character more sympathetic, more prone to sweetness than petty theft and violence. It would be an over-simplification to say that Chaplin resolved these tensions at a blow by making his war comedy Shoulder Arms, but the Tramp's appearance in the trenches was certainly well-timed. By the time this 40-minute mini-feature was released, the war was almost over, but the audiences who (literally) tore down cinema doors to see the film, were thrilled to see their beloved Tramp in uniform, and capturing the kaiser too.

While Chaplin's origin story for the Tramp is a beautiful piece of movie myth-making, the truth is inevitably more complex and more interesting – it took much longer for the little fellow to grow into the Tramp, and longer still for the Tramp to become a hero. What's fascinating is that even while the sentimentality swelled, the Tramp never lost his edge. The Slapstick festival afforded the opportunity to watch Chaplin both in City Lights, which took years to make and was finally released in 1931, and in Kid Auto Races, shot in one day in 1914, within a few hours of each other. It's Kid Auto Races that the centenary springs from – filmed just after Mabel's Strange Predicament, it was released two days earlier. Despite their many differences, in each film the story is to do with the Tramp's problematic visibility. In the early short, he plays an impostor who wanders into shot when a cameraman is trying to record a children's race. In the feature film, which was released as the great depression set in, the Tramp is an unwanted presence everywhere – loved only by a blind girl, and a man who is blind drunk.

Photograph: Allstar Collection/Cinetext//Sportsphoto Ltd

The first film ends with Chaplin gurning grotesquely at the camera, a final confrontation to give the audience a jolt and a giggle. City Lights also ends on a close-up of the Tramp, smiling nervously at the woman he loves, who is seeing him for the first time – a question hovering in the air as to whether she will return his affection now she knows his low-rent identity. This centenary is the perfect to time to return that gaze, and appreciate Chaplin's genius in making cinema audiences fall in love with someone they never expected to.

Steve Jobs: The Mac Turns 30

As the vehicle sped away from the white office building, Mr. Levy looked at the driver and said hello to Steven P. Jobs, then the young, spry co-founder of Apple, who immediately responded with a voluble tirade about the magazine Mr. Levy worked for.On a late-November day in 1983, Steven Levy, then a freelance journalist for Rolling Stone, got into a car outside 10460 Bandley Drive, in Cupertino, Calif.

As he zigzagged Cupertino’s streets toward a pizza restaurant, Mr. Jobs complained that a coming article about the Macintosh — a computer that was still two months away from being announced — would not be on the cover of Rolling Stone, but rather stuffed inside a planned issue. Mr. Jobs groused that the magazine was, as Mr. Levy remembers, an expletive, and said a previous cover article about MTV was an expletive, too.

Mr. Levy couldn’t get a word in, but when he finally did, he explained that he had written the MTV cover article Mr. Jobs hated so much.

“He immediately changed the subject,” Mr. Levy recalled with a chuckle in a phone interview.

For the next couple of hours, over pizza with olives, Mr. Levy interviewed Mr. Jobs about the coming Mac computer, his design philosophy, a breakup which had left Mr. Jobs love-sick and, ominously, struggles with Apple’s board over the direction of the company. (Mr. Jobs would be fired two years later.)

The interview was a rare and raw moment for Mr. Jobs, where he bared his true feelings on the record with a reporter.

Paul Sakuma/Associated PressMacintosh computers lined up at a production facility in March 1984.

While some snippets of the 11,500-word conversation were used in the Rolling Stone feature (which never did make it to the cover), until now, the transcript has been tucked away in one of Mr. Levy’s files.

To celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the Mac, Mr. Levy said Friday that he was appending the transcript, which is “essentially unexpurgated,” in an updated Kindle version of the book about the birth of the Macintosh, “Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything.”

It’s clear in the interview that Mr. Jobs was struggling with a few demons. For one, he was upset about a recent article in Time magazine that described himas petulant and unkind. And he blamed his obsession with work for a breakup.

“I just had a romance that I really care about, a lot — I mean, a lot — go up in smoke. Because of the stress, and the sort of other woman that Macintosh is,” Mr. Jobs said.

