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Cinema is primarily an industry, secondarily an art. Squat, tasteful red brick buildings in the heart of Hollywood are the physical evidences of Chaplin's supremacy as industrialist as well as artist. Chaplin finances his own pictures and shrewdly supervises their sale and distribution. He writes them, casts them, directs them. He works by mood. He shoots thousands upon thousands of feet of film, saving perhaps 50 feet that he feels is right. When things go wrong he stops work and plays tennis. Sometimes he works all night. He listens to a great lot of advice, disregards most of it. Sometimes his spasmodic working habits bewilder his subordinates. To ease their minds he has instructed a special studio watchman to keep a lookout for his car and swiftly warn the workers of its approach. Thus laggards will not lose their self-respect by having the boss catch them in a poker game.
Chaplin does not reject the sound device because he does not think his voice will register. His objection is that cinema is essentially a pantomimic art. Says he: "Action is more generally understood than words. Like the Chinese symbolism it will mean different things according to its scenic connotation. Listen to a description of some unfamiliar object—an African wart hog, for example. Then look at a picture of the animal and see how surprised you are."
City Lights cost $1,500,000 to produce.
Before release it had sold to a guaranteed booking of more than $4,000,000. Chaplin worked frantically to make it his greatest, to justify his faith in pantomime. Chance guests would be hauled into his projection room to see rushes of the film. They were asked to describe what they had seen. If they missed a point that was intended to be clear Chaplin—feeling that his story must be understood by everyone, even the stupid or the distracted—would have the scene refilmed. In rest intervals he would play "Violetera" on his harmonium and sing an imitation of Spanish words to it in the manner of Raquel Meller. One afternoon he nearly lost his mustache. He has had the same one for 15 years. A Manhattan theatrical barber picked it out for him. He says that if he ever loses it he will play smooth shaven. On this day he came in just in time to see a guest about to throw the mustache away, mistaking it for hair combings on Chaplin's makeup table.
* A piece of business or dialogue often repeated.