A new collection of Chaplin’s Essanay films will be released by Summer 2015. Today, you can see the impressive results of this painstaking restoration on Blu-ray/DVD in CHAPLIN’S MUTUAL COMEDIES, now available in a Limited Edition SteelBook.

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1. What sparked your interest in silent films and Chaplin films in particular?

2. You’re here to premiere your new restorations of two of Chaplin’s Essanay films: A NIGHT IN THE SHOW (1915) and THE BANK (1915). Tell us a little about what makes these two films special.

3. You have devoted countless hours to track down rare pieces of footage. What are you looking for? What would make a film element of no interest during the restoration process?

4. What is your favorite piece of lost or rare footage that you’ve found?

5. You have been collaborating on The Chaplin Project for over a decade. Now that you are wrapping up the Essanay film restorations, is this the end?

6. Chaplin shot the Keystone comedies, then the Essanays, and then the Mutual comedies, yet you decided to restore the films out of order. Why save Essanay for last?

A new collection of Chaplin’s Essanay films will be released by Summer 2015. Today, you can see the impressive results of this painstaking restoration on Blu-ray/DVD in CHAPLIN’S MUTUAL COMEDIES, now available in a Limited Edition SteelBook.

For more exclusive interviews like this one, plus film preservation news and special discounts, sign up for the Flicker Alley Newsletter.

You can see the full restoration results in Cinerama’s SEARCH FOR PARADISE, now available for pre-order.

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Because itinerant filmmakers operated at the furthest fringes of industrial filmmaking, they left few records behind and were rarely mentioned in industry literature of the time. Most of the information about these films is found almost entirely in local newspaper articles and the advertisements taken out by the filmmakers themselves. Unfortunately, because itinerant filmmaking peaked in the 1930s, the discovery of a new filmmaker is often followed by a search that ends with the discovery of his or her obituary. The lack of written information about this phenomenon makes oral history one of the more fruitful methodologies for studying local filmmaking because it both unearths facts about the productions and reveals the feelings that the films evoked for participants at the time of their creation and in intervening years.

The pages that follow are excerpts from interviews, both published and unpublished, with the subjects and makers of four narrative itinerant series. These oral histories show the diverse and sometimes contradictory stories to which the productions gave rise. By uniting them here, I hope to provide a new perspective on a genre that has been all but lost to film history.

***

Melton Barker and The Kidnappers Foil

Melton Barker was the most widely traveled and long-lasting of the itinerant film producers, returning again and again to his series The Kidnappers Foil for more than four decades. Barker clung to his original 1930s script with amazing tenacity over the years, keeping it virtually unchanged into the 1970s. The barebones plot revolves around the kidnapping and attempted ransoming of “Betty Davis,” a local girl who is eventually rescued by a gang of local kids. The script was designed to get as many children on screen as possible, with one spoken line per child, to lure their parents and friends into the theaters as well as to collect the fee that Barker charged for so-called acting lessons.

As he crisscrossed America, Barker frequently returned to the same towns to film different versions of The Kidnappers Foil. He traveled to the Texas Panhandle town of Childress twice, once in 1936 and again twelve years later. Childress’s two Betty Davises were Dory Dugan, who starred in the 1936 version, and Eugenia “Genie” Houseman, featured in the 1948 film. Dugan, who was interviewed by Caroline Frick and American Public Radio’s Michael May in 2006, said that her memories revolved largely around going to “a big house on the other side of town” for the filming. “That was a big treat for me,” she said. “It was very expensive, since we had nothing. We were very poor people.”

Genie Houseman’s recollections of her participation were somewhat hazy at first, but over the course of my 2009 interview with her, she was able to recall many memories of the film. . . Barker, never missing an opportunity to play up his fictitious Hollywood connections, occasionally attempted to convince the parents that their children were on the way to stardom. “Later, it must have been when they brought the movie back [for the screening],” remembered Houseman, “he offered my mother eight hundred dollars to bring me to Hollywood. My mother was a schoolteacher, and she said, ‘Oh, no, no, no.’”

