The Gold Rush 1924 1925 1926 next previous
The Gold Rush Clippings 7/363
Charles Chaplin, Ladies‘ Home Journal, Philadelphia, Oct. 1922.
Airview of Charles Chaplin Studio, Los Angeles, 1922,
Los Angeles Public Library
„During the making of a picture I have no sense of humor“
Editorial content. „We Have to Come to Stay
By Charles Chaplin“
Two Photos. „Charles Chaplin as You Have
Probably Never Seen Him, and, below, the Charlie
Chaplin Everybody Knows“
„THE public is not tired of the motion pictures, but it is tired
of the vogue of the pictures. There have been too many
theaters to fill and consequently too many pictures have been
produced. In the world of entertainment real merit has
always been scarce, and now that merit is demanded of the
pictures, the whole industry finds itself in a sort of slump,
the same sort of slump that the theater has often experienced;
but with all the pessimism that now prevails I see no
reason for believing that the pictures will revert to the mere
recording of news happenings and educational subjects.
The motion picture has come to stay. It is a recognized
medium of art, though it has seldom been exploited
in that way. It has shown great possibilities of providing
a cheap and almost universal amusement, and it
has demonstrated that it can do certain things better than
the stage.
The motion-picture producers must now turn to more
serious work. The picture drama that we have had
so plentifully provided for us in the past must be altered. That
little sweetie of a heroine must go. So, too, must the
eternal triangle of husband, wife and lover. There have been
too many commonplace happy endings arrived at,
not by any process of clear or logical thinking but simply
because it has been thought that virtue must triumph
if the box office is to do a big business. I do not deliberately want
tragedy, nor do I disparage the story that turns out prettily,
but the motion-picture drama of today has no other problem, once
we we are introduced to the heroine, than that this same
young thing shall receive the just reward of her goodness four
or five reels later.
All this has ceased to be entertaining. The public will
demand – and has already shown signs demanding
– if not sterner stuff, at least more sincere material, served
up with less sugar. I do not believe that this means
a growth in taste or a change of standards, but simply that what
we have had in the way of motion-picture drama has
become too cloying.
It seems to me that the successful picture will henceforth
depend upon more actual action, construction and
,business,‘ to those of us who work in the theater or the studios,
means that certain something that the performer does
in a scene that is entertaining apart from its connection in the
building up of a story. If the script or story calls for a
character lighting his pipe, so that later the house may be set
on fire, some directors will merely call upon the actor
at the right time to light that pipe. A more inspired director will
make the lighting of the pipe interesting or individual
in itself so that it seems natural and characteristic, and so that
it will not appear to have been done merely because
of possible importance later.
What the Film Play Needs Today
ALL greatly successful motion pictures and most successful
plays are full of these little incidents which make for the
naturalness and the humor of the entertainment. Frank Craven‘s
fine comedy, The First Year, is full of this very material,
so much so that to a person who knows the theater it is apparent
that it could only have been written by someone who had
appeared on the stage and who knows fully how greatly ,business‘
will help even the best of dialogue.
The reason so many people like the news weeklies
or educational films better than the feature plays is because
they present people who are busy doing things. I am not
interested in the opening of a park by the mayor in some town
where I hope never to be, but the whole circumstance
carries with it that conviction of life and reality which so many
photoplays lack entirely.
Likewise many persons think today that the film
comedies are better than the dramas. If they are right it is
unquestionably due to the fact that the comedies
have paid less attention to plot and trite moralizing than the
dramas. The comedy has had more invention and
it has had more theatrical ,business.‘ It has also known from
the beginning that speed and the quick movement
of objects are essential to the motion picture. The film demands
speed not necessarily in the term of quick movement
but in a combination of circumstances, one happening directly
after another.
I feel sure that the future of the films will take care of itself
not so much because of new blood but by the demands
of a tired and too long acquiescent public. The films can do much
to depict actual life with its comedy and tragedy. Realism
is needed, realism in the sense that there be truth and sincerity
rather than forced and obvious moralizing, which we have
had to satiation.
