Charlie Chaplin (1951)

$10,000 a week from Mutual 59 ten times his salary of the previous year — an incredible amount of money for a young man of twenty-six who, less than three years before, had been an obscure vaudevillian. His great and sudden wealth had curiously little effect on him as a person and no effect on him as an artist. His remark, after the signing, is said to have been "Well, I've got this much if they never give me another cent. Guess I'll go and buy a whole dozen neckties." A new studio, The Lone Star, was built at 1025 Lillian Way, Hollywood, and opened March 27, 1916. More time and effort went into the Mutual pictures. For instance, 90,000 feet were shot to provide the 1,809 feet of the two-reel "The Immigrant," roughly the same footage as was exposed for the twelve-reel "The Birth of a Nation." (But at that time, Griffith, after many rehearsals, seldom shot a scene more than once.) Five hundred prints of the Mutual comedies were distributed, a large number compared to the hundred and fifty to two hundred prints for a hit picture today. Counting in Chaplin's salary, the cost of each Mutual approximated one hundred thousand dollars which topped the average cost for features at the time. Theatres which paid fifty dollars a day for the Mutuals when first issued paid four times that price for the same pictures six or seven years later. In 1925 Terry Ramsaye estimated that the cinema theatres of the world had already paid five millions in film rentals for these pictures and the public had spent twenty-five millions at the box offices! There was much "dumping" of the old Chaplin comedies by the illegal process of making a new negative from a positive print. When the prints of the Sennett and Essanay comedies wore out they were replaced by "bootleg" duped prints re-imported from abroad. Some idea of the traffic in Chaplin films may be gained from the records of the little Crystal Hall on 14th Street in New