Yet what is apparent in the discussion is that Mr. Jobs knows he is about to introduce a computer that is going to change the world. He discusses the graphics and the design of the machine with the passion of an artist describing a newly completed masterpiece. “I mean, it’s incredibly great,” Mr. Jobs said when asked about the Mac. “It’s insanely great.”

The Times’s January 1984 Review of the Macintosh: “Apple Weighs In With Macintosh”

The Macintosh he was so excited about would be the world’s first mass-market personal computer that had a graphical user interface and a mouse.

“It’s hard to put yourself in the mindset, to look back at the way things were back then,” Mr. Levy told me when I asked about re-reading the interview after all these years. “Computers had these glowing green letters back then and there was no Internet.”

But Mr. Jobs seemed to know exactly the kind of impact the Mac would have, and the team of people who had helped make it a reality.

He repeatedly refers to the team that built the Mac as “pirates,” and then says a quote that became famous years later: “Better to be a pirate than join the navy.” It’s also clear that Mr. Jobs and his band of over-worked pirates had agonized over every detail of the computer, even analyzing the details of the manual.

There are some aspects of the 30-year-old interview that might answer some unanswerable questions about what Mr. Jobs would have done with his life if he were still alive today.

When Mr. Levy told Mr. Jobs that there was “speculation” that he might go into politics, Mr. Jobs replied that he had no desire to enter the public sector and noted that the private sector could have a greater influence on society. “I’m one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did,” Mr. Jobs said.

Brian Snyder/ReutersAccessories for an original 128K Macintosh computer included an disk for the operating system, as well as a guided tour of the system.

One thing Mr. Levy was continually searching for in the interview, was what was driving Mr. Jobs — a question that was echoed in 2011 in “Steve Jobs,” the biography written by Walter Isaacson.

In the 1983 interview, it’s clear that money isn’t the answer. Mr. Jobs talked about his net worth falling by $250 million in six months. ”I’ve lost a quarter billion dollars! You know, that’s very character building,” he said, and notes that at some point, counting your millions of dollars is “just stupid.”

Mr. Levy pressed again. “The question I was getting at is, what’s driving you here?”

“Well, it’s like computers and society are out on a first date in this decade, and for some crazy reason we’re just in the right place at the right time to make that romance blossom,” Mr. Jobs replied, noting that the 1980s were the beginning of the computing revolution. “We can make them great, we can make a great product that people can easily use.”

Such passion is something that would follow Mr. Jobs through his career, and what he said next seemed to be the driving force behind that passion.

“I look at myself as an artist if anything,” Mr. Jobs said. “Sort of a trapeze artist.”

“With or without a net?” Mr. Levy asked.

“Without,” Mr. Jobs replied, and then he said one of the more profound things in the interview: ”You know we’re constantly taking. We don’t make most of the food we eat, we don’t grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.”

Given that we’re still talking about the Mac computer 30 years later, and a long list of other products Mr. Jobs helped create, it’s apparent that he was able to add something to that pool.

Gene Kelly: The Legacy

Gene Kelly's Career: Evidence Mom Knows Best?

By Carrie Saldo

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Credit Image provided courtesy of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra

An iconic image from 'Singin' in the Rain.'

Hollywood history would be very different had Gene Kelly pursued his dream of playing shortstop for the Pittsburg Pirates. Born and raised in the Steel City, it was his mother who insisted he take dance lessons as a child.

Now, Colorado native Patricia Ward Kelly is sharing these and other lesser-known details of about her legendary late husband.

“He’s gone, but the process is very alive,” said Ward Kelly, during an interview at Rocky Mountain PBS. “The number of young people I meet each day who are touched by him is phenomenal. It gives me a great sense that he’s continuing to inspire young people.”

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Credit Courtesy Patricia Ward Kelly

Gene Kelly in one of his many movie musical roles.

Just imagine if Kelly opted for baseball instead of Broadway:Singin’ in the Rain, one of the most popular movie musicals of all time, might never have been. Instead of a delirious-with-love Don Lockwoodtapping and twirling through a torrential downpour, there would be spry saves at shortstop

Exclamations of ‘Grounder Nabbed’ may have replaced ‘Gotta’ Dance.’

