northeast
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New arts call info
Historic Northeast Cultural Arts Commission presents the 2008-2009 Free Concert Series starting with the Doug Talley Quartet performing its original scores to three classic silent films. They are early Chaplin 2-reel films. Each lasts for about 20 minutes. The date is Friday, June 6, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Scuola Vita Nuova Charter School at 544 Wabash — one block west of Prospect at the corner of Independence and Wabash. The event is free. Donations are welcome to benefit programs offered by the Historic Northeast Cultural Arts Commission. Bring the entire family. For more information, visit www.NortheastArtsKC.org.
Three Classic 20 minute featured shorts
A Night at the Show was Charlie Chaplin’s 12th film for Essanay. It was made at Majestic Studio in Los Angeles the fall of 1915. Based on A Night in an English Music Hall, the Fred Karno-produced ensemble sketch which brought Chaplin to the U.S. in 1910, the film is set in a crowded theater, where a series of mediocre variety acts try to entertain the audience. Chaplin plays two roles: a slick-haired dandy in the orchestra seats, who flirts with the female performers at every possible opportunity, and Mr. Rowdy, a walrus-mustached drunkard who heckles the actors from the balcony. The film comes to an abrupt end when Mr. Rowdy gets hold of a fire hose and douses everyone in sight.
In February 1916, only two years after entering the movie industry, Chaplin signed a contract with the Hollywood-based Mutual Film Corporation to produce a series of 12 short movies. This huge contract made Chaplin the highest-paid entertainer of his time and allowed him to exercise complete control and artistic freedom over the comedies, inspiring the 27-year-old Chaplin to be as funny and daring as he could. During the next 16 months, Chaplin made 12 comedies at the breakneck speed of almost one a month. Easy Street, one of these short comedies, opens with Chaplin wandering into a mission where he is smitten by a lovely girl while listening to a minister’s sermon. Now reformed, Chaplin becomes a policeman and is assigned to the inner city ghetto of Easy Street where he helps the poor, rescues the kidnapped girl, and defeats the local bully becoming a hero to the people of Easy Street. Not your typical sanitized view of the inner city, the film walks a fine line between humor and pathos and stands as one of Chaplin’s finest short films.
The Immigrant (also called Broke) — another of Chaplin’s Mutual films — starring the Charlie Chaplin Tramp character as an immigrant coming to the United States who is accused of theft on the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and befriends a young woman along the way. It also stars Edna Purviance and Eric Campbell. The movie was written and directed by Chaplin. According to Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s documentary series Unknown Chaplin, the first scenes to be written and filmed take place in what became the movie’s second half, in which the penniless Tramp finds a coin and goes for a meal in a restaurant, not realizing that the coin has fallen out of his pocket. It was not until later that Chaplin decided the reason the Tramp was penniless was that he had just arrived on a boat from Europe, and used this notion as the basis for the first half. Purviance reportedly was required to eat so many plates of beans during the many takes to complete the restaurant sequence (in character as another immigrant who falls in love with Charlie) that she became physically ill.