A film which I saw recently dealt with divorce – a husband
and a wife separated, only to be reunited again in the
end. The original French play upon which the film was founded
probably had the author‘s arguments against divorce,
which he may, with the aid of words, have made interesting
and convincing. What got on the screen was a thin,
undramatic story with obvious sentimentality. This play seemed
to me typical of a whole run of domestic dramas –
hackneyed, thin and false.
A little girl who could not have been more than nine was
sitting near me in the theater. About halfway through
the play she said to her companion: ,Aw, I bet she goes back
to her husband.‘
If the screen is to take up the subject of divorce, and
divorce seems to me doubtful screen material, then it ought not
to be so treated as to be clear to a child of nine.
The public was once satisfied to see a train arrive
and depart, the waves beating on the rocks, and a battleship
floating at anchor. In the old days of the Biograph
Company the simplest of little narratives entertained hugely
by the sheer novelty of the medium which permitted
that something to be told in pictures.
The public, when tired of the extremely simple, demanded
pictures that were a bit more complicated, and we have
progressed much from our old beginnings; but I do not feel that
there is much justification for the relief that the films are
in the rut today. We of the films have not gone ahead as our
public has.
There is not, I suppose, and never has been another business
for which the public feels the same sense of responsibility.
The film fan takes the greatest interest, and he feels he knows
just what is amiss with the whole business. A man in
inland Texas writes me that he has an idea for me that will give
me a fame in this country such as neither I nor anyone
else ever dreamed of having. ,You know how to do it,‘ he writes,
,and I know what the public wants.‘
A woman who had been calling at all of the Hollywood
studios and expressing her views to everyone who will listen to
her is convinced that the pictures are in a slump because
the producers have continued to employ the same actors and
that the public has tired of the same old faces.
No public is more loyal than the motion-picture public.
I know no audience to compare the film fans with except the
regular clientele of the English music halls. There
the tried performers, so long as they keep up their acts,
always make the biggest hits, and the newcomers
are compelled to struggle and to be very good indeed in order
to command any attention.
In the pictures the newcomer has much to defeat.
I remember my own beginning. It was in those early days of the
movies – about nine years ago – that I appeared for
the first time in what was thought to be a very funny comedy.
I had seen the picture number of times, but I was
anxious to know how it would go over an audience, so I went
into a picture theater.
All around me I heard my work being compared with
that of another comedian. ,Who‘s that gink?‘ ,Aw, he‘s no good.‘
,He thinks he‘s funny.‘
Scarcity of Good Acting
IT IS not wholly a question of loyalty to the known actor.
The person who is familiar to the audience has an
advantage from the start. The seconds that intervene between
the introduction of the character and the explanatory
matter in the titles that introduce him are just enough to cause
a slight amount of confusion.
No, the public is not tired of old faces. It is tired of
the old faces in the old material. It would have been even greater
apathy for new faces in the old material.
The public is always weary of the type of acting that
has been exhibited on the screen. Good acting on the screen
is the same as good acting on the stage or anywhere
else – mark the ,good.‘
It is true that one rarely sees much good acting on
the screen; but I do not see or hear of much good acting being
done on the stage in these days. The theater seems
to have lost most of its subtleties, and the actor of today
certainly does not have the training that the actor
of even twenty-five years ago went through.
A great many actors and a great many critics have
insisted that there never can be good acting on
the screen because that certain cooperation, that electrical
something or vibration or understanding that
exists between the audience and the performer is missing.
The mere fact that a man is an actor presupposes
that he has some imagination and the sense of how a thing
should be played. He has felt it in the preparation.
When a thing is perfectly played, regardless of whether
the audience is a small one or the whole world,
the creative artist must know that he is acting the scene
correctly.