The sports star did not immerge but the athletic impulse Kelly had as a kid would define his dance style - be it on the Great White Way, in Tinsel Town, or on television.

If that wasn’t enough, Kelly also spoke French, read Latin and wrote poetry.

“He felt that you needed this broad grounding in all subjects in order to be a great dancer,” said Ward Kelly.

A "triple threat” in the performing arts world is someone who can dance, sing, and act equally well. (It’s a relatively uncommon distinction among performers.) Kelly was at least a quintuple threat who, in addition to acting, singing, and dancing, also choreographed, and directed.

His approach to dance on film – showing long, uncut sequences and the entire body from head-to-toe, also helped revolutionize the American movie musical.

The behind-the-scenes details Kelly related to his biographer wife are now fueling efforts like Ward Kelly’s forthcoming memoir and a live performance piece entitled Gene Kelly: The Legacy.

Ward Kelly personally presented Gene Kelly: The Legacy as part of the2013 Starz International Film Festival. It was an evening that included film clips, personal reflections about their time together as a couple, as well as stories Kelly related to her about how and why he wanted to capture dance on film.

"Gene, coming out of the depression said…, ‘I want to dance like people, like my father’s people, and people that did not have money,' " said Ward Kelly. "He wanted to create something - like Gershwin - create a particularly American style."

Part of that style included showing the lines of the body. Brandishing one of Kelly’s t-shirts with jagged, uneven edges, she showed how he cut it with scissors and then tucked the smaller garment into his pants.

“The beauty of the line of the dance was not in having a bulky suit or things stuffed into your pants so this was his way to have a leaner line,” Ward Kelly explained.

Kelly’s musical numbers - such as the 13 minute "Broadway Melody" ballet in Singin’ in the Rain - were at times epic. They could also be intimate. Such as the avant-garde duets he performed with a newspaper in a barn, an animated mouse, or puddles of rain water.

“I think a lot of that was the innovation too of coming up with new ways to create movement and sound and dance out of simple things like a torn newspaper and a squeaky board,” said Ward Kelly. “I think anything to bring it down to the level of the everyday man and make it real, so he’s not in some fanciful thing often he’s just right on the street literally.”

A Chance Encounter

When Gene Kelly met Patricia Ward in 1985 there was one project and a 46 year age difference between them. That one project would spark their eventual marriage and her documenting the legendary Broadway, movie musical, and television icon.

They met in Washington, D.C. while working on a television project for the Smithsonian as a script writer and the host/narrator respectively. Following that project, he hired her.

“He brought me out to California to write his story,” said Ward Kelly. That was in the mid- 1980s. They married in 1990 and she never left.

For more than a decade she documented everything Kelly said. There were audio recordings and copious notes. At times the scribe sessions were so impromptu sugar packets and cocktail napkins sufficed for archival tools.

Ward Kelly can’t count herself among the young people inspired by him. When she first met Kelly, she didn't know he was famous.

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We really bonded on a different level. On a level of poetry and word origins and things that I don’t think he’d encountered that often and I certainly hadn’t encountered anyone quite like him before either,” said Ward Kelly.

The Colorado Symphony Orchestra will screen Singin’ in the Rain with live orchestral accompaniment Jan. 11, 2014.

Chaplin: The Tramp is Born

The evolution of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp

Classic Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin's Tramp character first appeared in 1914, but it would be 'The Kid' in 1921 before he was fully developed.

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Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in "The Kid," 1921. (File photo)

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By Susan King

January 24, 2014, 1:00 p.m.

Cinema was just emerging from its infancy when Charlie Chaplin created his comic character the Tramp a century ago. With his bowler hat, baggy pants, endearing little mustache, exaggerated shuffling walk and cane, the Little Tramp was an instant star.

"The cinema was not yet 20 years old when he made the first Tramp film," said documentarian/film preservationist Serge Bromberg, whose Paris-based Lobster Films teamed with Flicker Alley three years ago to restore and release the "Chaplin at Keystone" DVD set. "What is so amazing is that 100 years later, he remains the absolute icon for cinema."

