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22
Photoplay Magazine
To trap the inspirations that come to him in the night, Chaplin has a phonographic dictating machine
by his bedside.
wrote pieces for the papers about his soulful eyes and delicate health.
As a matter of truth, his heart was intact, his respiration normal and his habits excellent as usual. His only trouble was the chronic and incurable one "the next story."
One day when time was desperately short he Avas walking up Sixth avenue at Thirty-third street w'hen an unfortunate pedestrian slipped and skidded down the escalator serving the adjacent elevated station. Everybody but Chaplin laughed. But Mr. Chaplin's eyes lit up. Also he lit out — for the studio in Los Angeles.
Thus was "The Floorwalker" born. Mr. Chaplin did not care a whoop alwut the floorwalker person as a type — what he sought were the wonderful possibilities of the escalator as a vehicle upon which to have a lot of most amusing troubles. "The Floorwalker" was built about the escalator not the floorwalker.
The history of "The Floorwalker" is in a diagnostic sense typical of the building of a Chaplin comedy. Everyone of them is built aroxtnd something.
Mr. Chaplin, despite his afore-mentioned staff or staffs or staves of scenarioists, sec
retaries, et al., is his own author. He surrounds himjiclf with these interesting and gifted persons, not to have them do his work for him, but to supply gravel for his mental gizzard. They are liable to have ideas which when introduced to his svstem set up reactions which result in something that appeals to his fancy.
Tlie j)rocess is not unlike that by w^hich oriental pearls are made, in which the clever Japanese push a grain of sand into the oyster to be covered with purest pearl. The only difference is that the oyster is not looking for the sand and Chaplin is.
Mr. Chaplin is essentially a one-idea man. He has what some practical psychologists call a single track mind. When he gets two trains of thought in operation one of them is cither put on a siding or derailed — frequently with complete loss of all on board. Once in a while there is a collision followed by a spectacular shower of sparks and a long lingering blue haze of what is described as temperament in all persons drawing in excess of one hundred and fifty dollars a week.
Repeatedly w;hole armies of "extras" have been employed to appear at the Chaplin studios, there to sit out the day while