In acting before the camera there is more than
an audience. The actor has a sense of importance of the thing
that is grinding away, recording, perhaps immortalizing,
his gesture at the very moment of inspiration. There are many
actors who rehearse extraordinarily well when they go
over scenes before the actual photographing, but when the
command ,Camera!‘ is given, their acting is much less
good. This unquestionably is due to a subconscious knowledge
or fear or sense of the importance of the thing. What
is to be done cannot be undone easily. Things often seem
funny or good in the rehearsal, and when later seen
in the projection room I often wonder why anyone allowed
them to be photographed. I have never, for my own
part, been so nervous before an audience as I have been
before the cameras.
I have never seen in the films an actor who was absolutely
indifferent to the camera. We are still afraid of this
grinding machine that we try to cheat but seldom fool. Every
now and then in a news film you will see someone
who is terribly camera conscious. We have progressed from
that, but not yet have we reached the point where
we can be indifferent. Persons who wish to guy the films will
tell you that babies and animals are the best movie
actors. It is entirely due to their natural unconsciousness
of the camera.
My quarrel with screen acting is not so much on
the score of what it has borrowed or failed to borrow from
the stage, but with the working out of its own problems.
Conveying thought on the stage is simpler than on the screen.
This is obviously due to the natural pauses or spaces
that come between speeches. On the stage, when a character
speaks a line such as ,I want that,‘ and another replies
,You can‘t have it,‘ the meaning is not only clear but the attention
is readily focused on the characters speaking in turn.
As the movies developed there came into being what are
called spoken titles. These are merely printed words
of dialogue. The expression on the actor‘s face is supposed
to indicate the speaker and his thought. The problem
is to attract attention to him, and then after an interval to the
character who has the answering line, such as
,You can‘t have it.‘
Now on the screen this cannot be accomplished by doing
what the newspaper cartoons and comics do, that is to
print a balloon of words floating out of the mouth of the comic
figures.
The spoken titles besides being most difficult to act
correctly will always be inferior to the voice, but in spite of the
difficulties I see nothing wrong with the film as a medium
of artistic expression. It is a medium which is unrestricted, certainly
more so than dancing, which people have for a long time
accepted as a medium for portraying thought.
Film Characters Hard to Sustain
IT IS not easy to sustain character on the screen. Here
and there you will discover a good bit, but it is all too
seldom. I do not know whether the difficulty in acting for the
screen is due to the fact that there are too many scenes
or because the inspiration is lost in the delays that come up in
the photographing of the story. For my own part, I do not
believe that I have ever sustained a character through an entire
picture, and the one that I am working on now is my
ninety-eighth.
Acting for the screen, just as in the theater, is an individual
matter. New personalities will occasionally appear, and
they will have their own particular type of treatment. I have great
faith that when we have more realistic picture drama
realistic acting will result. There will be in time also greater
repression, and it will not seem necessary to have
a character represent hate, joy, guilt, sorrow as a standardized
one hundred per cent product without gradation, as is
too often the case. Guilt as now depicted on the screen always
amuses me. If a man commit a crime, why should he ever
after look as though he were guilty? The audience has seen him
do the deed and knows that detection will follow. In the
meantime the guilty man is trying to get, and perhaps thinking
that he is getting away with it. Not so in filmland. Once
a man has done wrong his guilty face must be read in every
scene.
What too often passes for acting on the screen today
is a matter of make-up. We have too many make-up
or what I call crèpe-hair artists. They can put on a beard and wear
a wig, but that is as far as they go in the assumption
of a character. Sometimes a muscle working in the face
is recorded by the camera, and this is acclaimed
as acting.
The hastily assumed externals, which mean so much
to the impersonation of character in the theater, are
useless on the screen. As a boy of seventeen I played old men
in touring companies in the English provinces – old
colonels and such. This was done chiefly by throaty voice and
labored walk – and a great deal of make-up. On the
screen obviously there is no voice, and the labored walk would
merely burn up footage.