The reason the character has remained a part of culture is straightforward, according to Bromberg. "We are all the Tramp. He has no nationality. When a kid watches Chaplin, it's simple. He doesn't speak, he just shows. He shares the most common values of generosity."

That's just a part of it, noted Ohio University professor and Chaplin historian Lisa Stein Haven, who said, "He's not above kicking somebody in the pants and making the authority figure look bad."

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The Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Avenue is amid a two-month celebration, "The Tramp at 100: A Charlie Chaplin Centennial." Besides presenting an evening of classic Chaplin shorts, Cinefamily will also be screening Chaplin's feature-length films such as "The Circus" (1928), "Modern Times" (1936), "The Kid" (1921) and "City Lights" (1931).

When Chaplin arrived at Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Co. in 1913, the British comedian was touring the U.S. with Fred Karno's theatrical company. At 24, he was already a seasoned veteran of the British music hall, having joined the Karno troupe in 1908. At Keystone, Chaplin became a member of the stock company of comedic actors such as Sennett, Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle.

Chaplin, though, didn't have a clue about movies. "He wasn't at all a cinema creature," said Bromberg. "He thought the films were to be shot in chronological order."

Movie audiences got their first look at Chaplin in the short comedy "Making a Living," released in early 1914; he played a swindler — replete with top hat and a villainous mustache.

The Tramp was born with his second film — "Mabel's Strange Predicament," staring Normand. As Chaplin related in "My Autobiography," Sennett told him, "'We need some gags here,' he said, then turned to me. 'Put on a comedy make-up. Anything will do.'"

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On his way to wardrobe, Chaplin thought: "I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small mustache, which, I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression."

The moment Chaplin put on the clothes and makeup, "I began to know him, and by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born." And Sennett, said Chaplin, "stood and giggled until his body began to shake."

"Mabel's Strange Predicament," which opened Feb. 9, 1914, was actually the second Tramp film released. Two days earlier, Keystone brought out "Kid Auto Races at Venice."

Chaplin is riotously funny in both comedies and demonstrates his brilliant comic timing and athleticism. But the early Tramp was quite different than the sweetly sentimental fellow who took care of a little boy in "The Kid" and earned money for a blind woman to regain her sight in "City Lights."

In "Mabel's Strange Predicament," he's a slapstick happy drunk whose flask is his best friend. And in "Kid Auto Races," the Tramp is an obnoxious spectator who keeps interrupting the filming of the race.

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"What we have is a character of some vulgarity, a bit violent, very funny, but very slapstick," said Bromberg.

But then Chaplin took charge of his films by mid-1914. The character was so popular, he went to Sennett and told him, "If you want me to stay, I want to do the films myself," said Bromberg.

The Tramp continued to evolve by the time he got to the Mutual Film Co. in 1916, where over the course of two years he made 12 films, including such early masterpieces as "The Immigrant" and "The Vagabond."

'"Chaplin is still so funny but there is some romance going on, and all of a sudden you have tears and laughs in the same film," said Bromberg.

With the release in 1921 of his first feature-length film, "The Kid," Chaplin's evolution from a wastrel to the funny little man who wore his heart and emotions on his sleeve was complete. The Tramp had fully arrived, and movies were never the same.

susan.king@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-charlie-chaplin-tramp-classic-hollywood-20140126,0,4224217.story#ixzz2rPTyYDR7

Chaplin: Kid Auto Races at Venice

Letters at 3AM: February 1914

Charlie Chaplin's iconic Tramp was really born in "Kid Auto Races at Venice," not "Mabel's Strange Predicament," as commonly thought

BY MICHAEL VENTURA, FRI., JAN. 24, 2014

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON STOUT

The icon that Charles Chaplin created at the age of 24 may be said to have been born on the first day that he was put on public display: Feb. 7, 1914.

The "flicker" was "Kid Auto Races at Venice," and the original print ran but six minutes and 33 seconds.