Although screenings of The Kidnappers Foil, as well as most other itinerant film series, were generally held as soon after filming as possible to capitalize on the publicity that had accompanied the production, Houseman’s recollection was that

“ten years later they showed it at the [Childress] Theater for the first time—I would have been seventeen at the time. I remembered crawling down in my seat because it was a little embarrassing. My mother didn’t know that they were showing it, so she never saw it. They said that they were going to show it every ten years, but I guess they just left it in the theater, because that’s where they found it later.”

For those itinerant film actors lucky enough to see themselves on the screen again decades later, the impact of the childhood experience is often multiplied by both the passage of time and the ability to share it with their children and grandchildren. Judy White was five years old when she played the Betty Davis role in the 1947 Odessa, Texas, version of The Kidnappers Foil. She spoke with me by phone from her home in Grand Prairie, Texas, more than six decades after her star turn, but her memories of the film were still fresh, and she grew more and more animated as she recalled the story:

“. . . It was very exciting, because I really thought that I was a star at that point, so going to the premiere was wonderful. And I don’t know if they sold tickets, but I know that those of us who were in the film got in first, and I thought that was pretty special. And they had lots of lights and there was lots of noise and a big crowd outside the theater as we went in. So we really felt “Hollywood.” I don’t know that they had the big lights that turned around, but it was a well-lighted place for downtown Odessa. It was very special for somebody my age. Whether as an adult I would have thought that was a big commotion or not, I don’t know, but I went expecting it to be special, and I thought it was. I don’t know if it was like a premiere or not, but that’s the way I felt about it. . . Everybody thought it was a fun thing to do. I’ve thought about it through the years, just off and on, thinking, “Wasn’t that a funny thing that we did?” I bragged to my grandchildren that I’d been in the movies, you know? They were impressed! It was a fun thing, and a fun thing to remember.”

The once flourishing genre of itinerant films had long been forgotten by 1972, so reporter Owen Taylor, perhaps anticipating skeptical readers’ feelings that the entire operation might be a scam, also interviewed two mothers of children who appeared in the film:

“A lot of people think it’s fake or something,” says Mrs. Roy Peacock, whose 6-year-old Brain [sic] is in the cast, “but we think it will be a good experience for Brain. He really wants to do it, too.” Mrs. Lyndol Ellison says that she told Barker she thought it all sounded like “a moneymaking” scheme when she registered daughter Penny, 10, and son Scott, 8. “He said that he made money from this, alright, but he said that he also had to pay for his expenses. But if he does what he promises it will be worth it,” she says. Barker, apparently responding to Mrs. Ellison’s comment about his movies being merely a money-making gimmick, replied, “I get that sort of thing. It usually comes from ignorant people who don’t know what’s involved. Actually,I could probably make some money at this sort of thing if I didn’t have to buy film and have it processed,” which he estimated cost him four hundred to five hundred dollars.

Two of the other stars of the Cleveland The Kidnappers Foil, Laura Smith Legge and her brother Lance Smith, were eleven and six years old, respectively, at the time of the film’s production. [Laura recalls:]

“Mr. Barker had us to sit on top of a picnic table in a row and also on the bench part of the table. One by one, he told us what he wanted us to say. When he came to me, he told me to say “Come up and see me sometime, boys” [like Mae West] and to put my hand behind my head and push my hair up like I was flirting . . . then he told the boys to say “Woo-wooo” after my line. Well, that embarrassed the stuffing out of all of us, as we were at the age that flirting didn’t come that easy yet. Then he gave out the rest of the lines and told us to speak up and not to squint our eyes (it was a sunny day). He set his camera up on a tripod and the filming began. He played the part of the robber that day and some kid’s father played the Dad. We did several takes and that took the better part of the day. Parents were standing on the edge of the filming area watching intently. I remember everyone having a good time. Mr. Barker was a very nice man and he enjoyed every minute of it.

