His New Job (1915)
released 1st February 1915
Cast:
Charlie Chaplin
Robert Bolder
Arthur W. Bates
Charlotte Mineau
Ben Turpin
Leo White
His New Job (1915)
Comedy
29m
Essanay Film Manufacturing co.
Director:
Charlie Chaplin
Writer:
Charlie Chaplin
"A riot of fun in two acts"
ESSANAY
announces it has secured
CHARLES CHAPLIN
The Greatest Comedian
the motion picture world
has ever seen.
The inimitable laugh-maker is at
work now on some Essanay comedies
that will be released in the near future
YOU KNOW WHAT CHARLES CHAPLIN MEANS TO YOUR BOX OFFICE!
So boasted Essanay in a full-page ad in the Moving Picture World trade paper dated 2nd January 1915. And well may they boast: after all, they had secured the services of a comic whose on-screen antics had taken the world by storm over the previous twelve months.
Charlie Chaplin’s contract with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios expired at the end of 1914. In late October 1914, Sennett had signed Chaplin’s older brother, Syd, for a weekly wage of $200, $25 more than Charlie was earning. Syd arrived in Hollywood full of stories of how popular his kid brother was back home and urged him to demand a generous rise when the time came to renew. Emboldened by his brother’s news, the comedian decided he would only remain with Keystone if it agreed to his ambitious wage demands.
Chaplin’s insistence on $1,000 per week dumbfounded Sennett, who had offered him $750. The flabbergasted producer pointed out that even he didn’t earn that much. Chaplin reminded him it wasn’t his name that filled cinemas. Sennett relayed his demands to Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann, the heads of the New York Motion Picture Company that owned Keystone. They proposed a counteroffer: a three-year contract starting at $500 per week, and rising by $500 each year so that Chaplin would earn $1500 per week in the third year. But the English comic knew he was in a strong position. Perhaps tongue-in-cheek, he suggested they reverse the terms of their offer so that he began on $1500 per week, with his wages dropping by $500 in years two and three.
Chaplin was certain other offers would materialise when Sennett declined to accept his demands – and, sure enough, he didn’t have long to wait. Over lunch at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, where Chaplin was living, Jesse J. Robbins of Essanay offered him $1250 per week. He couldn’t yet confirm whether Gilbert M. ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson, joint-owner of Essanay, would agree to Chaplin’s demand for a $10,000 signing-on bonus, he said. Chaplin hid his surprise. The idea of such a bonus had never occurred to him. In fact, he had attended the lunch with no strategy whatsoever. Anderson, it seemed, had believed exaggerated rumours of Chaplin’s demands. Finding them acceptable, he had authorised Robbins to make an offer. Recovering quickly, Chaplin confirmed he did indeed require a $10,000 signing-on bonus. Robbins obtained Anderson’s permission to close the deal over the phone.
Chaplin was elated. The move offered him an escape from everything he disliked about Keystone. Instead of a frantic schedule that demanded almost a film per week, he could work at a pace more suited to his creativity. He would also have greater control over his material.
However, Essanay was not to be quite the nirvana he had expected.
In mid-December 1914, he travelled to their studio in Niles and was immediately disenchanted. He disliked the studio with its glass roof, which, he knew, would make working in the summer intolerable, and Niles was in the middle of nowhere. Anderson’s bungalow, which he had offered to share with the English comic, Chaplin found depressing. “Empty and drab,” he recalled. “One had to take a jug and fill it from the bath tap and empty it down the flush to make the toilet work.”
Anderson suggested he might find the company’s Chicago studio more to his liking, so Chaplin caught the eastbound train, arriving on the 23rd December.
He found the Chicago studio, a former warehouse on 1333 Argyle Street, just as dismaying – although for different reasons. Essanay worked in a much more regimented fashion than Keystone. “In the upstairs office the different departments were partitioned like tellers’ grilles,” Chaplin revealed in his autobiography. “It was anything but conducive to creative work. At six o’clock, no matter whether a director was in the middle of a scene or not, the lights were turned off and everybody went home.”
Upon his arrival on 2nd January 1915, he was told to collect his assigned script from Louella Parsons, the head of the scenario department. Chaplin informed Parsons, who would one day become an influential Hollywood gossip columnist, that he would provide his own script. He also refused the services of a director.
He was at least allowed to select his own cast from the studio’s stock company. He recognised only one of them: Ben Turpin, the weedy, cross-eyed comic who had been appearing in films since 1907. Turpin initially worked as the studio’s janitor, sweeping out Essanay chief George K. Spoor’s office. Even when acting, he would work as a carpenter, scenery painter, prop man, and shipping clerk. He had made little impression since returning to Essanay in 1913 after a four-year stint in vaudeville. Spoor had been reluctant to re-hire him and offered him only the same rate of $50 per week he had previously earned. Since then, he had provided comic support to Wallace Beery in his Sweedie comedies and George Ade’s Fables. Working with Chaplin earned Turpin long-overdue recognition for his comic talent.
A fifteen-year-old Gloria Swanson was also featured among the cast, playing a stenographer. Chaplin had originally intended a much larger part for her. He spent an entire morning working with her - possibly as a favour to Anderson’s wife, Leona, for whom Swanson’s Aunt Inga worked as a nanny. “Oh, God! I could not get a reaction out of her,” Chaplin bemoaned. “She was so unsatisfactory that I gave up and dismissed her.”
