from Corey

Charlie Chaplin: The First Artist
Charlie Chaplin. What do you think of when you hear that name? Charlie. Chaplin. What alliteration! I know I think of a funny, short man with a mustache and baggy pants. I think of black and white films. I think of catchy tunes from the roaring twenties radiating with the style of “ragtime.” Anything else? Oh, a top hat. Is that all Mr. Chaplin was though? A funny man in a top hat and baggy pants? Or did his existence possibly influence and innovate Hollywood to morph into what it is today?
All of these aforementioned images presently reside as the defining aspects of Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant career in many people’s minds, which is absolutely fine in many regards. However, in this essay, I not only intend to enlighten the general American about his biographical life and achievements, but to also enlighten myself. I mean I’m an actor in the business. He revolutionized American and silent filmmaking. I am bound to learn something from him. The following essay will discuss the life and works of Charlie Chaplin and how his career changed the way we experience film today.
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was born April 16, 1889 in Walworth, England to actress Hannah Hill and a ballad singer with the name of Charles Chaplin Sr. Charlie lived a rough childhood due to a number of devastating complexities: his mother was mentally ill and was repeatedly placed into the Cane Hill Asylum at Coulsdon and his father was a raging alcoholic who eventually died from alcoholism in 1901. Due to these simultaneous extremities, Charlie, along with his older brother Sydney, were forced to closely bond and quickly mature. However, due to their parent’s abilities and familiarities in the show business, the Chaplin brothers were able to find a “home” on the stage as well as natural ability when it came to performing.
Charlie flourished with success even from a very young age. His father was essentially the catalyst in beginning Charlie’s stage career. He introduced Charlie to the “music hall” and the art of “vaudeville comedy” throughout England. Eventually “Charlie made his professional debut as a member of a juvenile group called ‘The Eight Lancashire Lads’ and rapidly won popular favour as an outstanding tap dancer” (charliechaplin.com). Charlie found immediate success with American audiences as well, specifically in the stage arena of performance. He rapidly gained the reputation of “the funny man” from his vaudeville comedy acts, which eventually lead to multiple motion picture contracts and, in 1913, “12 two-reel comedies” including “The Floorwalker”, “The Fireman”, “The Vagabond”, “One A.M.” (charliechaplin.com). Chaplin soon gained recognition among American audiences as well as film companies and therefore was in very high demand from both. This high demand inadvertently caused him to move to working as an independent producer. As an independent, Chaplin was able to work much more freely and maintained the ability to incorporate what he had always desired to put into film. Robert Moss pinpoints one of Chaplin’s essential breakthroughs in his book Charlie Chaplin: A Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies: “In 1918 Chaplin continued on his mercurial course, signing with First National in what was the most celebrated contract of that time: the comedian was to receive one million dollars for producing eight films” and he maintained full control of them as well (14). In the post World War 1 era Chaplin doubtlessly lived as the most popular and premier entertainer in the world. Since he worked as an independent, Chaplin gravitated towards hopping from one film company to another, “culminating into the creation of his own firm, United Artists, in 1919” (Moss 15). (“United Artists” still is a successful, functioning film studio today, with CMU alum Paula Wagner as its CEO, and has represented numerous iconic films throughout the years including “Rocky,” “The Pink Panther,” and “James Bond.”) Throughout the early 1900’s, Chaplin was THE celebrity. His success was incredible. Moss reminisces about “A small theatre in New York made a…fortune showing nothing but Chaplin pictures for nearly a decade” (15). So, it is easy to see the large amount of success Chaplin gained in less than two decades. But why were his films successful? What about them were so intriguing and funny?