The crèpe-hair bad actor has an emotional sister
who is very tiresome and always commonplace. Her assets are
quivering eyelids, glycerine tears and a chest which
heaves up and down. She faces the camera for a long scene
and fights with her back against against the wall,
as her sister in the theater used to do. Robbed of the wordy
tirade against society, the double standard of morality,
or something or other which sometimes by sheer force carried
along such parts on the stage, this sort of emotional acting
has become unspeakably dull on the screen.
Emotion on the Screen
EMOTION in the pictures does not come from the close-up
of a face in action. It is a matter of construction. When
the crippled boy drops his crutches in The Miracle Man and runs
up the path, the audience felt certain emotional tenseness.
No tears were on the screen.
Before I had anything to do with the pictures I was just
as ignorant as the ordinary person about procedure
and construction in the making of the film. I believed that it was
the usual thing to have a sequence of scenes, and that
these were taken in order and developed and then projected.
I did not know that a reel of about a thousand feet was
made up of a hundred scenes averaging ten feet each and that
these were put together and rearranged and edited
and cut until the finished product is thought ready for the theater.
Nor did I know that for a finished reel of a thousand feet,
ten thousand feet of film might have been taken and the best
bits of this put together.
Most of the people who make pictures, it seems to me,
make the mistake of wanting too much plot. The
scenario writer and the director build and rebuild, criss-cross
and dove-tail and lay so many pipes in preparation
for the plot or a situation that when the time for it arrives there
is an anti-climax.
I feel certain that it is better to begin with a casual
or a general idea. In my own work I have found that an elaborate
plot is not necessary – just a slim structure or a sequence
of scenes which will enable me to create a great deal of action
and business which will entertain the audience apart from
the story that is to be developed. A plot is of no importance to me
unless it does suggest these opportunities.
I was looking over some old notes the other day, the notes
from which The Kid, my most successful picture, was made.
There was only one idea, and that was that the character I play in
all my pictures was somehow to be made responsible
for a child who is to get into all sorts of mischief and especially
into a fight with a larger boy whose father is to be a great
bruiser. This father was to demand that, if his boy is licked, I fight
him. In my original plan for the story I had some indication
of the nice feeling of comradeship which resulted in the picture,
but there was originally no idea of parenthood or of
any of the things which made the appeal when the picture was
finished. These things developed as we began to work
and naturally grew out of what we were doing. They were not
merely accidents, because they were inherent in the
material with which we began.
The screen needs plays, and there is no use in getting
away to a reading start, as nine out of ten pictures do.
Usually all there is in the first reel is a great many introductions
of characters, a close-up and the same character at a
distance and a few views of scenery which are supposed to
create atmosphere. All this tends to make every picture
seem like most other pictures. If these same stories were to be
put on the stage, no matter how hastily they were slapped
together, they would occasionally begin in action.
The film play is nearer the theater than it is story-telling,
and the writer for the screen should have some
knowledge of the proscenium. If you could imagine a play
in fifty scenes, you would have in the theater some
approximation of what we are trying to do in the pictures.
Importance of Effective Entrances
ONE of the important things in the construction of a play is
providing effective entrances for the leading characters.
Often the minor players feel this has been done at their expense
and merely to fatten a part which is already good.
But there is something more to this than the mere feeding of a
star‘s vanity. On the screen it is most difficult
to get the leading characters on in interesting action.
In the theater an entire act may be devoted
to talking about an important character. In a revival of Sherlock
Holmes, in London, I played Billy the page in Holmes‘
Baker Street apartment. All the characters in the first act did
nothing except talk about the great detective and his
marvelous powers. William Gillette, who wrote the play and was
the star, knew that it was far more effective to come on
toward the end of the act after there had been a good deal
of preparation, and that any audience would be more
ready to accept Holmes‘ greatness after they had heard the other
characters talk about him.
It is much easier for a comedian to get an effective
entrance than it is for the leading character in a drama. It seems
to me that the entrance in The Kid was very effective.
First came a succession of melodramatic scenes, and since
the spectator knew from my association with the picture
that it was a comedy, he was naturally led to wonder all during
this melodrama what the possible connection could
be and just how the child that I adopt from the ash can could
possibly get to the back alley where I am discovered.
