Word: chaplins
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...first computer aimed at the mass market? That hardly fits IBM's stuffy old image, but when the company needed an advertising campaign for its new personal computer 2½ years ago, it turned to one of the 20th century's most enduring and endearing characters: Charlie Chaplin's Tramp. Says Charles Pankenier, director of communications for the PC: "We were dealing with a whole new audience that never thought of IBM as a part of their lives." Industry insiders estimate that the firm has spent $36 million in one of the largest ad campaigns ever mounted...
...Chaplin once explained that he created the character in 1915, after an accidental meeting with a hobo in San Francisco. The Tramp's resurrection was only slightly less serendipitous. IBM's advertising agency, the Madison Avenue firm Lord, Geller, Federico, Einstein, was looking for someone, or something, that would attack the problem of computer fright head on. The agency was talking about using the Muppets or Marcel Marceau, the mime, when, according to Creative Director Thomas Mabley, the idea for the Tramp "sort of walked in and sat down...
Called Unknown Chaplin, it consists of three hour-long documentaries made for Britain's Thames Television by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, the team responsible for the best overall film history ever made, 1980's 13-part Hollywood. They were given access to Chaplin's film vaults by his widow, and to numberless outtakes from the pictures he made in 1916-17 for the Mutual Film Co., which are now controlled by a silent-film collector-impresario, Raymond Rohauer. From hundreds of hours of this material, the pair has fashioned not only a priceless contribution to film...
...Chaplin was an improviser. He would order up a huge set or an elaborate mechanical prop (like The Floorwalker's escalator, the comic potentials of which we watch him explore) with only the vaguest notion of what he might do with it. Then, with all his co-workers assembled, with Chaplin doing detailed demonstrations of their pantomime ("he became me," Cherrill remembers) and working up the long, intricate comic lines that are his art's hallmark, the cameras would turn. And turn. And turn some more, through hundreds of takes. For it was only by studying what Chaplin...
...finally, it is not Chaplin's profligacy that awes the viewer of Unknown Chaplin but the relentless perfectionism of his all-encompassing ego and, curiously, a sort of higher frugality. He seems never to have forgotten a good idea, returning to half-formed conceptions years after they occurred to him in order to perfect them. Brownlow and Gill have, for instance, found home movies taken at a Douglas Fairbanks party that show Chaplin dancing with a globe. Something like a decade later, that little improvisation becomes the basis for The Great Dictator's strongest image, that...