***

Oral history is a technique that is used occasionally in traditional cinema studies, but historians of itinerant film do not just benefit from interviews with the participants, they require them. This is not just because of the historiographic limitations mentioned earlier but rather because itinerant films derive so much of their importance, and perhaps even their primary meaning, from the reactions of the audience. These screenings, which were often literally a single show but at the most a week of shows in the local theater, were designed to be an event for the local people in attendance, even if the film itself was just a ten-minute short that played in the program where the cartoon would usually go. Ultimately, it is only through listening to the impressions of the participants that we can begin to understand these films.

***

Dwight Swanson is a specialist in amateur film and regional film production and has lectured and written extensively on home movies and amateur film, including presentations at the Orphan Film Symposium, the Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium, the University Film and Video Association, and the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ annual conferences. He is a past member of the National Film Preservation Board, and is past co-chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Small Gauge and Amateur Film Interest Group and the Regional Audio-Visual Archivists’ Interest Group. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Center for Home Movies.

Source: The Moving Image, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp. 102-114. 

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You can watch Melton Barker’s THE KIDNAPPERS FOIL in WE’RE IN THE MOVIES: PALACE OF SILENTS & ITINERANT FILMMAKING, now available on Blu-ray/DVD.

The Cinerama camera on the set of the shoot in the Arabian Peninsula.

Bedouins and Boy Scouts in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the Arabian-American Oil Co. was located.

Shooting a scene on the Darjeeling Railroad in India.

Shooting along the Ganges River, which flows south from the Himalayas.

Cinerama’s SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD Blu-ray/DVD Combo is now available for Pre-Order.

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Pictured Above: Wausau Daily Record-Herald, September 17, 1914

This September 17 marks the 100-year anniversary of the premiere of THE LUMBERJACK. The oldest surviving film made in Wisconsin, THE LUMBERJACK was produced by a group of itinerant filmmakers who traveled from town to town making “local talent” pictures. Seventy years later, the making of this local film became the subject of the documentary WHEN YOU WORE A TULIP AND I WORE A BIG RED ROSE. Both films are now included in the WE’RE IN THE MOVIES: PALACE OF SILENTS & ITINERANT FILMMAKING Blu-ray/DVD collection. In celebration of THE LUMBERJACK‘s milestone anniversary, we’re taking a look at the only known contemporary reviews of the film, courtesy of WHEN YOU WORE A TULIP‘s director, Stephen Schaller.

THE LUMBERJACK was previewed for the film’s cast on Wednesday morning, September 16, 1914. The public premiere was the following evening, September 17, 1914. As indicated in the half-page ad above, THE LUMBERJACK was paired with “the big two reel biograph” THE HONOR OF THE LAW. Although the biograph now appears in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Schaller’s years-long search for a mention of the film in reference work has not yielded any results and it is unclear whether a copy survives.

Wausau Daily Record-Herald, September 16, 1914, p. 2

Notes Schaller:

“The review of the opening night events appeared in the following day’s newspaper under the headline ‘Amusements.’ It’s reported that ‘great appreciation of the acting of the cast was shown by the enthusiasm of the audience’ and ‘Mr. and Mrs. H. J. Hagge as the principals were heartily encored.’ The Rothschild Park bridge railing collapse is described as a ‘thriller which was not anticipated when the picture was arranged.’ However, the death of Paragon Film’s executive, Edward Rosenthal, is not mentioned.

Note, too, that the reviewer twice mentions interior scenes of the saw mill which were ‘very pleasing.’ Sadly, there are no interior scenes of the saw mill in the extant print. This is why I inserted my own intertitle ‘Missing Footage? Site of the McMillian Saw Mill’ into WHEN YOU WORE A TULIP and followed it with a 180 panorama of the now vanished mill’s location.”

