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nerves are stretched to breaking point, and he is tensed to such a pitch that all his technicians work twice as hard and twice as fast as they had believed possible.
Chaplin detests the apparatus of his medium — the cameras, the microphone, the lights, the travelling stages, accepting them balefully as necessary evils, but giving all his interest to the rehearsal of the takes, and driving his continuity-girl into near insanity with his blithe indifference to the need for exact repetition of detail in consecutive shots. To this day, he first takes the scenes that appeal to him particularly, going haphazardly from set to set, and increasing the burdens of his script and continuity girls and his associate producers until only his integrity and his charm save him from rebellion or desertion.
When the moment for shooting has come, he is wholly absorbed, his pockets crammed with last-minute ideas, gags, changes in decor scribbled on odd scraps of paper through the wakeful hours of the night; first at the studio, and last to leave it, sometimes never leaving it for days on end.
Side by side with the volcanic Chaplin entirely taken up with his work goes the amusing fellow-worker of the old days. He is still capable, in a moment's pause between scenes, of launching into vivid impersonations, impassioned dramatic scenes, a piano concerto or a little light fooling, so that the executives who a moment before were breathing fire and fury before the erratic demands made upon them, relax under the magic of the Chaplin who had known how to hold crowds enthralled.
As soon, however, as the next scene is prepared, the momentary relaxation is immediately cut short, and Chaplin plunges into work again with the same ardour and the same fury, taking a scer.e twenty, thirty, forty times, until it approaches his requirements.
In spite of his apparently erratic methods, his refusal to save time by shooting scenes in sequence, his insistence on long rehearsal periods, and multiple takes for every shot, Chaplin can complete a film in minimum time if he chooses — Monsieur Verdoux took exactly twelve weeks, and no one in Hollywood who knew his methods would believe it. This in itself is proof that Chaplin is always master of the chaos into which he plunges his studios while he is on the job.
Dressed like a tramp, driving himself in a battered Ford, tearing like a whirlwind through the studios, Chaplin invariably brings his chosen rabbit out of the hat. He tends to spend an increasing length of time over the preparation of his films. When he had bought out Orson Welles over the Verdoux theme, he spent four years over the writing of the scenario, brooding over it, leaving it for a while; returning to it with renewed eagerness, determined to give the scenario all the rime