Hit pause. I have to interrupt myself because some of you are skitting off to search the Internet for "Kid Auto." Careful. YouTube's version is a decent print, but the final and crucial 11 seconds are absent. Steer clear of the other widely circulated Internet version, a choppy 1919 reissue with a story tacked on through title cards. (By 1919, audiences wanted films to begin, have a middle, and end; in 1914, they weren't so picky.) The dependable version of "Kid Auto" is only available in the 2010 box, Chaplin at Keystone.

OK, hit play.

I'm not being uppity when I say that film critics have missed the point of "Kid Auto." Perhaps that's why it wasn't fully restored until decades after most other Chaplin films. Critics rightly, and a bit boringly, point out that Chaplin's first performance as the Tramp was in "Mabel's Strange Predicament," a longer picture filmed earlier but issued two days later than "Kid Auto." But "Kid Auto" was the first time the public saw this character.

"Kid Auto"'s six minutes and 33 seconds shared a reel with a picture called "Olives and Their Oil." Mack Sennett's Keystone studio produced comedies primarily, but also made "educationals" – short documentaries. Brent E. Walker's compendium of all things Keystone, Mack Sennett's Fun Factory, lists about one "educational" a month in 1914, including "A Glimpse of Los Angeles," "How Motion Pictures Are Made," and "Our Largest Birds" (about ostriches).

"Kid Auto" shares a reel with an educational and has an educational title: "Kid Auto Races at Venice." Below the title, as part of the Keystone logo, we see "Farce Comedy/ Keystone Film Company/ New York 1914," but the next card reads: "In Picturing [i.e., filming] This Event An Odd Character Discovered That Motion Pictures Were Being Taken And It Became Impossible To Keep Him Away From The Camera."

To employ a 16th century usage still current in 1914, the spectators were being gulled – deceived. Invited to believe they were watching something "real."

And that was easy, because they, in fact, were watching something real.

Keystones of 1914 jumped from the title into the picture with no credits, no names of actors or directors – unless an actor became popular. Then Mabel Normand would star in "Mabel's Busy Day" and "Mabel at the Wheel" or Roscoe Arbuckle would star in "Fatty Joins the Force." (Chaplin, interestingly, even when famous, would just use "His": "His New Profession," "His Musical Career.")

So we've seen a title card and a card of explanation, then we're watching something real: the Kid Auto Race at Venice, Calif. – real kids speeding around in small race cars launched from a steep ramp, watched avidly by real crowds of men and women, boys and girls.

The opening footage lulls the audience into their "educational" mode.

So it's 1914, we've never heard of Charlie Chaplin, we've never seen the Tramp, we'd like to see the race, and we have no reason to notice the fellow in the derby with the cane yards from the camera at the far left of the screen.

The camera isn't pointed at him. We might not notice when he does a bit of business with a cigarette or when a cop (not a Keystone cop, a real cop) asks him to step back from the racetrack. Soon he turns to the camera. Takes a few steps toward it. Notices it. Is interested. We may not be watching him, but he's watching us.

We're about 44 seconds into the picture. For the next five minutes and 50 seconds, give or take, we will be fixated by this impish man, who doesn't look normal but neither looks so very different (nor does he look like a tramp). And the camera will continue to gull us.

For instance, there's a marvelous 180-degree pan of Chaplin in front of the grandstand, walking a bit down the grandstand, walking across the racetrack, then walking near the crowd on the other side – a camera movement not unheard of in "educationals" but rare in 1914's dramatic films and unheard of in comedies. We of 1914 can't be sure what we're watching. The film style is like an educational, but the guy is hilarious.

You may not find him so in 2014. But a British critic, unnamed in David Robinson's Chaplin: His Life and Art, wrote: "'Kid Auto Races' struck us as about the funniest film we have seen. ... He does things we have never seen done on the screen before." Audiences around the world agreed.

This "odd character" is not a nice guy. He doesn't care about anything but being on camera. He gives not a damn about the disruption he's causing. He doesn't pretend to like anyone in sight. When a little boy (not an actor), gets too near him, he meanly swats him away.

