Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin

Hey hey movies lovers and fascism haters! Filmmaker, writer, and all around great guy Bryan Young joins co-hosts Kelly Swails and Brandon Wilhelm to discuss a few movies directed by and featuring two silent-era giants: Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin. Topics include: 

• How fast the movie industry changed during the silent era
• How without Normand, we wouldn't have Chaplin
• Why each of these filmmakers saw their movies get banned during their career
• Who gets to be forgiven and who gets to have a legacy (hint: it's usually not women creatives)
• The last time Kelly bought sloe gin 

On that note, let's discuss the cocktail we paired with our discussion. When Charlie Chaplin exploded onto the Hollywood scene, the famed Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City created his namesake cocktail. It's surprisingly light, refreshing, not too sweet, and fairly low-ABV as cocktails go. We would totally batch this for a silent movie viewing party. We may rename it The Mabel Normand when and if we do that. 

You know what? There are no rules. This cocktail is called the Mabel Normand now. 

The Mabel Normand

• 1 oz sloe gin
• 1 oz apricot liqueur
• 1 oz lime juice

Add all ingredients to a shaker tin with ice. Shake until frosty and pour into a chilled glass. Garnish with a dried lime wheel or a lime twist, if you like. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

Hey everybody, welcome to Bard Movies, the podcast that mixes band movies, booze, and conversation into one delightfully chaotic mix. I'm your host, Kelly Swales.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

And I'm Brandon Wilhelm.

SPEAKER_03 0:13

And today we're going to be talking about two silent era films created by giants of the industry, Mabel's Strange Predicament and The Immigrant. Buckle in, gang, it's going to get a little quiet in here today.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Hello. My name is Brian Young, and I really love silent films, but movies in general. And uh I'm a writer and uh filmmaker, and I teach screenwriting at the University of Utah in their continuing education department, and I write for Script Magazine, and I teach screenwriting for Writers Digest in their online university as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:41

So yeah, you've you've got all the bases covered, like the writing, screenwriting, films. You're just a nerd of all trades.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Excellent. Well, welcome, Brian. Uh, before we get going on our conversation, I want to talk about the beverage that we're drinking today. We chose the Charlie Chaplin, a pre-prohibition era drink created at New York City's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. We'll have the recipe in the episode description as well as on our website at frozen shoulderproductions.com. But it's basically equal parts, slow gin, apricot liqueur, and lime juice shaken with ice and strained into a glass. Cheers, gang.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Cheers.

SPEAKER_03 2:20

Let's get this up.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

I love that there are drinks that are pre-prohibition named after Chaplin because he was that big of a star before then.

SPEAKER_03 2:28

Yeah. Yeah. It was kind of nuts because I was kind of thinking initially, I was thinking, like, oh, you know, in Mabel's Strange Predicament, he's drinking from a flask. Maybe I can do like a play on that or whatever. Or maybe he had like a specific drink he liked to drink. And so I just kind of was like in the Googler and it just came up like a dozen recipes for this cocktail. And I'm like, oh, well, shit, my work's done for me. Okay. And I actually, I have to say, I was expecting it to be really sweet. It's not at all. It's really good. Yeah, it's not too bad. I also have to say that I haven't actually purchased a bottle of slow gin since college, so that's exciting.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

I don't know if I ever have.

SPEAKER_03 3:12

All right. Well, now, now on to the movies. Brandon, do you want to kind of give us a synopsis of Mabel's strange predicament?

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Uh, sure. Uh, this is basically uh your standard Keystone comedy. Mabel Normand, who was the big star at the time, she is going to a hotel to meet her boyfriend. And along the way, she runs into all sorts of chaos, one being Charlie Chaplin as the tramp in the movie he invented the character for. Others would be uh a couple across the hall, and then when the boyfriend shows up and finds her hiding under someone else's bed, uh all sorts of misunderstandings happen.

SPEAKER_03 3:50

Misunderstanding ensues, and you left out the most important character, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Oh, the dog.

SPEAKER_03 3:55

The dog.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Which is why she's hiding under the bed across the way.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

Because she was playing fetch with it, and when she was undressed, and right, and then she got locked out of the locked out in the hallway in her nightgown, and Yeah. Yeah, it was it was she was in definitely a strange predicament for sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

I love that her being undressed as her in a complete pajama set with no skin visible.

SPEAKER_03 4:23

And she's still wearing like dark stockings. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Well, that was 1914.

SPEAKER_03 4:29

Yeah. You know what? This one was a really, really fun kind of movie. I um I I I'm not super, super well engaged or what or very knowledgeable about the silent era films, but I really just kind of like how, dude, you don't need a lot of dialogue. You know, it's like there's you sure it's still a little bit like stage acting where the where the movements are really broad and things are happening, and sure they've got tile cards, but you kind of don't need it. Like you kind of get what's going on just by by what they're doing, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Yeah, there's a few moments like um it's not like it's completely incomprehensible, but the scene where she's playing with the dog and it cuts to the people across the hall and the woman's losing her mind.

SPEAKER_03 5:15

Um Yeah, because she's going full Karen.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yeah. Um you don't really it took me a second to be like, oh, it's because the dog's barking. Because there isn't really a cut to the dog or something. You just see this lady losing her mind, like, what is going on? Oh, the dog. Got it. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 5:32

The noise next door.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

But they also weren't worried about making coherent plots. They were just setting things up so people could kick each other in the butt and fall down.

SPEAKER_03 5:40

Well, sure. Brian, what are your thoughts on Mabel's Strange predicament?

