It's the birthday of the filmmaker and actor Charlie Chaplin, (books by this author) born in London (1889).
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot
He started out as a vaudeville actor in a comedy troupe. He and his fellow actors would rehearse for hours before each performance, performing their slapstick routines with meticulous attention to details. He was playing the role of a drunk when a filmmaker in the audience saw his act and asked him to come to Hollywood to be in movies.
When Chaplin arrived in Hollywood, he was shocked to see how little rehearsal went into each movie. Hollywood directors at the time filmed each scene in a single take, refusing to waste money on extra film. Chaplin tried to get used to the Hollywood style, and he took all the jobs he could get, saving almost all the money he made. But he was disgusted at the quality of the movies. The camera often wasn't pointed in the right direction to capture his movements, and many of his favorite moments ended up on the cutting room floor. At the end of five months, he asked the producer if he could direct his own movie, and he put up $1,500 of his own savings as a guarantee against losses.
That year, 1914, Chaplin directed, wrote, and starred in 16 films in six months. It was that year that he debuted his most famous character: the "little tramp," who's always beaten down by life, always the butt of the jokes, but who never gives up his optimism. Chaplin saw the character as a bum who dreams he is a gentleman. He said, "That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head."
The little tramp character was so successful that Chaplin became the first person to have complete control over every aspect of the movies he made. He was an obsessive perfectionist, and pioneered the use of retakes, shooting each one of his scenes multiple times to make sure he got it right. He spent two weeks filming a single scene in The Kid (1920), in which the small boy stirs pancakes while his adoptive father watches. He ultimately shot 300,000 feet of film to make The Kid, and only used 5,000 feet of it for the final product.
Other Hollywood executives thought he was crazy. But he was the most successful filmmaker in the world for more than 10 years, until the introduction of sound.
He was the last major filmmaker to make silent movies. Two of his greatest films City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) were made after the debut of talkies in 1927. His only concession to sound in those films was the use of a musical soundtrack and some sound effects.
Charlie Chaplin said, "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot."