That's typical of Chaplin who, within a year, was being called the most famous man in the world. The Chaplin of 1914, especially, was not the tender fellow of 1921's The Kid. Children playing Keystone scenes with Chaplin often look wary; in Tillie's Punctured Romance he slaps a paperboy hard enough for the kid to be visibly afraid. But audiences, young and old, loved Chaplin for it.

Simon Louvish, in Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey, quotes a Chicago Herald piece from January 10, 1915: "In one year as a motion picture comedian, Charles Chaplin has achieved greater popularity than any other funmaker of the films." A 1915 New Jersey Evening News article describes vendors selling Charlie Chaplin balloons, postcards (two for a nickel) and statuettes. There are lookalike contests in Cleveland; in Kansas, they're calling it "Chaplinoia," "a movie epidemic." By 1916, Louvish reports, "[b]oys in the most remote parts of the world imitated Charlie Chaplin's walk and played games based on his character."

The Chaplin who first swept the world bears little resemblance to the Chaplin of the famous features we constantly rerun. When the world sang the dozens (some say hundreds) of improvised versions of "The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin," it wasn't sensitivity that impressed them.

"Charlie Chaplin, meek and mild, swiped a sausage from a child/ When the child began to cry, Charlie socked him in the eye. ... One, two, three, O'Leary, I saw my Auntie Sary/ Standing in the door, O'Leary, kissing Charlie Chaplin."

I won't jump to conclusions, profound or otherwise. My job here is simply to present the mystery.

Critics tend to be snowed by Chaplin's later pooh-poohing of his Keystone experience. He didn't pooh-pooh at the time. Robinson quotes what he wrote to his brother Sydney when Sennett hired him: "I don't know whether you have seen any Keystone pictures but they are very funny." Mack Sennett's Tillie's Punctured Romance, the world's first feature-length comedy, gets short shrift in Chaplin's autobiography, but to Sydney he wrote in 1914: "It is the best thing I ever did."

"Kid Auto" ends with a grotesque close-up of Charlie making fun of whoever's on the other side of the lens – i.e., you and me. Then the picture suddenly ends, as if the film broke, but no: In 1914, Keystone endings were often abrupt. A Keystone didn't conclude; it stopped, as though the picture was over but the story was not. (Existentially accurate, wouldn't you say?)

Said Chaplin in 1916: "The human race I prefer to think of as the underworld of the gods. When the gods go slumming they visit the earth. You see, my respect for the human race is not 100 percent."

We of 1914 – we loved him for that.

Chaplin & Kelly Similarities

More similarities crop up between Charlie Chaplin and Gene Kelly as I continue my research and the writing of my book.

They both danced.
They both acted
They both directed
They both wrote
They both roller skated
They both were short, Chaplin maybe 5'6" and Kelly 5'7" regardless of what you hear
They were both in great shape
They were both workaholics and when working, all else was unimportant and put aside
Neither of them had any real workout routine, but used their craft to keep them in shape.
They both loved tennis and swam
They both knew the movie business inside out
Neither had many "Close" friends
They were both mainly agnostic
They were both liberal

Chaplin's 1st Movie Location Revealed

Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. was Charlie Chaplin’s second motion picture release, and the first to feature his Little Tramp persona.  It was filmed at the Junior Vanderbilt Cup Race held in Venice, California on Saturday, January 10, 1914, and at the children’s pushmobile race held there the following day.  The weekend shoot capped Chaplin’s first week on the job at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studio, where Chaplin began work following the holidays on Monday, January 5.  (Note: apparently Chaplin commenced shooting Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), in which he wears the tramp costume for the first time, immediately prior to the weekend filming of Kid Auto, butMabel was not finished and released until after Kid Auto was released.)

In my book Silent Traces I explain how Chaplin filmed most of the scenes from Kid Auto at the corner of Second (now Main Street) and Westminster in Venice, while looking either north, south, or west, and how several background homes and buildings there are still standing.  I have posted a few photos here.

Main and Westminster, looking west towards the ocean, at what was a hillside country club with tennis courts (fences), and what is now the Westminster Dog Park.

