My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin (most read book in the world TXT) 📕

dodges behind a desk, only to expose himself to another, eventually escaping through another door into more glass-partitioned offices, getting further and further away from his base, until he finds himself out on a balcony, nude, over-looking a busy thoroughfare below. This sequence, although photographed, was never used. I thought it better to keep Charlot a nondescript with no background and to discover him already in the army.

Shoulder Arms was made in the middle of a sizzling heatwave. Working inside a camouflaged tree (as I did in one of the sequences) was anything but comfortable. I loathe working outside on location because of its distraction. One’s concentration and inspiration blow away with the wind.

The picture took a long time to make and I was not satisfied with it, and I got everybody in the studio feeling the same way – and now Douglas Fairbanks wanted to see it. He came with a friend and I warned them that I was so discouraged I was thinking of throwing it in the ash-can. The three of us sat in the projection-room alone. From the beginning Fairbanks went into roars of laughter, stopping only for coughing spells. Sweet Douglas, he was my greatest audience. When it was over and we came out into the daylight, his eyes were wet from laughing.

‘You really think it’s that funny?’ I said incredulously.

He turned to his friend. ‘What do you think of him? He wants to throw it in the ash-can!’ was Douglas’s only comment.

Shoulder Arms was a smash hit and a great favourite with the soldiers during the war, but again the film had taken longer than I had anticipated besides costing more than A Dog’s Life. Now I wanted to surpass myself and I thought First National might help me. Since I had joined them they were riding high, signing up producers and other stars and paying them $250,000 a picture and fifty per cent interest in the profits. Their films cost less and were easier to make than my comedies – and certainly grossed less at the box office.

When I spoke to Mr J. D. Williams, the president of First National about it, he said that he would put the matter before his directors. I did not want much, only enough to compensate for the extra cost, which would not have amounted to more than an additional ten or fifteen thousand dollars a picture. He said they would be meeting in Los Angeles within a week, and that I might talk to them myself.

Exhibitors were rugged merchants in those days and to them films were merchandise costing so much a yard. I thought I spoke well and sincerely in pleading my cause to them. I said that I needed a little extra because I was spending more than anticipated, but I might as well have been a lone factory worker asking General Motors for a raise. When I had finished talking there was a silence, then their spokesman stirred. ‘Well, Charlie, this is business,’ he said. ‘You’ve signed a contract and we expect you to live up to it.’

Said I laconically: ‘I could deliver the six pictures in a couple of months, if you want those kind of pictures.’

‘That’s up to you, Charlie,’ said the calm voice.

I continued: ‘I’m asking for an increase to keep up the standard of my work. Your indifference shows your lack of psychology and foresight. You’re not dealing with sausages, you know, but with individual enthusiasm.’ But nothing would move them. I could not understand their attitude, as I was considered the biggest drawing card in the country.

‘I believe it has something to do with this motion picture convention,’ said my brother Sydney. ‘There are rumours that all the producing companies are merging.’

A day later Sydney saw Douglas and Mary. They, too, were perturbed because their contracts were expiring and Paramount had done nothing about it. Like Sydney, Douglas thought it had to do with this film merger. ‘It would be a good idea to put a detective on their track just to know what’s going on.’

We all agreed to hire a detective. We engaged a very clever girl, smart and attractive-looking. Soon she had made a date with an executive of an important producing company. Her report stated that she had passed the subject in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel and had smiled at him, then made the excuse that she had mistaken him for an old friend. That evening he had asked her to have dinner with him. From her report we gathered that the subject was a glib braggart in an esurient state of libido. For three nights she went out with him, staving him off with promises and excuses. In the meantime she got a complete story of what was going on in the film industry. He and his associates were forming a forty-million-dollar merger of all the producing companies and were sewing up every exhibitor in the United States with a five-year contract. He told her they intended putting the industry on a proper business basis, instead of having it run by a bunch of crazy actors getting astronomical salaries. That was the gist of her story, and it was sufficient for our purposes. The four of us showed the report to D. W. Griffith and Bill Hart, and they had the same reaction as we did.

Sydney told us that we could defeat their merger if we announced to the exhibitors that we were forming our own production company and that we intended to sell our productions on the open market and remain independent. At the time we represented the top-drawer attraction of the industry. It was not our intention to go through with this project, however. Our objective was only to stop exhibitors from signing a five-year contract with this proposed merger, for without the stars it would, be worthless We decided that the night before their convention we would appear together in the main dining-room of the Alexandria Hotel for