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Well, I thought it was it was really funny, like that Charlie Chaplin is not in it as much as I would have expected for something that you look on the poster, right? Like now when they bill it, it it's billed as a chaplain movie, and you're like, why is it called Mabel's Strange Predicament if it's a Chaplin movie? And he's just sort of there occasionally, and he's not the tramp we know, right? He's sort of like a really lecherous guy who's trying to just uh he's he's got wandering eyes for literally any woman walking through the lobby of this hotel that he's drinking in, and Mabel being in her pajamas happens to catch his eye the most. Uh, and you know, more hijinks ensue. But he's just playing a variation of his vaudeville drunk, um, which is great, like he's terrific at it. But this uh, like you said, this is the this is the film that he in he first appeared, well, he first filmed his um tramp character for under Mabel Norman's direction. So she actually directed this picture, and although he appeared in another picture first, just a few days before this got released first, because back then it was like, hey, there's something going on down the street, go film and see if there's any business you can do. Right, right, right. And so the first official tramp release was something else, it was like uh day at the races, like the kid races at uh Venice Beach or something like that. And so that because it was just basically a jackass skit. Oh, right, right. Where he's just messing around in front of other people's cameras in front of this soapbox derby of other kids it came out first. But yeah, no, like him not being the tramp we know and love. Like, I think of the tramp and I think of the kid, and I think of like very touching like uh depression era, like the pathos down on his luck with pathos, yeah, exactly. And this is like I'm a lech chasing a woman. Um and it's it's more Max Senate sensibility than it is Charlie Chaplin. Ah but that but that's also because like Max Senate is the one who plucked him from vaudeville and just said, This is how we make movies, kid.

SPEAKER_04 8:28

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

But in a more rural Canadian accent, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_03 8:34

Um this is how we make the show. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's my terrible Minnesotan accent. I apologize to everyone in Minnesota.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Yeah, I I just recently watched the uh Laurence Olivier Wuthering Heights, and it was very similar to Chaplin. Like, Olivier gets on set and he's like, This is how you act! And everyone's like, knock it off. He's like, Oh, I guess you hate acting.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Yeah. Well, and it's funny how like this was the first Mabel and Chaplin movie, and it kind of went okay because you can almost see how Chaplin and Mabel are separate, and it didn't seem as though there was much of a clash, but like the second time they had to work together for Mabel at the wheel, he had a full-on meltdown and just threw a tantrum and was ready to quit.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

Oh, did he really?

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yeah, like he was gonna quit because he couldn't handle like Mabel Norman telling him no. Like, none of the rest of the directors that were working for Keystone really liked working with him because he was he he was already that chaplain perfectionist sort and wanted to revise all the gags, and all the other directors are like, we don't have time for that, we don't have time for that. Let's just go. And in Mabel at the Wheel, which was the second movie they made together, like Max Senate was already ready to fire him, and Mabel was like, No, I see what he's capable of, let me take him. And she's really the one who like made his career and let him use the tramp. Because if you look at all the other films there, Max Senate, I don't I can't find any evidence that Max Senate hated the tramp character, but if you look at all the other films he was making chronologically, she's the only one, she's the only director other than himself who let him use the tramp. Like everybody else has him in like pencil thin, like handsome mustaches or villainous goatees or whatever, like and clothes that fit him. Like, she's the only one supporting him as the tramp. She's the only one nurturing who he could be and like showing him all that stuff. But he gets on Mabel at the wheel, which is their second collaboration together, and he wants to do a gag. Like, there's a a moment in the film where he's wetting down the racetrack, and she's she's you know, playing the action hero driving the race car around the track, and he's wetting it down so that she's supposed to spin out and and spin out, yeah. And he's like, What if there's a a shot where some like there's a kink in the hose and I look into it and it sprays me in the face, and she's like, Hey, that's the oldest gag on film, because it was literally like the Lumiere brothers filmed that as one of their original 10 reels to show people what film was capable of. So it literally was the oldest gag on film.

SPEAKER_03 11:35

It's like the uh it's like a proof of concept, like, see, we could we could be funny, guys.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yeah, it's called like the waterer watered or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Yeah, and and she's like literally like, we don't have time for that, we're just moving on, we don't have time for that. And he literally just like melted down and sat on a curb and was just like crestfallen and wouldn't do it. And she literally, uh, by some accounts that I read, like had to stop the rest of the crew from beating the shit out of him. Really? Because he disrespected her so much, and she was so beloved at the time. And Senate was gonna fire him that day, but he'd gotten telegrams from New York saying we need the rest of this guy's pictures, people seem to like him. But he went and talked to the rest of the directors on the set, and they were like, No, I'm not gonna work with that jerk.

SPEAKER_04 12:23

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

And Mabel was like, I'll do it, but he needs to like shape up. Right. So Senate had to finish the rest of that picture with Mabel, and then the two of them ended up working out a really great relationship together where he would direct her and she would direct him, and he would come to her dressing room and she would like train him better in pantomime for film and stuff, but like, yeah, without without her, we wouldn't have gotten Chaplin as he was because like no one else around there was nurturing what he wanted to do on film, especially with the tramp character.

SPEAKER_03 13:03

That's kind of the research, the research that I did that was basically like, yeah, Mabel was younger than than Charlie, but she had been in films for forever at that point, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

Yeah, yeah. Because she she started at well, I mean, she started as a like a model for like artists and industrial design and stuff, and then she got discovered working for DW Griffith, the biograph in New York, which is where Senate had started.

SPEAKER_03 13:31

That piece of shit.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Yeah. And Griffith had no interest in comedy, and of course not.

SPEAKER_03 13:39

He's too busy, you know, re-re-redoing the KKK.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah, well, this was way before then, though, and and he like Senate was there as his protege, and Senate was like, we can make cops funny, man. Yeah, and Griffith was like, I don't want to make anything funny. And Senate was like, but we can do all this stuff with film, and Senate just kept trying to make comedies under Griffith, and Griffith was like, fine, you do that thing. And he used Mabel Normand in a few films, but he just couldn't handle her being Mabel on his sets because she would be Mabel in between takes and undercut him and not be serious.

SPEAKER_04 14:23

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

She would be hilarious in between takes, and he just couldn't hack that. So he's just like, get her out of here, give her to give her to Senate. And then when Senate went and created Keystone and then eventually went to California, she just went with him. And so she'd been in film for years, and here's Chaplin literally two weeks into his contract, having this girl younger than him saying, No, we don't have time. That gag is old as dirt, forget it, get out of here. And he was just like, I can't take this.

SPEAKER_03 14:55

This it seems like that Mabel was really like a visionary, especially for the era. Like she had and she had like a lot of power in in from like a really young age. Like people listen to her.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Oh, yeah. Well, and part of it was that like Max Senate was her her boyfriend. So, like, when the head of the studio is your boyfriend and he will literally move heaven and earth because you say so, people will listen to that as well. Not to say she was doing that on purpose because she um I think she ruined his days as many as he ruined hers.

