We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
128
get lessons at his school. He works for the camera with the minutest care".
Linder, a great artist himself, was quick to perceive and commend in the young Chaplin a constant preoccupation with perfection. Already at that time, only four years after he had entered films, he was proving himself an able and imaginative producer, so that, again according to Linder, "from first to last, spectators of every race, and of every type of mind, could follow the evolution of his thought and the very finest touches of his wit".
To this testimony, one of his early secretaries, Elsie Codd, added amusing detail — of days and nights of bad temper, during what she called the "incubation period", which began when some comic incident in real life had inspired him to start thinking about a new film. After this brooding period, which sometimes took him off alone to Catalina Island, he would expound his ideas to a few chosen friends, using their comments as a stimulus to further ideas. Once the theme had grown clear and fixed, there was no more delay or solitude. The film once started, all was fire and fury, endless patience and concentration, until it was done.
Chaplin on the job was from the beginning absolute master of every detail. Each member of his company, dressed and made-up, was inspected by him before the day's shooting began. Each scene was described in detail, with a joyousness and vitality that made working with him, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his determined search for perfection, an enjoyment and a unique experience. In the early days, a super of considerable experience said of him, "He is so kind and patient, and above all he's so different somehow"; while Martha Raye, who took part in Monsieur Verdoux (1947) said that to work with an artist like Chaplin was not only an honour and a privilege, but enormous fun. "For us all, Charlie is the tops!"
The scene once explained, the players rehearsed their parts endlessly, Chaplin having interpreted every single role, to such a degree that Miss Codd is able to state "without exaggeration, I think I can say that he has played every character in every one of his comedies".
Throughout the whole rehearsal period, Chaplin's unflagging vitality and enthusiasm whipped his players into an excitement that made them give of their best. He was himself a protean figure, now an old gent puffing along in anger, now a simple maiden bowed in grief, now a masher swaggering into a park, now the harassed mother of many children; always building the compact lines of his perfect comedies, dovetailing cause and effect, paring down to essentials, inventing the most fantastic comedy gags, sweeping everyone before