Poised to ship upon receipt of orders, the good folks at
BearManor Media have just published my latest book:
CHAPLIN’S VINTAGE YEAR:
The History of the Mutual-Chaplin Specials.
Silent comedy aficionados need no introduction to this
subject.
For casual viewers: these are
twelve 2-reel comedies produced by Chaplin during 1916-17 that, quite frankly,
have been viewed by more eyes than any other cinematic work.
Consider (at risk of morbidity): cemeteries
are choked with millions who didn’t live to see
The Sound of Music, much
less
Star Wars or
Harry Potter, yet queued up at their local
nickelodeon box office, dimes in hand, just to watch these films, often more
than once.
During their first release
cycle between 1916-18, they grossed $3.3 million when admissions were, on
average, .10-.15 cents.
They came
around again, with new prints each time, in 1919, 1923, 1927, 1932 (with music
and sound courtesy of the Van Beuren studio’s Gene Rodemich and Winston
Sharples), 1941 (in two “streamlined” feature compilations of six shorts each)
and beyond, right up to today.
Search
“Chaplin Mutual” on YouTube; you’ll find them.
CHAPLIN’S VINTAGE YEAR covers not only the making of those dozen gems,
but their selling (and re-selling) as well, into the 21
st century,
and the restoration and Blu-ray release that is coming next year.
Naturally, that history includes television. There’s a bit more that can be told on that
subject, for which this blog is the perfect forum.
In March 1941, RKO Radio Pictures, which had acquired the
Chaplin Specials from its former shorts supplier the Van Beuren Corporation,
sold the negatives to Guaranteed Pictures Inc.
Guaranteed had been formed in 1928 by Samuel Goldstein and Mortimer
Sikawitt, and mainly distributed independent features, mostly
foreign-made. Four years after its
founding, the company financed the first Yiddish-language talking feature, Joseph
in the Land of Egypt. It was mainly
a labor of love, yet hit big among its target audience, especially in Poland.
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Typical low-budget Commonwealth fare. |
Eager to get into the non-theatrical business, by 1937
Goldstein and Sikawitt (who’d soon change his name to Mort Sackett) founded
Commonweath Pictures Corporation for 16mm road show distribution and home movie
sales. They bought up theatrical films,
mostly low-budget scraps from dead studios or independent productions that had
been released by United Artists and RKO.
Naturally, after Guaranteed acquired the Chaplin Specials, Commonwealth
was assigned non-theatrical rights. In
1947, the company branched into TV with Commonwealth Film and Television,
simply licensing its properties for the home screen.
Guaranteed had issued their two feature compilations in
April and August of 1941; limited releases to be sure, but all enormously
successful.
In early 1943, Commonwealth
took the two 6-short features and reworked them into three 4-short featurettes
for non-theatrical release, and also made each individual short available.
Like every other buyer of the Mutual Chaplins, though,
Guaranteed needed to aggressively assert its legal ownership of the titles, as
hundreds of stray prints were still floating around for sale or lease. In January 1942, action was brought against
the Movie Parade Theater in Los Angeles for unauthorized showing of a Mutual
short. Theater owner Edward Kohn was
forced to pony up $3,500 in damages for screening his own 16mm print of one
film!
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Notice in the May 6, 1941 issue of FILM DAILY. |
Unfortunately, no one seems to have told Goldstein, Sackett
or their lawyer that copyrights needed to be renewed after 28 years. The Van Beuren versions were never registered,
despite the synchronizing of music and sound that effectively turned them into
“new works.” Consequently the
Mutual-Chaplins slipped into the public domain in the mid-1940s, and there was
little that Guaranteed or Commonwealth could do about it, not that they didn’t
try.
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Mort Sackett tries to assert his no-longer-applicable rights to the Mutual-Chaplins in 1959. |
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Luckily, Commonwealth was a major TV distributor, thanks
mostly to their prodigious cartoon library, and it helped that they had the
best-looking elements on the Chaplin subjects.
It doubly helped that they never bothered making dupe or 16mm negatives,
striking 16mm prints straight off the original 35mm pre-print materials. Naturally this came at a cost to their
eventual preservation, but that was nobody’s concern in the late 1940s.
TV distribution of the Chaplins began around 1950. In November of that year, Goldstein died in
a horrific crash on the Long Island Railroad, and it was the beginning of the
end for Commonwealth and Guaranteed.
Three years later, Goldstein’s heirs would (unsuccessfully) sue for
control of the companies, claiming Sackett and his wife (who served as
treasurer) were intentionally mismanaging in order to lower share value. In truth, Sackett was just incompetent; “one
of those bullying, cigar-chewing types,” according to film preservationist
David Shepard, who met him in the 1960s.
Before cashing out at the end of that decade, all Commonwealth
properties would wind up in public domain hell. You’ve seen their titles over and over in the dollar bin: The
Flying Deuces, Pot o’ Gold, Second Chorus, ad infinitum.
Chaplin’s history on early TV was rather spotty. He was a big hit in Los Angeles, but owing
to the legal and political allegations then hounding him, veterans and women’s groups
in other cities, including New York, forced his films from the air. By the end of the decade that opposition
began to recede and the Little Tramp gradually made his way back to the
tube.
In 1963, New York City’s WOR-TV
licensed the three Commonwealth compilations for their
Million Dollar Movie
program, and held those rights for at least three years.
The individual shorts turned up on public
television.
By 1972, of course, all was
forgiven and Chaplin returned to the U.S. in triumph to
receive a special Academy Award.
Eventually Blackhawk Films bought the surviving
Commonwealth elements, which is another story, covered in detail in CHAPLIN’S
VINTAGE YEAR.