Although the film title mentions a “Kid Auto Race,” I was never able to determine what in the world exactly was a Kid Auto Race?  Thankfully, Todd von Hoffmann, associated withwww.VeniceHeritageMuseum.org, and co-author of The Von Hoffmann Bros.’ Big Damn Book of Sheer Manliness, contacted me with the solution, as reported in the May, 1914 issue of Technical World Magazine.

From Technical World Magazine, May 1914

The Kid Auto Race at Venice was, in fact, a sanctioned ten-mile race in which fourteen year old boys piloted home-made one or two-cylinder cars, many adapted from motorcycle engines, while vying for a share of $250 in prize money.  From today’s sue-first, safety-first, bubble-wrap your child perspective, it is almost inconceivable that untrained and unlicensed youths, without helmets, safety equipment, and no doubt without even seat belts, were once actively encouraged to race one another along the streets of Santa Monica and Venice.

Click to enlarge.  A photo of the Kid Auto Race appearing in Technical World Magazine (upper left), a modern view up Main from Westminster (lower right), and two comparable movie frames.

The article also describes the pushmobile race held the following day, where Chaplin was also filmed, as motorless carts raced down a steep ramp.  Three of the houses pictured in the background below are still standing.  In the far background between Charlie 3 and 4 stands the former Race Thru The Clouds twin-track racing roller coaster, once located along the former Venice Lagoon.

Looking south from Main (at the time Second) and Westminster, at the pushmobile ramp.  Three homes in the back, the far left on San Juan, the other two along Horizon Avenue, still remain (Google Street View links).

I have set forth the complete text of the magazine article below.  While the reporter duly transcribed his narrative of the event, he was either oblivious to, or deliberately chose to ignore, the antics portrayed by Chaplin there at the time.

May, 1914 Technical World Magazine, submitted by Todd von Hoffmann,http://www.VeniceHeritageMuseum.org

Forty youngsters dare-deviled around a ten-mile course at Venice, California some little time ago in the Junior Vanderbilt Cup Race. They all had homemade one- or two-cylinder cars and they were all after one of the six silver cups and a share in two hundred and fifty dollars of prize money.

Albert Van Vrankin, Jr. sailed home with first prize in a little over thirty-seven minutes, although in the middle of the race he ran into a ditch, turned turtle, and had to extricate himself and his car.

The starting line for the Kid Auto Race at Venice

Most of the machines were ingenious adaptations of motorcycle engines to four-wheel crafts. Many of these cars, some of which are easily controlled, are capable of amazing speed.

At the race, the ten thousand spectators, including Barney Oldfield, Earl Cooper, and Teddy Tetzlaff, who judged the finish, cheered wildly as the contestants whirled around the track.

Regular road racing rules the contest and the fourteen-year-olds traveled the course with splendid judgment and the daring of older heads.

Besides the Junior Vanderbilt, there were races for pushmobiles, which furnished a great deal of amusement for the crowd. A broad incline was used to give the pushcars a good start and most of the boys had trouble in getting to the bottom right side up.  Some of the spills looked dangerous to the crowd but none of the drivers were injured.

The difficulties of the boys in constructing cars for the Vanderbilt are told only by the perfection of the machines, because the adaptation of a motorcycle engine to an automobile is a very difficult mechanical job. The dozens of cycle car manufacturers that have sprung up within the last few months have given testimony freely that the thing can’t be done. A special motor for the little car of the “common people” has been built by most of the manufacturers, and many different schemes of transmission and differential have been used.

In The Footsteps of Chaplin

On a recent trip to Hollywood, doing research for my book, I couldn't help retracing some footsteps of Charlie Chaplin.  There is a book called, Silent Traces, which chronicles the thousands of silent movies locations then and now.

Douglas Fairbanks Sr Crypt where Chaplin gave a eulogy for his best friend who died so young.

The side entrance to Chaplin's studio on the corner of Le Brae and De Longpree where he filmed part of the movie, A Day's Pleasure, back in 1919.  Standing in the same spot was amazing.

The nondescript grave of Chaplin's mother in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery where Rudolf Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille and many other Hollywood notables are burieds.

A great view of the Mack Sennent Studio as it looked when Chaplin started in movies exactly 100 years ago.

An early camera for the Silent Movies.

Movie Poster for City Lights