(2 of 4)
It took Chaplin two years to make City Lights. He made Modern Times in 148 shooting days. Reason: for the first time in his career he used a script. Far less complete than those used by other producers, it merely sketched the story. As usual, Chaplin outlined his own sets, directed by acting out all parts, developed his own camera angles on the sets, cut each sequence after making it, scored the picture himself in the projection room by playing accompaniments on a small piano with a musical stenographer to write down what he played. Though he plays violin, banjo, harp, organ, concertina and several brass horns, Chaplin cannot read music. The script also contained dialog, of which less than 10% is spoken or used as captions, inserted to give actors timing for their scenes. Sample, from the scene in which The Tramp and The Gamin make friends, sitting on a sidewalk.
Gamin: What's your name?
Tramp: I have no name.
Gamin: No name?
Tramp: It's a silly one. You wouldn't like it. It begins with X.
Gamin: Not eczema?
Tramp: It's worse than that. It's Charlie.
Gamin: There's no X in that.
Tramp: I never thought of that.
Chaplin's small studio, spread out in the sun behind high walls on La Brea Avenue, is like a legendary castle charmed to resist change by some sorcery laid upon it before talkies were invented. In it he has made small effort to keep abreast of new developments in the industry whose one acknowledged genius he is. He sees few pictures, afraid that other actors might influence him. Shooting Modern Times, he worked harder and more systematically than ever before. He got to the lot at ii or 12 o'clock every morning, seldom left before 2 or 3 o'clock the next morning. Chaplin casts his own pictures but never interviews applicants for roles.
He peeps through a curtain while a subordinate conducts the interview, signals privately whether or not the applicant should be hired. This is because he cannot bear to refuse a part. Once in a music hall, an audience booed him. He has not forgotten the humiliation.
Because in the last five years Chaplin has been forced to think of himself as a genius, to recognize in his productions the underlying themes which others first perceived in them, his pictures have lost spontaneity. In Modern Times, the "message" has been underlined rather than, as in the old days, subconsciously implied. Socially, Chaplin's prestige has steadily increased since he went into semiretirement. Although cinemaddicts may be less interested in him. the critical recognition of the 1920's has brought many notables to his door. Some, like Poet Laureate Masefield, who tried repeatedly to get an interview, he unaccountably dodges. Others, like Albert Einstein and H. G. Wells, he welcomes. In entertaining visiting notables, Chaplin's method is to discourse on his guest's specialty. For Wells, he is a student of world affairs; for Einstein, a mathematician. He once spent an evening telling Charles Mitchell how to run National City Bank. It is a tribute to his social prestige that, because he chose her as his companion as well as his leading lady, Paulette Goddard, whose most noteworthy previous role in cinema had been as a Goldwyn Girl in The Kid from Spain, was internationally famed long before Modern Times was previewed.