SPEAKER_04 15:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Um but she really just she knew what she was doing too, and you can tell her influence in Chaplin's films and his work, even all the way through his stuff, and it really did start there and made Mabel's strange predicament.

SPEAKER_03 15:51

It's so interesting to me, and we'll we'll probably talk about this a little bit more later, but it's so interesting to me that we, you know, like you don't have to be a film nerd nerd or a film historian or really know too much about movies to know who Charlie Chaplin is. And you know, we're making the argument here that Charlie Chaplin wouldn't exist as we know Charlie Chaplin to be without Mabel Normand, and nobody knows who Mabel Normand is. Unless you're unless you're like a film nerd or you're in the industry. You just don't know.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Well, and part of that is because so many of her films got like she went through so much controversy, and so many of her films got banned, and she didn't live long enough to have any of that advocacy happen. Right, right. Um, I was doing some of the research on it today. There's only one missing Chaplin film. Chaplin could afford to save all of his movies, and the only film of his that's missing is one of his 1914 films with Mabel.

SPEAKER_04 16:53

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Yeah. And Mabel has only 49% of her films have survived.

SPEAKER_03 17:03

That's such a fucking tragedy, man.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

And and part of it is because Chaplin got wealthy enough to be able to pay to archive his own films. Buster Keaton, it's the same thing. He wasn't able to afford to save his own films, but in the 50s he teamed up with somebody who was wealthy enough to do that.

SPEAKER_03 17:25

Sort of like uh I was gonna say, sort of like Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift being like being so stinkin' rich that they can just buy their entire catalog and it's theirs.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

No, it wasn't that. I mean, Buster Keaton in the 50s was sort of like Buster Keaton was notoriously horrible with money and always sort of a recovering alcoholic, and never had the owned the rights to any of his stuff, even at the end. And like, even some of it, like a lot of the stuff of Buster Keatons we have was literally because James Mason later in the 50s bought Buster Keaton's old house and was going through it and just found a whole bunch of film cans with some of his lost films in it. Um it's sort of an accident that we've only lost one Buster Keaton film. But with Mabel, like she died in 1930.

SPEAKER_03 18:16

Yeah, like of tuberculosis or something.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Tuberculosis, and it was after the murder of William Desmond Taylor sort of dragged her through the mud because she was the last person to see him alive, and that was in 1922, and that sort of put her um that put her name sort of in the mud and made her not necessarily as bankable a star at that point. And then there was the the Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle case where she wasn't directly involved in his controversy, but after Chaplin left Keystone, because he was only at Keystone for one year, Fatty Arbuckle sort of paired with her, so she made a ton of movies with him before he moved on, but then because of his controversy, all of his films did get banned. And because she made so many movies with him that took those off the table, and only about half of his films survived as well. And the majority of his films that survived are the ones he he did pairing with Buster Keaton.

SPEAKER_03 19:27

Okay. So tell me a little bit more about this, because I I read a little bit about it, but I'm still a little confused on what happened.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

The Patty Arbuckle thing.

SPEAKER_03 19:36

Yeah, because basically, like the two two kind of murder cases or whatever that kind of like dragged her name through the mud, and then like her stuff stuff started getting banned and that and not shown. Let's let's poke at that a little bit because you know I wasn't quite I wasn't quite getting it, I think, whenever I was looking into So we'll start with William Desmond Taylor.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

William Desmond Taylor was a film director, um, and he worked for uh Adolf Zucor, who owned Famous Players Lasky, which turned into Paramount Pictures. And basically, uh Adolf Zucor was everything you can think about as far as like shady businessman goes. He was willing to put anyone and everyone out of business if that meant he could consolidate like everything he could.

SPEAKER_03 20:28

Oh, sure. Sounds like a gem of a guy.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

She was pretty adamant that they couldn't have any more scandals in Hollywood. And when William Desmond Taylor showed up murdered, that was a huge problem for him. One of his good friends was Mabel Normand, and Mabel was an intellectual, and so was William Desmond Taylor, and I think everybody sort of viewed Mabel as, you know, sort of just a happy-go-lucky dit. And she would go to his house and borrow philosophy textbooks, and they would talk about you know, that kind of stuff. And there was no like relationship there. There's some rumors that she had fallen into drugs and he was helping her get off of them, but the family pretty well denies that, and there are other biographers that are like, no, she wasn't into drugs. It was really scandal rags at the time that were promoting those rumors because those sold papers. Sure. So there yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Uh I also read that uh another actress and writer at the time, Anita Luz, in her autobiography, really pushed that, oh yeah, Mabel was totally on cocaine.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yeah. There's nothing definitive one way or the other, but there are there are more accounts that she wasn't on drugs that she than she was. But there are accounts that she was.

SPEAKER_03 21:57

So I mean it's Especially with something like cocaine or something, you can be a recreational user and not on drugs, right? It's it's could be something that she did at a party or something once or twice, and then that was it.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

There was a time where she did go away for a while and lose a she lost a bunch of weight and then came back. But there is a lot more evidence that she had born the child of Samuel Goldwyn, uh, that was stillborn.

SPEAKER_04 22:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

And sort of recovered from that and came back, and she she did not like him, and her days at MGM sort of ended, and Max Senate sort of helped her get back into the industry from that point, but her career never really recovered because of a third scandal that happened later. But so William Desmond Taylor basically seems to have been there were three sort of key suspects, and there was a fourth person that was probably actually responsible for it. But because she was the last person who spoke to him alive, she was just in the papers constantly, and the papers were always looking for anything to smear Hollywood with.