Wausau Daily Record-Herald, September 18, 1914, p. 3

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You can watch THE LUMBERJACK and WHEN YOU WORE A TULIP AND I WORE A BIG RED ROSE in WE’RE IN THE MOVIES: PALACE OF SILENTS & ITINERANT FILMMAKING, now available on Blu-ray/DVD.

My first exposure to the films of Mack Sennett came at about age 7, via a television airing of Robert Youngson’s compilation WHEN COMEDY WAS KING. This film featured short clips from classic shorts, starring Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Gloria Swanson, Bobby Vernon, Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin and Billy Bevan. (Several of the films excerpted in that 1960 compilation appear on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION, VOL. ONE, including Fatty and Mabel Adrift, Teddy at the Throttle and Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies.)

My appetite for classic silent comedy in general, and Mack Sennett in specific, was further whetted through viewings of 8mm films at pizza parlors and Disneyland’s Main Street Cinema. These viewings led to the ultimate next step for a youthful film enthusiast in the 1970s: the purchase (thanks to scrimped-away allowance money) of Regular 8 and Super 8 format movies (from companies such as Blackhawk Films), and a projector to show them on. Small format films could also be checked out at local libraries, as could books that provided a few tidbits of information about Mack Sennett and his films, mostly about his ground-breaking early Keystone comedies. But the lack of an all-encompassing historical document about Sennett, his films, and those who appeared in those comedies and helped him make them, led me on a quest that several decades later resulted in my book, MACK SENNETT’S FUN FACTORY.

Mack Sennett had a long and successful run as the operator of an independent film studio–beginning in 1912 during the “Nickelodeon” era of early silent films, and ending in 1933, at a time when sound movies and the era of the “Hollywood studio system” was well underway. During that 21 year period, Sennett released his films through a series of distributors. During his first five years as a studio head, Sennett did business under auspices of the Keystone Film Company, whose famous comedies were distributed first by Mutual, and later by Triangle. Sennett left Keystone in 1917 to go truly independent, and distributed his silent films through Paramount, then Associated First National, then Pathé. In the sound era, Sennett’s films were handled by the Educational Film Exchange (whose specialty, belying its name, was comedy shorts, not educational films) and Paramount (for a second time, during his final year of operation in 1932-33).

As I studied these films, I began to realized that the majority of Sennett-produced silent films that were widely available came from either the Keystone period (1912-17) or the Pathé period (1923-29). Every Sennett clip that had appeared in WHEN COMEDY WAS KING came from one of these eras, as did the majority of the 8mm home format prints offered by Blackhawk Films. Blackhawk offered only one film from Sennett’s silent Paramount era (Hearts and Flowers), and none from his First National period. Another company called Film Classics Exchange had a few more Paramounts, and a couple of First Nationals, but still not many in comparison to Keystone and Pathé.

Survival rates of silent films are very low, with some major stars (such as Theda Bara) represented by only one or two surviving films today by which to analyze their work. Often, the survival of a particular film title is aided by it being reissued for theaters, home movies and television at a later date. And the determination upon which films were reissued came from several factors. One was the popularity of the star.

That is the reason that, up until just about four years ago, it was believed that 34 of the 35 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone in 1914 (34 shorts and one feature) survived. The lone missing film was believed to be Her Friend the Bandit (though Chaplin’s appearance in this film will not be 100% confirmed until if and when it is found–which seems fairly unlikely at this point). Then, in 2010, THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION, VOL. ONE co-producer Paul Gierucki discovered a film called A Thief Catcher, which is on the Volume One set. Chaplin’s appearance as a Keystone cop in this film upped his Keystone appearance total to 36 films. Some of the other Keystone Chaplin short films were believed lost for decades until their re-appearances, often in battered and dupey reissue prints in smaller gauges like 16mm and 9.5mm. It has only been in recent years that efforts have been made to combine higher quality surviving 35mm prints from these films with footage from smaller gauge prints filling in any missing footage–such as Recreation on this set, and the entities making up the “Chaplin Keystone Project” who restored the films seen on Flicker Alley’s CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE set.