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin and Arthur W. Bates in His New Job (1915)
Swanson later claimed she had been “deliberately uncooperative,” because she couldn’t stomach the idea of appearing in a comedy. “I would have been mortified if anybody I knew had ever seen me get kicked in the pants or hit with a revolving plank by an odd sprite in a hobo outfit,” she later recalled. Remembering the audition, she said, “He kept laughing and making his eyes twinkle and talking in a light, gentle voice and encouraging me to let myself go and be silly. He reminded me of a pixie from some other world altogether…All morning I felt like a cow trying to dance with a toy poodle.”
Perhaps Swanson thought no-one would ever see her earliest films. Perhaps her memory failed her, or maybe she lowered her standards for the sake of her career. Whatever the reason, Swanson wasn’t entirely honest about feeling comedies were beneath her. In 1916-1917 she made nine comic shorts for slapstick supremo Mack Sennett, appearing opposite genre stalwarts like Bobby Vernon, Mack Swain and Chester Conklin.
Adding to Chaplin’s dissatisfaction with his working conditions at Essanay was the fact that George K. Spoor still hadn’t paid the promised $10,000 bonus. Anderson’s business partner had been unhappy about the deal. Anderson had clinched it largely without his knowledge. Spoor felt no comic was worth even the weekly salary Chaplin was receiving, let alone an enormous bonus just for signing on. In fact, he avoided their latest recruit to delay paying the bonus until he received proof of his worth at the box office. Only when he saw the advance sales figures for His New Job did he show his face. He apologised profusely when the angry star confronted him, blaming the front office for not following his instructions to take care of all business arrangements.
Chaplin was no happier while working on His New Job. In his autobiography, he recalled being horrified that to save the cost of a positive print, the studio viewed each day’s rushes on the original negative. When he insisted they make a positive print, “they reacted as though I wanted to bankrupt them.” He found the studio’s attitude “smug and self-satisfied,” a consequence, he believed, of their membership of the Motion Picture Patents Company.
His dissatisfaction did little to dampen his professionalism as he shot His New Job on Essanay’s newest stage, constructed the year before. Besides his pick of cast, the studio allocated Jackson Rose, one of their best cinematographers, to shoot the picture*. Rose would later film Max Linder, the French comic Chaplin idolised, when he came to Essanay in 1917.
Chaplin’s routines mesmerised other members of the cast, according to ‘30s character actor Edward Arnold. In his autobiography, Lorenzo Goes to Hollywood, Arnold quoted Essanay writer H. Tipton Steck: “Chaplin’s acting, even in those days, fascinated everyone. He was so dynamic, yet subtle. Whenever he was doing a scene, the other members of the cast would behave as though they were hypnotized. Everybody stood still and watched him. Even the stage hands would leave their work and gather around. It became a standard joke in the company that ‘this fellow Chaplin had better be dropped. He disrupts the whole organization with his antics’.”
As with A Film Johnnie (1914) and The Masquerader (1914), Chaplin chose a movie studio for the setting of his first Essanay picture. As he had not yet fashioned a storyline – despite what he had told Miss Parsons – the Essanay studio provided a ready-made backdrop for improvisation. The film’s title, His New Job, referenced his move from Keystone to Essanay, as did the name of the studio in the film: Lockstone was a thinly veiled reference to Sennett’s fun factory.
The improvised plot saw Chaplin hired by the fictional studio as a general helper. His incompetence leads to his demotion to carpenter’s assistant, but circumstances conspire to give him the lead part in a picture. But once again his ineptitude ensures the production swiftly descends into chaos. Chaplin told Moving Picture World, “It is the very best comedy I have ever produced. The new surroundings and clever actors whom I had to work with enabled me to make the greatest comedy of my life. I couldn’t help laughing when I saw it on the screen.”
Moving Picture World’s reviewer wasn’t so complimentary in her rather ambivalent review of 20th February 1915. “It would seem that Charles Chaplin has but to poke some other fellow in the stomach, pommel the seat of his trousers, or rattle his brains with anything that comes handy to call forth round after round of the heartiest laughter,” she wrote. “And after all is said and done the whole production consists merely of slapstick comedy…but, as indicated before, if the audience thinks it ’s funny, it must be so.”
His New Job was the only film Chaplin shot at Essanay’s Chicago facilities. Returning to Chicago from New York on 12th January 1915, Anderson could see that his star attraction was unhappy. “He didn’t like the cameraman and he didn’t like the fellow who painted the scenery and he didn’t like this and he didn’t like that.”
Chaplin insisted that if Essanay wanted results from him, he must return to California. Although he made little effort to conceal his dislike of Spoor, the executive was now keen to accommodate his every wish. The strange little Englishman had the potential to earn stratospheric amounts for the studio. So, he arranged for Chaplin’s immediate return to Niles.
There, Chaplin produced the rest of his films for Essanay, developing the artistic finesse to complement his comic skills. However, his comic genius would only fully mature during his time at Mutual from 1916.
*Some sources credit Roland Totheroh.
Sources: My Autobiography, Charles Chaplin; Chaplin, Dennis Gifford; Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, David Kiehn; Charlie Chaplin, John McCabe; Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, Jeffrey Vance; Swanson on Swanson, Gloria Swanson; Charlie Chaplin: the Beauty of Silence, Alan Schroeder; Chaplin, the Tramp’s Odyssey, Simon Louvish; Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up, Tricia Welsch; Lorenzo Goes to Hollywood, Edward Arnold.