SPEAKER_03 23:21

Well, I mean, we we still do that today, right? It's like when someone's at the pinnacle of their career, if like the slightest little thing happens, it's like Jennifer Lawrence.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Yeah, and it stayed in the papers constantly because it was an unsolved murder. Um, and still today, there's still like really competing theories about what actually happened. There was a child star that had been in love with him named Mary Miles Minter, who had worked with him in and most of her films are lost too. There's a few that still exist, but he did like I want to say like Anne of Green Gables or something with her in it, or like maybe not Anne of Green Gables, one of those sorts of movies with her in it, and she just fell in love with him, but she was underage, but she didn't kind of get that he was he was um, if not gay, at least bi because he did have a family that he'd left behind, but he was sleeping at the time with one of his uh like fellow film workers. Um, but she would just come over and profess her love to him all the time. And he he he had asked a lot of people in his production, like, please don't leave me alone with her, that kind of thing. But her mother was a prime suspect because she was one of those classic Hollywood moms that was always like, I will kill him if you get near him again, and that that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_03 24:54

Oh, like the m like the momager kind of thing?

SPEAKER_00 24:56

Very much so. She was she was sort of the proto-type of that uh uh of that. And then another one was his his his like valet chauffeur, his valet was sort of the other prime suspect who had like already been accused of like embezzling a whole bunch of money and was blackmailing him and had changed his name a number of times for this sort of behavior, and he had taken off at at uh you know prior to this. Um, he seemed to have had a pretty solid alibi, but there is another woman who was an actress that he'd worked with in his past who confessed to his murder on her deathbed in like the 60s, and she was part of this sort of blackmail ring, and that's sort of the most compelling case that people have put together at the moment. I mean, aside from her confession, but that it was really weird that like every time she got pinched during this area of time, Paramount lawyers came, like really high-powered and high-paid Paramount lawyers came and bailed her out. And anytime she needed money desperately, this Z-list starlet would magically get put in an A-list Paramount production in a tertiary role, and all of Adolf Zucor's papers for this area of time were you know disappeared in all of the executives because they were so they were so personally managing how they were dealing with the murder of William Desmond Taylor, and Mabel Norman's every move was just being tracked because she was just part of this.

SPEAKER_03 26:54

Right, right, right. Wow, this is like super fascinating. So then the next one was So how I was gonna say, so Hollywood's always been sort of sort of Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

So the next one was Fatty Arbuckle, um, and he was one of the biggest comedians in the world. Like, really, you know, if if he hadn't gone through this, um, I think people would probably look at him the same way. If he if he hadn't gone through this and hadn't died of a heart attack in like I think it was 1933 or so, I think people would look at him the same way they do Chaplin and Keaton and Harold Lloyd. But Chaplin, Keaton, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd all lived to ages long enough where they could write their own biographies, uh, autobiographies, and tell people how great they were for many years, and then able to keep their films in the public eye.

SPEAKER_03 27:46

And manage their legacy.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

Yeah. But um, Fatty Arbuckle was again one of those huge stars and very charismatic on screen, especially in his team-ups with Mabel, and um, sort of by all accounts, just one of the nicest people. And uh he gave Buster Keaton his start on film, teamed up with Mabel for a long time, but um he went to a party one weekend in San Francisco at the St. Francis Hotel, and a an actress there named Virginia Rappay the the way it's told now, the the way it sort of came out in the court documents and everything is that she wasn't feeling well, had some sort of like infection, and then he checked her into another room so that she could rest, and then went back to work in Hollywood, and three or four days later she died, and an enterprising young district attorney in San Francisco thought that he could use this as an opportunity to put Hollywood on trial and said, Sure, you know what? Fatty Arbuckle must have raped and murdered this woman, put him on trial for that.

SPEAKER_04 29:02

They were off to the basis.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

And so Yeah, didn't they say something like uh he crushed her because he was on top of her?

SPEAKER_00 29:08

Because he was so big. So the problem was is there wasn't any evidence for that, and no one really wanted to testify to that effect, and they sort of put some people under duress to testify to that effect that they recanted repeatedly and would would testify to it and recant and testify to it and recant, sort of under threats. And basically, he was um there were three trials separately, and he was it was either hung juries or a final acquittal um the third time, and he was cleared of all wrongdoing, and even the third time the jury went to the drastic step of writing a letter saying that like not only are you not guilty, but we feel like the justice system has done you a grave disservice and that we have harmed you in this process. And his name was clear, but again, the hand of Adolf Zucker, uh, who had sort of propped up the Hayes code and Robert Hayes, who was dealing with censorship and Hollywood self-censorship at the time, basically thought that if they let Fatty Arbuckle films back on the screen, because Hayes was ready to let let this happen, like let Arbuckle films get unbanned, Zucchor thought that the religious right would be able to have that groundswell of political, like they'd have their moment to actually have the government step in and supersede the Hayes code and have government censorship rather than their sham of self-set censorship. So he sort of ordered Hayes to keep Fatty Arbuckle films banned and keep him out of Hollywood. So he was he was only able to make a living sort of barely uh you know, under a pseudonym directing movies. And really he still maintained box office appeal in Europe, but not enough to to really make a living in in the way that he had, and then he died really young. But because of that ban, Mabel Norman kind of got hit with that, and then a couple years later, her chauffeur shot someone at a party.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

Jesus Christ, Mabel, pick better friends.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Um and then she got dragged into that trial, and then like there were territories where like the entire religious organi like the women's religious organizations in states like Ohio were like, you know what?

SPEAKER_03 31:52

Oh, you're you're Ohio. Don't remind me.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

Mabel Norman. So like I know the entire state of Ohio banned Mabel Normand films because her chauffeur shot a guy, and there were some others too. But so Oh my god. She like Max Senate tried to organize some comebacks for her, so she got to make um there was a movie called uh Extra Girl that was really good, um, where she gets to take some lions around and gets chased around a movie studio with them. And uh Molly O was one uh that he made for her, and uh there was another, but like her career never really recovered because she was sort of out of it. She was already suffering from tuberculosis at this point. Um she just said screw it, and she moved to New York. Um, she did some stuff on stage and just sort of retired with her pile of money and did some gardening and passed away in 1930.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

Yeah, like at 36 or 37. It was not very old.

SPEAKER_00 32:55

38, I think.

SPEAKER_03 32:57

No, no, she well, how like how old she was. Oh, okay, 38, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just really tragic. I it's and and and we can talk a little bit about it later, but I just feel like so often in Hollywood, and I think this isn't you know, just Hollywood, it's everywhere really. It's you know, like men get the the benefit of the doubt and they can make their comebacks or whatever, but like when once a woman is like screwed in this way, it's so hard for them to like come back and have a resurgence, and and I think that's evidenced by you know, like like we're mentioning, like there's one Chaplin film that's lost, but how many, like ha over half of Mabel's of Norman's films are lost, and that's a big reason, or that's a big part of it.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Uh there was also uh in the 30s that I'm not sure how many studios, I'm pretty sure MGM did this, were like, you know what, it's a depression, let's fire all the women.

SPEAKER_04 33:55

Ah.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

And these are women who like there was this star Marie Dressler, who was in a Chaplin movie. Uh, she was the box off the biggest box office draw in like 31 to 32, and they just killed her career. There was a writer named Francis Marion who had made like one Oscars, and they're just like, nah.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

Marie Dressler actually was in the first feature-length comedy film, uh Tilly's Punctured Romance, which starred Mabel and Chaplin, and they were at they actually played sort of the villains and a couple in that that Max Senant made. Um, and that was a 1914 movie, which is actually hilarious. And and Chaplin as the scenery chewing villain is actually terrific.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Yeah, I haven't watched that one yet. I I have it on the Keystone set, but haven't gotten to disc five.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Um, yeah, Marie Dressler, like they pulled her. Apparently, everyone at Keystone was really like like wary of her because they pulled her off of Broadway. And and it was based on a play that she had been starring in, because that was the only way Senate could convince his partners in New York to give him the fifty thousand dollars he needed to make a six-reel comedy film because they didn't want him to make a film that long anyway. So they were like, Well, maybe maybe if it's based on a play and you get this starlit, and so he just threw everyone in the company into it and brought her in, but she got paid way more, and he ended up giving Mabel or giving her Mabel's dressing room, and that was that pissed Mabel off. So he had to just build Mabel a new dressing room, and that caused problems, and yeah, it's a whole thing.

SPEAKER_03 35:46

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Shall we shall we talk about the image? See, you wanted rabbit holes, you got rabbit holes.

SPEAKER_03 35:54

I I am all about the rabbit holes. To be perfectly honest, I am surprised Brandon has not jumped in more because I just know he's like, Yep, I know that, yep, I know that. Did you know about this?

SPEAKER_01 36:05

Uh well I went, I did a like chaplain watch early on in quarantine, and I watched almost all the Keystones and I watched all the mutuals. And so it's been a good five years since, or five or six years since I've uh really looked into all this. I'm like, well, he seems to have it on point. I don't want to jump in and be like, what about oh, that wasn't real? Cramp.

SPEAKER_03 36:31

Uh Brandon, you want to give us a rundown of the immigrant?

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Uh sure. Uh the immigrant is weirdly only like two, two and a half years after Chaplin's Keystone stuff, but is a huge leap forward in like the character of the tramp and how the film comedies worked. Basically, the tramp is an immigrant on a boat coming to America. Uh, the whole first reel is him on the boat falling in love with this uh other young immigrant played by uh I think it's Edna Pervayanz, who was Chaplain's mistress at the time. And then the second reel is he runs into her again in a restaurant and hijinks ensue and he loses his money and can't pay for the meal.

SPEAKER_03 37:14

I as we were watching it, that the scene in the restaurant, I'm like, oh, this is like fast times at Ridgemont High, right? Whenever Rat goes to the German restaurant with Finally with Stacy and he's like so psyched about this, and oh wait, shit, he left his wallet at home, so they have to just keep ordering food. That's kind of what I remind it reminded me of.

SPEAKER_05 37:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:35

I really enjoyed The Immigrant. I I thought it was interesting. Like I said, I'm not super well versed in the silent era, but I thought it was interesting that even in that two or three years, it's like there's, you know, there's more sets, there's interiors versus exteriors, there's movement, there's like it's an upgrade in filmmaking techniques and stuff, I thought, and it was like really apparent watching them back to back. And and I know it's played for comedy in the movie, obviously, because at this point, you know, Chaplin's a comedic actor. But man, even like the stuff for comedy is like, oh, we just really didn't like immigrants, did we? Um, I'm thinking of the scene in specific where there's like an older gentleman that buys a cup of coffee and pays with the dollar or whatever, and the waiter sticks the sticks the dollar, thinks it's just great, whatever, sticks the little dollar coin in his pocket, it falls out of the pocket. Uh Chaplin's character is like, oh my god, this is great. The tramp is like, now I can have now I can pay for my coffee and beans. And he picks a coin up off the floor and presents it to the waiter, who then bites it to see if it's real. Spoiler alert, it's not real. So then, you know, Chaplin's character gets in trouble for it. And I just thought that was just interesting, where it's like, here's this old guy, maybe irregular, but definitely from around here. We're gonna take his money fine, but the second you, you immigrant person, give it to me, I'm gonna make sure it's real. And I, you know, there's a there's a few other instances of of things like that where, you know, like his table mates kind of like looking at him weird because he eats his food funny or uh whatever.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Well, I mean, he is shuffling his beans with a knife into his mouth and then into his coffee. Which is weird.

SPEAKER_03 39:17

Yes, it is played for comedic comedic effect, obviously. But yeah, I just yeah, there's a few things like that that I kind of caught, which at this time, this would have been what, 1917 or something?

SPEAKER_00 39:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:31

Uh right before Prohibition, but the run-up in the decades prior to Prohibition, this is this is a little mini rabbit hole for for us, uh, the run-up of to Prohibition, there was a huge part of the Prohibition movement that was anti-immigrant because these Germans, these Italians, these French people, these Eastern Europeans are coming over here with their weird customs and their weird drinks and their, you know, opening breweries, and how dare they? And it was really rubbed up against the Protestant and the evangelical right, even at the time.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Yeah, there was a whole beer hall riot here in Chicago. It was several decades beforehand, but the Chicago mayor was like, nah, these beer gardens done.

SPEAKER_05 40:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

And the Germans marched in protest, and knowing the protest was coming, they waited until they would cross the bridge and then raised the bridge, thinking the cops can just go in and beat the hell out of everybody. But the Germans brought their own weapons, so it they fought back and then they reopened all the beer halls.

SPEAKER_03 40:32

Yeah. You know, so that was very much a a prevailing sentiment at the time. So I understand absolutely kind of what this where this is coming from and what what sort of the culture is that this movie's being made in. Like I said, it's being done for comedy and comedic effect, uh, but I just really still fit found it interesting.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

To me, I one of the most poignant moments in that short isn't necessarily him kicking the immigration agent, but it's the shots of them all looking out longingly at the Statue of Liberty as the immigration agent is tying them up against the you know, like Chaplin at that point is really leaning on the visual storytelling of silent film as a medium, and it's you know, part of part of that that evolution that you talked about was the evolution of the medium, but and part of it is the fact that Chaplin was spending probably more on each film at that point than Senate was on all of his films in a year. Right. Like he is like investing in the rest. And Senate was like, what can we get out fast? But but part of it is that film was just advancing so fast every year, right? Like you look at the way the visual language changed year to year, right? Films from 1914 look different than films from 1915 and 16 and 17, and they just they grow every year. And the immigrant is him leaning on that, and it's not an accident that he's building those images in that way, and he is saying something, and he is saying something about his own experience, and it's no wonder that they're like maybe this guy doesn't like us, maybe maybe, maybe we should do something about that. They were wrong to say that, but uh like to to threaten him with it or because of it.

SPEAKER_03 42:40

You know, I it's interesting because and and we'll we'll we'll uh move into this, like his his bans, like his work being banned and his controversies and stuff. But since starting up the this podcast series, so much of what I'm finding is you know, sure, there's reasons, right? There's reasons this book is banned, or there's reasons we don't show this the movie in a theater or whatever. There's we have reasons, but I feel like what it comes down to at the crux of it for so much of this stuff, and you're kind of just corroborating what I'm what I'm about to say here with the immigrant, is the idea that we don't like looking at our own prejudices and biases and our own shitty behavior on screen or on a page on the pages of a book. So, you know what, we're just gonna say that they say the N-word here and we're not gonna let us let other people read it. It's like, you know, we've got this, like art is a mirror, right? And we don't like that reflection looking back on us. So it's the arts the problem, not us. We're not the problem.

SPEAKER_01 43:40

Well, you have that today. I mean, look at the right-wing backlash to the Odyssey, which is a movie that I mean, I haven't seen it yet, but it it's a story that doesn't really have politics. It's an adventure story. But we have to politicize it because we have a section of this country that just wants to see their views parroted back to them. Right. And Instead of being challenged and parented back to completely by white people.

SPEAKER_03 44:05

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can't can't forget that part.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

I think I'm gonna go see the Odyssey and be like, yeah, there's literally nothing in here that is controversial. It's just a movie about a guy fighting monsters and going home.

SPEAKER_00 44:19

I was really surprised. Ben Shapiro's review was like, yeah, there's some politic you know, there's some politics in the casting, but this movie's actually great. I was like Shapiro was? I was s I was really surprised by that.

SPEAKER_01 44:32

Oh Yeah, I didn't look too deep into it. I saw the headline about it, and I'm like, oh, he usually hates everything mostly because he couldn't make it in Hollywood, so he hates Hollywood.

SPEAKER_03 44:42

Interesting. Huh. I wonder if he's just a Nolan fanboy.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

Probably. I don't know, honestly. It's gotta be one of those things where he's like sweating trying to figure out which button to push.

SPEAKER_03 44:57

Do I hate it? Do I love it? Do I hate it? Do I love it? I don't know. Where do I go?

SPEAKER_01 45:01

Oh, yeah. I could see him being like, oh, I hate this immigrant movie because it's about immigrants and they're not terrible people.

SPEAKER_03 45:06

Yeah, right, right, right. So let's kind of like segue, I guess, into uh like Chaplin's career and why he gets banned and and and all of that. Like I know a little bit, but I know Brian, you're gonna bring a lot more like nuance and facts to this than than what I know. Um so can you can you give us a rundown on that?

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Well, I mean, a lot of why Chaplin ended up having to flee the country had a lot to do with the McCarthy era bands um for yeah, because well, I was gonna say Chaplin first, though, in the 30s was really anti-fascist, anti-capitalized. Yeah, no, he got a lot of flack for The Great Dictator. Um, no one wanted him to make the Great Dictator. United Artists. Um, United Artists was a film company that he started with um uh Mary Pickford or uh Douglas Fairbanks and I want to say D.W. Griffith. Um and the they basically it was them saying, like, we're gonna create our own like artists union because the rest of the studios are just screwing us, and we're gonna have ownership and United Artists in control was um a promise as much as the name of the company. Basically, The Great Dictator was one of those movies that he was he was going to be making, and his partners were like, You're gonna piss a lot of people off. Because he started making it well before American entrance to the war. I he made it before even the UK had declared war on Germany, right?

SPEAKER_03 46:44

Like Oh wow, that was yeah, that was super early.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Because he was very, very adamant about I mean it didn't come out for a long time because his process, I mean Chaplin's process is notoriously slow and tortured because he does everything down to the score himself.

SPEAKER_03 47:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like Prince in that way in that way, right? Kind of does all the instruments and then puts it together.

SPEAKER_00 47:10

And and he is notorious for like he puts Kubrick to shame as far as the amounts of takes and film that he uses. Yeah, I was gonna say, like Fincher. Um worse than that, because he's willing to like re-block scenes and re-reconceive editing on the set and go like, no, the gag wasn't there, we've got to find it here, we've got to re-explore and do that sort of thing. Which is why, you know, he had to do, you know, his contracts for like Mutual or SNA were like, you've got to do 12 shorts in a year, and it took him a year to do 12 shorts where everybody else was producing a short a week. You know, because he had that level of perfectionism and level of exploration in his filmmaking at a time when film was so expensive.

SPEAKER_03 48:04

I mean, film's still expensive, but yeah, I mean proportionally speaking, though, it was way more expensive back then.