Other factors that influenced whether films were reissued (thus allowing for a higher chance of survival), was the success and failure of a given film organization, and also the distribution company’s involvement with the home market. Certainly, many Keystone comedies were reissued due to their popularity with audiences, and the star quotient of such stars as Chaplin, Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. However, Keystone was also a company that ceased to exist in 1918, about a year after Mack Sennett himself had severed relations with the organization. Ownership of Keystone film rights fell to Harry Aitken, the man who headed the Triangle Film Corporation, and who subsequently assumed legal ownership of Keystone’s original parent organization, the New York Motion Picture Company. With no new pictures to distribute after Triangle itself folded, Aitken began reissuing old Keystone product under a number of company names, or leased it to other reissue organizations. Later, around 1921, Aitken was sued by several of his former partners and business associates for financial improprieties. When Aitken lost the suit, more Keystone product was reissued to satisfy creditors.

For these reasons, a large number of a Keystone comedies were reissued. Some, particularly those once offered for home sale by Blackhawk films, such as Bangville Police, Fatty and Mabel Adrift and Teddy at the Throttle, have remained in the public eye for many decades. Others were reissued only once or twice, and in a small number of prints. In those cases, we have the film collectors who purchased them originally, and collectors who acquired the prints in later years  to thank for their re-emergence many decades after they were believed lost to the general populace. (A number of those  films believed lost, but saved by collectors, appear on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION, including On His Wedding Day, A Fishy Affair and The Great Toe Mystery.)

Additionally–for a majority of the Keystone-Mutual comedies of late 1914 through fall 1915–their survival is largely due to a trio of strange bedfellows: film pirates, Mack Sennett and the Library of Congress. Until about 1912, the Library of Congress required each film submitted for copyright to be accompanied by a “paper print”: literally, a long roll of 35mm wide paper featuring a positive contact print of the film. Mack Sennett and his bosses at the New York Motion Picture Company (Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann) rather cavalierly had neglected to copyright any of their films from the beginning in 1912, through much of 1914. However, the comedies’ immense popularity–enhanced by an even greater reception for their new star Charlie Chaplin–resulted in many Keystones being bootlegged by film pirates. After taking a few film bootleggers to court, Keystone began copyrighting its films in the fall of 1914. In doing so, they also took the by-then-unnecessary step of submitting paper prints of the films to the Library of Congress. As a result (though original prints do exist of some of these titles) many Keystones of this period survive only via these paper prints. Examples of titles from the “Keystone paper print era” on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION are A Bird’s a Bird and Gussle’s Day of Rest. (It should also be noted that the majority of Sennett’s Biograph titles from 1908 to 1912–such as The Curtain Pole and A Dash Through the Clouds–exist because of the paper prints submitted to the Library of Congress by that company.)

Many of Sennett’s comedies distributed during the years 1923-29, by the Pathé Exchange, survive largely due to Pathé’s very aggressive pursuit of the home movie market, beginning around 1922 with its “Pathé Baby” program–issuing shorter versions of two-reel comedies in home gauges such as 9.5mm. (We have Pathé’s home movie releases to thank not only for the survival of Mack Sennett’s 1920s films, but also many of his chief rival Hal Roach, who had been distributing through Pathé since the mid-1910s.) Though numerous Pathé Sennett two and three reelers survive complete (and from 35mm nitrate print sources), others exist today only in truncated one reel and half-reel versions via Pathé home market releases. Sometimes, a film can be restored to a near-complete version with the combination of incomplete footage from a variety of sources, as was done on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION with the film A Rainy Knight.

Often (somewhat ironically), the chance of survival for some silent films can be doomed inversely due to the success of the company distributing them. That is the case for many Mack Sennett Comedies released through Paramount during 1917-21–considered the “holy grail” period of Sennett due to the scarcity of examples from this era. Paramount Pictures was formed in 1914, as the conglomeration of several companies including Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, and the Jessie L. Lasky Motion Picture Company. One hundred years later, Paramount is still going strong. Paramount is arguably the company that had the most influence on creating Hollywood’s “studio system” during its rise in the late 1910s, when it created the model of a large studio which owned and operated its own theater chain which controlled all films on its program–features, shorts, newsreels and cartoons. This period coincided with the period when Mack Sennett was distributing its product through Paramount.

When Sennett left Paramount in 1921, he sold his 78 two-reelers back to Paramount. Though Paramount did reissue a handful of Sennett comedies in the early 1920s (and some of those do survive), the majority of the Sennett-Paramount films presumedly languished in studio vaults until they deteriorated, or were discarded–like many of Paramount’s other silent films. Paramount was too busy producing new pictures to worry about reissuing old ones, particularly after sound arrived in Hollywood and silent films became “passé.” As a result, less than two dozen of Sennett’s 78 Paramount comedies survive. Two of the survivors appear on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION: Hearts and Flowers and Don’t Weaken. The latter is an extreme rarity, and was carefully assembled from two different archival sources for the restoration that appears on the Blu-ray/DVD set.

After leaving Paramount, Mack Sennett became part of a short-lived company called Associated Producers, featuring a number of producers (including Thomas Ince) banding together to form their own company, not unlike the organization formed in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith called United Artists. (One of the films on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION is a 1920 feature film that Sennett distributed through United Artists prior to forming Associated Producers, Down on the Farm. Long available only in a two-reel condensation, this release marks the first appearance of the complete film in any format going back to its original theatrical release.)

The Associated Producers company lasted only a year or two, before being gobbled up by the larger Associated First National company. Several years later, First National itself was merged to become part of Warner Brothers. Sennett released some shorts through First National in 1921-22, such as Gymnasium Jim. Sennett sold the rights to his First National comedies to Warner Brothers in the late 1930s, and because of that Warner reissued footage from a number of Sennett’s films as Vitaphone shorts in the 1940s, featuring narration and music.

In addition to the more-than 1000 short subjects he made from 1912 to 1933, Mack Sennett also produced 18 feature-length films. A majority of these survive, including the aforementioned Down on the Farm, and The Extra Girl, both on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION. However, one of the more intriguing feature titles in Sennett’s canon is The Crossroads of New York: a film which went through many titles and production delays on its way to being finally issued in 1922. Part of what makes the film so interesting is the fact that it was largely intended as a dramatic film, with a few comic interludes. No material from this film was believed to survive, until a very short clip surfaced recently in a European archive. However, THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION, VOL. ONE features a very rare trailer from the feature which includes a few film clips–the only other material known to exist.

Sound films were considered far more lucrative than silent films when, in the 1940s, fledgling television stations across the United States began seeking programming to fill their time slots. As a result, a majority of Mack Sennett’s sound films (released by Educational and Paramount) are known to exist, though most are not widely seen or accessible. The survival rate of Sennett films from 1932-33’s Paramount era are far greater than those of his earlier 1917-21 Paramount era. Nonetheless, many have only been viewed for years in battered or altered prints. Cinemuseum has restored such classic Sennett-produced W.C. Fields two-reelers as The Dentist and The Fatal Glass of Beer to sparkling versions unlike any seen since the films were first released, and they appear on THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION, VOL. ONE.

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THE MACK SENNETT COLLECTION, VOL. ONE is now available on Blu-ray.

Below are three of the newly-restored images. On the left is a page from a faded comic book. On the right is a restoration done by the 3-D Film Archive.

If you have 3-D glasses at home, be sure to place the blue lens over your right eye!

Please note: This red/blue anaglyphic image is for comparison purposes only. The restored images will be presented in full HD on 3-D RARITIES.

Images courtesy of Bob Furmanek and the 3-D Film Archive. For more information on 3-D comic books, please visit the 3-D Film Archive.

Image from Mighty Mouse, Issue #1

Image from Tor, Issue #1

Image from Tor, Issue #1

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SOURCE

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You can watch early itinerant films in WE’RE IN THE MOVIES: PALACE OF SILENTS & ITINERANT FILMMAKING, now available on Blu-ray/DVD.

Can you walk us through the approach you took when restoring CHAPLIN’S MUTUAL COMEDIES?

The approach is simple to describe, but hard to do.

Every one of the films has a title card ahead of it stating where the elements came from. You can see by looking at those 12 forward titles that most of the films were sourced from several different copies, and we’re telling everyone exactly what they were.

Each of the elements was sent to the [Cineteca Bologna] laboratory in Bologna, Italy, except for a couple that were scanned in Hollywood at Technicolor. Bologna did a careful comparison, determined the best elements of each film and scanned those. Some were further restored at Bologna, but most were restored at Lobster Films.

What the restoration involved was first stabilizing the image if it was jumping up and down at all, then taking out blemishes of all kinds, usually by hand, frame by frame. You can take out punch marks, most scratches, frame lines or life lines from old splices. You can put in little pieces from one source to cover up jumps in the action that were in another source. You can steady a picture that was unsteady and adjust contrast and brightness.

If frames were missing, they were put in from other source copies and carefully balanced so you really can’t tell unless you have extraordinarily sharp eyes when we cut from one element to another.

After they were cleaned, the films were speed-corrected.

Those multiple-source, speed-corrected versions were then used to create the scores. There are 24 scores, one orchestral and one improvised piano for each film. Only the score used for ONE A.M. was in a previous release. The other 23 are all new.

What about the title cards?

The titles are all new, but replicas of the original 1916-1917 titles, unlike the reissue titles that have been used in all the other versions [of the Mutuals] since the 1920s.

Each title has 2 components: the graphics and the text. Nobody had tried to replicate the graphics before. We had one reel of an original print of ONE A.M. and one reel of an original print of EASY STREET, and we used those as a matrix for the graphics and used them to recreate the titles for the 12 films. Since ONE A.M. is from fairly early in the collection and EASY STREET from later, we made the assumption that the graphics were the same in all the Mutuals.

Those titles [in CHAPLIN’S MUTUAL COMEDIES] are faithful replicas of the original titles. Copyright documents in the Library of Congress included descriptions and title texts of all the films. Two were missing. For those, we used text from 1920s reissue prints. The titles [in the originals and the reissue prints] weren’t radically different, but occasionally had an extra word or an extra title that had been dropped over the years.

We never found a film that had an original main title, so those are all new and made to look modern.

How did the different source materials guide your restoration decisions? Did run time influence you at all?

We did not restore for run time.

Each film was shot with two different negatives, with two different cameras: the A negative and B negative. The A negative is clearly the better one. You can tell by little things that Chaplin does that are more clever and detailed in one than the other. We tried to restore to the A negative wherever we could, but if a shot was too damaged to restore, we put in footage from the B negative. If there was more material in the B negative that was because they edited it out in the A original.

For example, in THE CURE, there’s a scene where Albert Austin who plays one of the attendants in the sanitarium walks down the hall. In the A negative, he starts to come down the hall and then it cuts away. It was edited this way. In the b neg, he comes down the hall and walks the whole way. Since we decided that we needed the B negative of that scene, we did use that take. Not because it was longer, but because we didn’t have a good condition shot of the A negative version.

You’ve worked on restorations of the Mutuals in the past. What sets this version apart?

This is by far the best, partly because we got better original material than ever before and partly because the technology has come so far in the past 10 years that even when sourced from the same material, this new version looks better.

A lot of work in the past was done at NTSC which is 525 scan lines; these were done at 2000 scan lines. And the ability to clean stuff up frame-by-frame has become exponentially more sophisticated and easier.

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CHAPLIN’S MUTUAL COMEDIES is now available on Blu-ray/DVD in a Limited Edition SteelBook.