We’ve uploaded a hilarious new video to our Youtube channel, TheChaplinFilms of Charlie Chaplin without makeup boxing lightweight champion, Benny Leonard, at Chaplin’s studio in 1918. Watch the fun archive footage below. And don’t forget to subscribe to our channel to stay updated on new videos!
This year’s Charlie Chaplin Days in Niles, CA are on June 11 & 12. Visitors can enjoy film screenings, a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and more!
For more information, visit Niles Film Museum’s website.
Last year, we launched the digital distribution of the soundtracks to The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus and City Lights. We also released Charlie Chaplin’s legendary final speech from The Great Dictator on digital platforms such as iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, Amazon, etc.
Very soon, we will be releasing excerpts from the original recording of the music to Modern Times, as well. Stay tuned!
Chaplin’s archive does contain the entire, full, orchestrated scores. But Chaplin, as a filmmaker, was making changes all the time, sort of trial and error, and he was that way as a composer as well. He would compose a piece of music, they would make a short score of it and orchestrate it, and he would sit down with the orchestrator and tell him what to do. They’d make a full score, they’d make parts for the forty to sixty musicians, and then they would listen to it, and he’d go, “Hmm, no, I don’t like that, let’s have the oboe do this line instead, on trumpet here . . .” So players were writing stuff down all the time, because he was dictating the changes he was listening to. All of those changes were done on the parts, or on pieces of paper they attached to the parts. I found music for Modern Times on the back of laundry receipts and paper menus and things like that, whatever scraps of paper players could find at the last moment and write down some notes. - Timothy Brock
Read more about the delicate process of restoring Charlie Chaplin’s music in a new interview of Timothy Brock on Criterion’s website.
We’ve uploaded a new video on our Youtube channel, TheChaplinFilms. Watch it below:
And subscribe to our channel to stay updated on new videos!
Pictured above: Michael Chaplin, one of Charlie Chaplin’s sons, and Pierre Etaix, the revered filmmaker from France, whom we had the pleasure of meeting yesterday evening at the Swiss Embassy in Paris at a presentation of Chaplin’s World by Yves Durand, and of the book The Freak: Chaplin’s Last Film by author Pierre Smolik (a drawing by Pierre Etaix illustrates the book’s preface).
At the mere mention of “Chaplin”, Etaix’s eyes filled with emotion. He spoke of his lifelong admiration for Chaplin.
In the photograph above, Pierre Etaix tells Kate Guyonvarch, managing director of the Chaplin office, that when he was a child he snipped some fur off of his aunt’s coat and stuck it to his upper lip, creating his own Charlot moustache. Etaix also remembers his surprise and awe at seeing Chaplin himself twice at Chaplin film screenings in Paris: once at the former Cinéma Paramount and once at the Cinémathèque Française, where he showed up extra early and sat in the theatre for over an hour and a half to be sure to have a seat, only to be asked to change seats by Cinémathèque staff when Chaplin himself showed up!
Pictured above is no ordinary cog. It is a relic from Chaplin Studios that film archivist and historian Bruce Lawton recently showed us (and let us hold!). The small cog is made of wood and was used as a prop in Modern Times, in a factory scene with Chester Conklin.
In Bruce’s own words:
“It was acquired by my great-grandfather, Don Malkames - who was an A.S.C. cinematographer and early film history preservationist - when he was working in California in the day. He first showed it to me at his house in Yonkers, NY during the summer of 1977 when I was 9 years old - where it was kept in his cinemachinery museum. I was already an avowed Chaplin fanatic - so I was mightily impressed! My Grandfather, Karl Malkames (also an A.S.C. cinematographer - and pioneering film restorer and preservationist) entrusted it to me one Christmas in the mid-1990s. It was Karl that first introduced me to Chaplin films as a very young child (he ran MODERN TIMES for me repeatedly - and it became my favorite film.) Presumably it is one of the VERY few existing cogs from the production.
Thanks, Bruce Lawton, for sharing this bit of history with Chaplin fans. Here he is pictured with the cog:
