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A WOMAN OF PARIS 111
to tell a story in pantomime. But when I, or any other actor, would give out with one of those big takes, Chaplin would just shake his head and say, "They're peeking at you." That did it. I knew that I had just cut myself a large slice of ham and had tossed the scene out the window.
Since then I have never played a scene before a camera without thinking to myself, "They're peeking at you; don't sock it."
Another pet line of Chaplin's was, "Think the scene! I don't care what you do with your hands or your feet. If you think the scene, it will get over/'
And we had to keep shooting every scene until we were thinking it— until we believed it and were playing it with our brains and not just with our hands or our feet or our eyebrows. If I remember correctly, we once did over 200 takes on one scene, and many scenes were shot more than 50 times. There were days when we rehearsed the same little scene time after time and then shot and reshot it until we thought we would go crazy. But Chaplin was satisfied with nothing less than perfection, or as close to it as we could come.
We were shooting for over eight months on the picture, a period that seems fantastic today. But Chaplin's studio overhead was small and there were no $5,000-a-week stars to be paid. I think we all finally became inspired by Chaplin's devotion to perfection. It was not as though we were working for a salary; it was do or die for alma mater. The actors and the crew became a team trying to make the best picture it could.
Each morning the whole company— including electricians, grips, anybody who wanted to watch— was invited to the projection room to see the rushes of the film that had been shot the day before. We would all sit there and express our opinions. Chaplin listened to everybody's ideas and evaluated them with an unerring instinct for those that were good. He had no academic knowledge of proper dramatic structure, only an innate comprehension of good theater and how to portray either simple or complex ideas in pantomime without the aid of dialogue or subtitles. I re