Motion Picture Magazine (Feb-Jul 1919)

The Bishop of Birmingham visited Chap lin's studio end of the roomy couch, looking quite un-Chaplinesque. "Sad?" I echoed, blithely. "I should think that making people laugh would be a very joyful business." He looked at me contemplatively, a trifle pityingly. "'If I could a tale unfold,'" he quoted lugubriously. "In 'A Dog's Life' I got stuck in a sewer-pipe and they had to cut it open to get me out ; a dog that we trained died just when the picture was half thru and we had to get another one and begin all over; I had to eat a couple of dozen 'cream puffs' one after the other, and they were made of papier-mache and not very nicely flavored. In 'Shoulder Arms' we worked for several days in a tank half filled with water to simulate a trench. I had to submerge about sixteen times before we got the right effect ; a ruined house 'set' collapsed before its time, with me in it — and they had to repair both me and the set before the picture could go on. In this picture, 'Sunnyside,' we work with animals, and animals get temperamental; a cow even had a pretty little calf just as we'd gotten out on location, forty miles from town, with a dray-load of props. That spoiled work for the day, and then some of the scenes we thought funniest had to be cut out. "After all," he went on, thoughtfully, "the hardest part of making comedies isn't in the falls you take or the knocks you get — it isn't in the annoyance of doing a scene over a dozen times to get the right effect. The worst tumble I take is when I've made a scene that's the pride of my heart, and I'm all puffed up thinking about it, and then I see it run thru in the projecting-room, in cold blood — 'the morning after,' as it were — and it drags along /Tvlike a crippled cow, and I Private Peat was just that fond of Charlie he even permitted the little master of mirth to come between him and his wife think, 'Great heavens, is that supposed to be funny!" Before I left the studio, Charlie took me over to the narrow walk between the projecting-room and the cuttingroom, where the million-dollar feet in the turned-up shoes had made a permanent impression of the famous Chaplin gait when the concrete was new and in a soft and yielding mood. I would have called it "The Laughter Trail," but he has a different name for it. "That's the 'Path of Sighs,' " he told me. "Sometimes I spend twelve hours a day trotting back || and forth from projecting-room to cutting-room, trying to doctor up a strip of film. When a comedy is finally released, I'm afraid to go and see it. Something is always wrong, and the public always picks on just that thing. Take it from one who knows, making comedies is the hardest business in the world, and being a comedian is the next hardest. That's why I'm serious about my work — I have to be !" Personally, I thought he was more than serious — I was inclined to rate him as a misanthrope, but when I struck the Mack Sennett studio The master funmaker himself was on the lot directing a country school scene, in which Chester Conklin played the schoolmaster and Louise Fazenda the recalcitrant pupil. As I approached the set, Chester was arguing with Louise in a helpless, tho heated, fashion, and Sennett was egging on the disagreement by megaphone instructions. "Talk to her, Chester — stick out your tongue at him, Louise — try to get out the door — stop her, Chester — get (Continued on page 110)