Chaplin’s style at the beginning of his career was extremely witty, witty to the point of almost containing a mischievous aspect to it. It is easily categorized as part of the “slapstick” genre of comedy “involving fast and furious antics, usually improvised in some familiar location: a doctor’s office, a bar, a park, and the like” (Moss 24). In 1914, Chaplin began his era of filmmaking famously regarded as the “Keystone comedies.” On the technical side of things, these types of reels could easily be made anywhere between a day and a week and cost less than $1,000. They were very cheap, quick to produce, and brief in length. While at Keystone, Chaplin made thirty-two comedies of the slapstick genre in one year, “adding attributes and mannerisms as he went along” (Moss 24). Chaplin used parks as settings for many of these farcical films and created very humorous situations with these settings. For example, in “Twenty Minutes of Love” the park bench is the ‘parlor’ where Charlie flirts with somebody else’s girl, using a stolen watch as a gift” (Moss 26). While working at Keystone, Chaplin was also under an apprenticeship with a man named Mack Sennett. Author and professor Donald W. McCaffrey pinpoints the importance of this apprenticeship and how it laid the basis for Chaplin’s future work in his book Focus on Chaplin: “Not one of the Keystone creations ranks with his best works, but it was a formative period – a necessary step in the comedian’s evolving grasp of the cinema medium” (1). His Keystone comedies laid the foundation for what Chaplin accomplished in the film industry. After working for Sennett, Chaplin moved on to work for the Essanay film studio in 1915 where he began to focus more on taking his time with his films and finding the exact effect he desired. “During the year at Essanay, he reduced the volume of his output to 14 films, expanded the shoot schedule a week or two, and increased the investment in each film to between $1200 and $1500” (Moss 35). While at Essanay, Chaplin produced films such as The Tramp and The Bank, where he creatively discovered a character that “would become the great comic portrait of all times” (McCaffrey 1). From there, Chaplin eventually moved on from short two-reel films to producing such silent full length features as The Kid (1921), starring one of the best child actors of all time, Jackie Coogan, along with The Golf Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), and City Lights (1931). According to McCaffrey, with these films “Chaplin reached the zenith of his creative abilities. The tramp-clown figure was the center, the focus, of his creation” (2).
Music was also a paramount aspect of Chaplin’s filmmaking career. Though he was musically untrained, his father, as a ballad singer and performer, had introduced him to the art, ultimately allowing for Chaplin to develop “quick ear, and a superb sense of rhythm, a taste for the art, experience with it on the stage, and an amateur performer’s devotion to it” (charliechaplin.com). We can now see that music was as integral to his films than any other aspect. However, unlike most directors and actors of the time, Chaplin composed most of his own music: “But perhaps of no other one man can it be said that he wrote, directed, acted, and scored a motion picture. Incidentally, Chaplin even conducted the orchestra, himself, during recordings, an added reason for the satisfying impression of wholeness in the Chaplin films” (charliechaplin.com). He was completely self-sufficient – director, actor, singer, composer, and musical director.
Chaplin was essentially the first, legitimate movie star in the film industry. He took stardom to the next level due to his brilliant comedic timing and creative ability. McCaffrey quotes Peter Cotes in a review Cotes wrote pertaining to Chaplin’s My Autobiography in Films and Filming:

“Looking back over Chaplin’s legendary career…and his creation of Charlie, the world’s greatest comedian, the best known figure of our day, and an art which ranged from the pinnacles of high comedy to the ocean depths of human despair, I would call him the first artist of modern times” (3).

Charlie Chaplin is the quintessential comedian of Hollywood’s history. He set the foundation for the comedy on the big screen that we see today, and ultimately made it work. Chaplin revolutionized the styles of comedy with his Keystone, slapstick genre of filmmaking that is now widely regarded as the fundamental source for comedy films. Again, McCaffrey states “Chaplin himself elevated the often labeled ‘lowly’ slapstick to what critics call ‘high art’” (5). I know I now have a greater respect for comedic cinema and the genre of comedy due to what Chaplin accomplished in his lifetime. No matter how hard anyone tries though, Hollywood’s first legitimate funny guy will always be remembered as the short, silent man with the baggy pants, small mustache and bowl hat.