DW Griffith -- Make the Most of Your Opportunity -- October 3, 2021

Exhibitors Herald, 15-October-1921

I don't mention DW Griffith much in this blog. When I first started reading movie books, he got credit for inventing many things in cinema. He didn't, but He did make some good movies. Way Down East, based on a popular stage play written by Charlotte Blair Parker. 

I remember that years ago San Francisco's Surf Theater hosted a DW Griffith festival. One night I went to see Broken Blossoms and Way Down East with a friend and two guys he knew who had probably never seen a silent movie. The two guys didn't like Broken Blossoms, but they both got involved with Way Down East. After the movie, one guy talked about the scene where Lowell Sherman's villain gets denounced. He said "He (excreted) a brick." I was happy to see that this movie could still affect people. 

Exhibitors Herald, 15-October-1921

Charles Chaplin -- January 3, 2014

A photo of Charlie Chaplin in City Lights from the 1933 World Film Encyclopedia, a British publication edited by Clarence Winchester.  The photo is credited to United Artists.  Be sure to click on the image to see a larger version. 

I think I have always known Charlie Chaplin.  I must have seen many of his movies on Fractured Flickers or other television programs.  KQED Channel 9, the local public television station in San Francisco, showed Paul Killiam's version of The Gold Rush.  I cried when no one showed up for the New Year's party. 

Years later, the Surf Theater in San Francisco's Sunset District had a Charley Chaplin festival.  That was where I first saw many of his features.  My wife, who was then my fiancée, came to most of the shows.  I remember a double bill of City Lights and Limelight.  At the end of City Lights, my she was weeping.  Perhaps that is when I knew she was a keeper. 

One of the first film-related books I read, when I was in grammar school, was My Autobiography.  I didn't understand a lot of it the first time I read it, although I knew something interesting was going on with Pola Negri.  I wondered why he didn't say much about his movies. Years later, I read his 1916 Charlie Chaplin's Own Story, which I think I read from the library at San Francisco State.  I was fascinated that he told a completely fabricated story about his first experience in making a movie.  This was only two years after he made his debut and there were lots of people around who could refute his story.