Posted on 11/07/2009 12:40:44 PM PST by DogByte6RER
Lost Charlie Chaplin film bought on eBay for $5
A lost Charlie Chaplin film has been discovered in a can of nitrate film bought on eBay for £3.20 ($5).
Morale Park from Henham, Essex, purchased the tin simply because he liked the look of it.
He was amazed to discover its fragile contents: a previously unknown seven-minute film Chaplin film called Zepped.
His interest was piqued, he said, when he could not find any mention of it on the internet.
The film features footage of Zeppelin airships flying over England during the First World War, and out-takes from three pictures that Chaplin shot with the film company Essanay, with whom the entertainer had a contract in 1914, before falling out.
An animated scene shows Chaplin wishing he could leave America to join his British countrymen in the war, before being taken on a cloud and deposited on an English church spire.
It also shows him sending up the Zeppelin, and an animated sequence of Kaiser Wilhelm popping out of a German sausage. There is a certification from Egypt, dating the film to December 1916.
Mr Park got his neighbour John Dyer, former head of education at the British Board of Film Classification, to look at it, and they concluded the film had been put together as a piece of war propaganda.
It is not known whether Chaplin was involved in the project or whether various out-takes were spliced together without his knowledge or consent.
David Robinson, author of Chaplin: His Life and Art, believed the film could be worth anything from £3,000 to £40,000.
Mr Park and Mr Dyer are currently in California making a documentary about the find.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Ping
Bet there’s lots of seller’s remorse!
That is pretty cool. I thought they were going to say it was stock footage or something. wow.
That must have been the last one.
How many "Lost Charlie Chaplin films" do you want. I have an endless supply.
I used to have one but I lost it.
Wow, I would have loved to be the one to find that. I have a fairly extensive collection of Chaplain films. My ultimate goal is to have a copy of every film he made. Guess I’ll have to add one to the list.
Boy, did I miss out on that one. A fan of classic Hollywood films I often bid on old Hollywood memorabilia, to use to decorate our theater room. Even the odd and unusual. I once bid up to $1500 on a small chunk of the airplane that Carole Lombard was in when she died. The winning bid was twice that, and good thing. My wife would of killed me, and sold my ashes on Ebay.
This is a huge find. It may be only seven minutes, but Chaplin was a perfectionist. That seven minutes could of taken weeks for him to call it good. He was famous for retake after retake, after retake, spending all day a few seconds of film.
Are you kidding me? An unknown Chaplin film? This guy could hold out for millions.
My favorite has always been Modern Times.
Though Chaplain's “socialism is a good thing” message was very obvious in the film, it was still a wonderful work of a comic genius. And that was the film that first introduced me to that dark hair beauty, Paulette Goddard, now a favorite Screen Goddess of mine.
Considering the fragility of the film-stock and lack of professional conservation, it’s remarkable that anything not already in hand still survives from that era. Sometimes you get lucky. About two years ago they tracked down a complete version of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” in a private South American collection. I posted the item but the mods seem not to have been fans of German impressionistic cinema.
A well known boxer, Dick Burge, became Sgt. Richard Burge and was a recruiter, before compulsory service enacted in 1916. Bombardier Wells (A white hope) also served. He did not go to the trenches. I would love to see that film, especially if it captured the dreaded Zepplins over London. It is part of history of that terrible war, that destroyed part of English life for ever.
So fierce was patriotism that the crowd ran rampant on any "dodgers" even harassing them in the street. Ted "Kid" Lewis of London(World welterweight boxing champion) had to stay Stateside for a while, he managed to escape that, until the anger subsided. My dad was a school kid in the East-End of London, when 105 kids were killed by a bomb. It may have been by a Gotha, a long airplane, they threw the bombs out by hand.
I do feel bad for the original seller. I often wonder if I myself, picked up a trophy for peanuts, would I try to remit to the seller a sort of compensatory reward?
Perhaps a hundred years from now someone will purchase a 50-cent tin at a neighborhood garage sale and find Obama's real birth certificate inside.
Strange things happen all the time, right?
Leni
I had read of the school being hit, it was by a Zepplin. The Family History Magazine article may have put too many deaths- or maybe my memory. It was 18 poor kids that died. You Tube had a survivors account.
Such was the Kaiser's war against civilians, people who had to struggle to survive regardless.
If you like Chaplin, check out my analysis of Chaplin’s lobby card for The Kid at Big Hollywood.
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/rdvonch/2009/10/03/heroic-hollywood-charlie-the-kid-and-the-cop/
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