The 2021 Chaplin Days online festival hosted by the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum includes my all-new video tour of Charlie’s century-old masterpiece The Kid (1921), revealing locations and the incredible visual history hidden in the background of the film. Now posted on YouTube, the show reveals Muhammad Ali would later own the mansion appearing early in the film.

Above, a frame grab from a once-lost film Derby Day (1922), available for DVD purchase thanks to Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions Found at Mostly Lost Vol. 2, provides a wide view of the site where Charlie filmed the rooftop chase and leap into the getaway orphanage truck. Charlie stands on the home directly behind the narrow triangle building.

Above, an early view of the Plaza de Los Angeles and Chinatown highlighted with places where Chaplin filmed. Echoing his own impoverished London childhood, it’s stunning to see how often Charlie filmed in LA’s poorest parts of town.

I had fun putting this together, and hope you will check it out, along with the many other 2021 Chaplin Days special programs and talks now hosted on the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum YouTube Channel.

Above, my YouTube talk from last year’s Chaplin Days fully covers the many Bay Area locations where Charlie made his five Niles Essanay Studio movies in 1915.

The Kid and all images from Chaplin films made after 1918 Copyright © Roy Export S.A.S.