In The Vagabond there was another effective
entrance – just the familiar feet with the big shoes walking
on the other side of a swinging bar door.
In The Mark of Zorro, Zorro, the part played by Douglas
Fairbanks, comes into the story effectively and
legitimately. In a tavern a number of soldiers are talking about
this good-bad man who commits crimes to relieve the
oppressed. A boasting sergeant tells the others just what he will
do when he comes face to face with this Zorro. The door
is thrown open and a masked figure enters. It is Zorro, and he
soon proves that everything that has been said of him
is true.
But all these considerations are really not my worries,
for the making of a comedy does not entail quite
the same search for material. Ideas of comedy are pretty much
the same and have been for centuries.
The comedy that lives is the robust comedy that keeps
its feet on the ground, the comedy that may even go
in for filth, for contrast. The too sweet and too vague comedy
loses its point too often and is not long popular,
Buffoonery does not die. It has come to us from the classics.
There is slapstick in the comedy of Shakespeare
and Molière. To my way of thinking, the screen does
comedy better than anything else.
Comedy on the screen can be made more
intimate by the enlarging of every important bit of business
or character detail.
Then, too, screen comedy is a jack-in-the-box sort
of a thing and admirably attuned to the mechanical grinding
of the projection machine.
I do not feel that the showing of the film comedy
requires music, but when in a serious play a man in evening
dress walks into a room and begins to ,emote,‘
something is needed to deaden the mechanical noises
if we are to take the actor‘s emotion seriously.
Screen comedy used to put a great del of reliance
upon the chase, the throwing of food and the
tragedy of the banana skin. Because of the presence
of these things, many theatergoers felt somewhat
superior to the robustness of our humor.
When I wanted to get more repression into my work I found
there was little enthusiasm.
In a comedy called Making a Living, I stood on a street
corner and borrowed some money from another character. When
this was projected the scene got a laugh, but no one
connected with the making of it thought the material of any use
whatever. It was much more comic to knock over
an apple cart or to fall into some mortar or to knock a man off
a ladder. I did, however, gradually get something
a little more subtle into my work and come to play scenes
with facial expression.
Creating Comic Situations
ONE of my earliest sure-fire methods of obtaining a comic
situation was to let dignity collapse. This of course is
much the same as throwing food or beating a man. I also found
that to quarrel with a man bigger than myself, as in Easy
Street, was certain to make for humor. The triumph of the mite
over the mighty was sure to be sympathetic. It is the old
idea of the underdog, or of David and Goliath.
In those days I was just as flippant about the films as the rest.
I did not consider the film medium as anything except
a means to get to the public. It never appeared to me as an art.
As I look back upon it, this does not seem strange, for
in the early days we took a picture a week. We would start out
with a company made up as a policeman, a sailor, a big
man, a girl, a nursemaid or any other perfectly familiar or labeled
characters. We had no particular idea of what we were
going to do, and we would go to the park and just sort of let a
picture happen. It was later almost impossible to work
up any sort of comedy in the streets the way we used to, for the
crowds often interfered and we could not concentrate.
Often we would contrive to get them to interfere and join in the
picture so that the three-dollar-per-day for extras might
be saved.
Frequently visitors want to see the making of a comedy,
because the think that the whole thing will be a great lark and that
they will have much that is funny to tell to the people
at home. I always feel self-conscious when visitors are present,
because I know they are going to be disappointed. The
taking of a comedy is such a laborious, tedious proceeding, far
more so than the taking of an ordinary drama.
People often ask me, since my pictures are comedies, why
I cannot tell a score of amusing things that happen
during the taking of a comedy – of Shoulder Arms, of Easy Street
– and I always refer these inquirers to members of my
company or to my manager. It is not funny to me. During the
taking of a picture I have no sense of humor.“
There are trade press quotations and comments nearly a year
later in Motion Picture News, Sept. 15, 1923.
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The Gold Rush 1924 1925 1926 next previous