SPEAKER_00 48:11

Um, so it was a huge risk and a gamble, but finally, by the time it came out, it worked really well. But even the reviews of the time of The Great Dictator were very much like this was great until he started injecting his politics in this huge speech at the end, just ruined the movie for people. Which I found really curious because I find I don't like the speech makes the movie for me, like it gives me chills every time I see it. So seeing contemporary reviews from people going like, Who the hell does this guy think he is to just stop and preach to us for five minutes in the middle of the movie? This is his worst picture, it's garbage because of this. It's really weird.

SPEAKER_03 48:52

Well, you know, they didn't like to have that prejudice or that apathy reflected back to them. But more often You know, you're you you know, they were supposed to care, they were supposed to be as pissed as he was, and they weren't.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

Well, you know, the especially the right wing in America at the time had a lot of money in Hitler and a lot of them really admired him.

SPEAKER_00 49:12

Yeah. But more often than not, when you see Charlie Chaplin on social media, what do you see? You see that speech. So that was sort of like when he started getting on the radar of people as like, uh, I think this guy might be a little bit in uh a little bit political. And then he made uh a couple of other movies. He didn't make a whole lot of movies in the sound era. He was in the midst of making Limelight, which never really got a proper release in the US until much later.

unknown 49:43

Right.

SPEAKER_00 49:44

Oh really? Limelight, actually, just as an interesting aside, is the one time Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin uh shared the screen and did a vaudeville routine together at the climax of the movie, and it's really terrific. But Limelight, he was making Limelight and went on vacation to the UK during the height of the McCarthy era trials, and when he was on his way back to the US, they told him that they were gonna revoke his you know visa and told him that he wasn't gonna be allowed back into the country unless he testified and named names and and uh he was not gonna be allowed back unless he had that interview, and he said he'd rather never walk step foot in America again uh than have that interview because he he just thought it was wrong and the McCarthy era sort of communist witch hunt was just anathema to him, and he never set foot in America again until the 70s when they invited him back to give him his honorary Oscar.

SPEAKER_03 50:49

That's so crazy. That is so crazy to me.

SPEAKER_01 50:52

I didn't realize it was a HUAC. I knew uh I knew he was kind of chased out of America, but I didn't realize it was an ultimatum like that.

SPEAKER_00 50:58

Well, it wasn't so much an ultimatum, like it it was we would like to talk to you, or you're you know, we're not going to let you have your visa unless you sit down and talk to us. And he was just like, fine, I don't need my visa. Yeah, I'm out. Like it was it was a moral stance on his point. There was it I mean from a certain point of view, that that's very much an ultimatum, but like for a guy that seemed as principled about that specifically as Chaplin was, that could very much seem like as much of an ultimatum as he would need.

SPEAKER_03 51:32

Yeah, you know, I I I I think I'm with you, Brandon. I think whenever I've heard about it and and read about it in the past, I'm like, oh yeah, no, that feels very much like they kicked him out a little bit, right? Like, because they know he's gonna say no. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

Um but but they had to bring him to heel.

SPEAKER_03 51:48

Yeah, they had to they had to do that. And I, you know what I gotta say, I I would like to think that if given the same situation, I'd I'd be the same way. I'd be like, you know what, fuck off.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:59

You know, I I I can live somewhere else. Because he wasn't a United States citizen, he was British, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:04

And I mean, but he'd been living in the US since I mean, we're talking the f he'd been living in the US for almost you know well over 40 years at that point.

SPEAKER_03 52:16

Right, right, right, right. Because he came over in the what early, early teens.

SPEAKER_01 52:21

I don't know the exact year, but yeah. Well, probably earlier than that because he was already in vaudeville by like I don't know the exact years, but I mean he started doing films in 14.

SPEAKER_03 52:31

Yeah, whenever I I kind of poked at his like really early childhood.

SPEAKER_00 52:34

He started doing films in 13 because he he signed the contract. His contract with Keystone was December 1913 to December 1914, and he had to finish his vaudeville contract um before they signed him. They signed him months and months before that, and he had to finish his vaudeville contract and get to California on it. So okay.

SPEAKER_03 52:58

Yeah, I just knew they that he had like a really, really pretty tragic childhood, like early childhood and stuff, and and he and his brother kind of got into vaudeville and showbiz kind of as a survival mechanism, so they wouldn't necessarily end up end up in an orphanage.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:14

And I think he still was for a time, if I'm remembering correctly.

SPEAKER_01 53:18

Yeah, I always meant to uh I never picked it up, but there's like a thousand-page uh biography of Chaplin that's supposed to be really good. Yeah. And I just never pulled the trigger on it. So I'm like, oof, that's that's months of reading.

SPEAKER_03 53:28

I mean, it's a fascinating life, but when you look at like, say, Mabel Norman's career and how she got castigated and tossed out of Hollywood, and here's Chaplin, and yeah, he I you can argue that he chose to walk away and talk chose to not capitulate to McCarthyism, and that's why he's gone. Or that's why he stepped away for a while. But you know, like he was a womanizer, he had numerous wives that were very young.

SPEAKER_01 53:56

Mistresses too.

SPEAKER_03 53:57

Mistresses, mistresses that were very young. There's any number of reasons he could have been cancelled, but it was like the McCarthyism that that did it, but then he still has a legacy, he still has a, you know, we're like obviously we're still talking about him, he's still relevant, he's still It's been funny, like me trying to put together.

SPEAKER_00 54:17

I mentioned this on Blue Sky the other day. It's like, why can't I find a Mabel Normand box set that has all of her films assembled for me to find anything close to a Mabel Normand collection? I've had to buy a Chaplin collection, a Max Senate collection, a Fatty Arbuckle collection, and then I'd say a good third of her films are held by universities and the Museum of Modern Art and a couple of other museums that have prints of her films that do not have them available to watch. Um, like the Museum of Modern Art in New York has almost a full third of her surviving films that they just haven't made available.

SPEAKER_01 55:07

It's because like Kino hasn't reached out or one of those companies to try to put something together.

SPEAKER_00 55:11

I just don't think that there's been an interest or a push because nobody knows who the hell Mabel Normand is.

SPEAKER_03 55:18

Which is, you know, kind of what I was alluding to earlier. It's like, dude, if you if you're not a film nerd, if you're not in like into film history or or into the silent era, you're not gonna you're not gonna have any idea who she is. And we can make the argument that Charlie Chaplin does not exist as Charlie Chaplin as we know it without Mabel Normand. And it's just super frustrating for me that these people that, especially women who are super instr instrumental in the golden age of Hollywood, you know, in the silent era in the early years, whenever uh talkies started happening, and they're just and erased from history.

SPEAKER_00 55:55

It's funny that well, it's not funny, it's whatever adjective, whatever appropriately tragic adjective you'd like to use, but it's not funny. But in that silent era, you know, the parody of directors between gender was much more evenly split, you know, and that it wasn't a big deal that Mabel Normand was directing most of her own pictures.

SPEAKER_03 56:18

And not only directing, but having like having a voice saying, like, no, you know, fuck off, you can't do this, we're doing it this way. That that gag is played out, we have to find something new, you know. And having agency and being listened to and having power. And then, you know, like you were saying, in by the Depression era, we're gonna use the excuse of, oh, we don't have any money, we're gonna fire all the women.

SPEAKER_01 56:41

I mean, that even happens in more modern day. Um, there's a the Belgian director, Chantal La Carriman. I remember reading, like I was watching some of her movies and realized you can't find a good chunk of them. And there was somebody talking about wanting to put on a film festival of her work, and you just can't find them.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

That's well, and another thing I found as I've been going through, because I'm currently researching a book set in the silent film era, so I've been just devouring all this stuff lately. Again, I found out like the movie serial format where you've got the Saturday Matinee serial. What's the first thing you think of, right? You think of Indiana Jones and then the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials. But the thing I found going through all of this is that they were actually they started way earlier than that. And the original serials were all women empowerment serials. It was all um, the first one was the perils of Pauline, and then you had like the mysteries of Myra, which was sort of like early weird cult horror stuff with a women a woman in the lead, and then you had the adventures of Kathleen, and the Adventures of Kathleen was a movie serial with a a woman in the lead that actually had the first movie novelization tie-in ever. So we still have that. I actually picked up a copy because we have the book with with movie stills in it, but we don't have any prints of all of the serials in them anymore. All of these serials are gone, but they all starred women who whose fathers were either dead and left them their money, or their fathers were kidnapped or gone in situations in ways that let them escape the patriarchy or the patriarchal b bonds that like sort of kept them down in the society of the 19 teens. And they were all smart young women who were single and not attached to anyone going on adventures and sort of seeing a life beyond that of a homemaker or whatever. And and you're looking at these in like 1911, 1912 to 1914, 1915, at a time when movie theaters weren't like the one room art deco movie palaces that we think of when we think of like oh early silent films. They were just like mom and pop shops where it's like any like storefront. Yeah, any storefront could put up curtains, have a jackass in the back cranking a you know, cranking a camera, and whatever chairs they could fit, you know, inside with their with their bed sheets stretched out. Those were theaters in the in the in the day. And so the Nickelodeon. So the the theaters, like these early serials geared toward women tied in with newspapers so that like they could catch up if they missed a week, read up about what happened the week before in the newspaper, were designed to make women feel comfortable in the theaters uh and make them feel like it was a space women could go because women were the ones with the disposable income, and women were the ones that they wanted to make feel empowered with the stories, and then they just lose all of them, right? Like these are the most popular serials the world has seen to that point. They lose all of them, and then when you think of serials, what do you think of? Oh, it's all just Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and we get Indiana Jones.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:16

Well, you know what though? It's it sounds a little bit to me like whenever you're talking about these cereals and they're geared toward women, and then we do like synopsies in the in the newspaper in case you had, you know, to take Johnny to the doctor last week or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:30

Um, it almost sounds like the precursor to the no it was, and and it was the newspapers that were sponsoring it because it was them getting into all this stuff. And it yeah, there was this element that like we just need to get women on board because no one thinks that the movies are a safe, secure place where the whole family could go and the women would always turn their nose up at it and and stuff, because that's just how much the the landscape of the industry and the landscape of exhibition was changing because a few years prior to that you were looking at just kinetoscopes, and it was like that was a whole different experience. And then it was either kinetoscopes or just film played at the end of a vaudeville show.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:17

Yeah, this is super fascinating. All right, let's go a little side note here. You mentioned that you're doing all this research for a book. Are you writing this on spec, or do you have a contract that you that we need to maybe not talk about on the podcast?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31

Yeah, I'm writing it all on spec. I'm setting it in 1910, which is again one of those interesting things as you try to figure out exactly where you'd be setting things in the movie industry in the 19 teens. Like 1907 is drastically different than 1910, and 1910 is drastically different than 1912.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:50

And yeah, yeah. It's well, like you you had mentioned earlier, right? Like the industry was changing so hard so fast and all at once, kind of it's like you don't have anything, and then it's completely different within five years. Fascinating. I'm glad you suggested this topic. This is the this is perfect. This is perfect. Um, well, you know, we're we're kind of getting it into the end of our time, and I want to be mindful of your evening. I I'm gonna ask you the question that I ask every podcast, and I know the answer is gonna be no, but let's ask it. Should these movies be banned?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:26

No, I think we should watch them often. I think no, of course not. I think no, I think we should watch them and show them to everyone, and I think we should make a Mabel Norman film festival and make the MoMA put more of the Mabel's films out there, especially since we've got all of her Chaplin films save one, so we might as well get some of the ones without Chaplin out there.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:52

Um, yeah, I would fully support that. And I feel like Brian, maybe we should like work on that. Should we start writing letters to Moa?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:00

I've been tagging them in Blues on Blue Sky. I don't think they look at that though.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:04

I no, probably not. Probably not. But uh, you know what? I'm only half joking, so we should probably get on that. All right, well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us tonight. This was such a great conversation. And listen, I'm got I've got more movies to watch, I've got more stuff to read about. I'm so glad that you gave our knowledge, your knowledge to our listeners. And speaking of the listeners, thank you, all of your listeners out there for being as amazing as you are. Be sure to check out our Patreon page. Subscribers get a sneak peek at our lineup and can listen to the podcast before the rest of the world can. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And hey, tell your friends about us, why don't you? This is Kelly Swales.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:47

I'm Brenda Wilhelm.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:48

And you've been listening to Bard Movies. Catch you next time.