While Chicago often is recognized for opulent downtown movie theaters of yesteryear, Northwest Indiana also has its own big-screen shining treasure of Hollywood history.
The Hoosier Theatre, 1335 119th St., Whiting, was built in 1924 and remains a popular one-screen 600-seat movie house.
At 2 p.m. Sunday, Charlie Chaplin once again will grace the towering screen for a special showing of his 1921 film classic “The Kid,” which stars the silent film icon as his famous alter-ego the Little Tramp.
Tickets are $10 for this silent film gem, which was Chaplin’s first feature length movie. More information is at www.hoosiertheatre.com or 219-659-0567.
The film will be accompanied by Jay Warren playing live music on the theater’s amazing pipe organ. As a bonus, audiences also can enjoy a second feature short film, just 27 minutes long, starring stone-faced Buster Keaton in “The Electric House” released in 1922. It has Keaton, who died at age 70 in 1966, playing a university botany major who accidentally is awarded an electrical engineering degree and must attempt to wire a home.
Just around an hour in length, “The Kid” also was written, produced and directed by Chaplin, who co-stars with child star Jackie Coogan, who was just 7 years old at the time of filming. Chaplin discovered Coogan at age 6 in the Orpheum Theatre vaudeville house in Los Angeles, when he saw him on stage performing the popular dance of the time called “the Shimmy.”
In addition to his film box office success, Coogan also ranked as one of the first child stars to be “merchandised,” with his likeness appearing on everything from dolls and whistles to stationery and even peanut butter. He also amassed incredible earnings estimated to be as much as $3 million a year at his height of young stardom in the 1920s (an amount likened to $50 million in today’s dollars).
Unfortunately, his mother and stepfather controlled and squandered his fortune, which led to California’s established 1939 enactment of the California Child Actor’s Bill referred to as “Coogan’s Law,” which specified that employers must place a certain amount of a child’s acting earnings into a trust fund, as well as requiring certain work hours and schooling.
It was Chaplin who helped Coogan later in life, lending him money and helping him find work. Coogan, a devout Roman Catholic who married actress Betty Grable in 1937 as the first of his four wives, became famous to later generations for his television work starring as silly Uncle Fester on the ABC series “The Addams Family,” prior to his death at age 69 in 1984.
Many people also don’t realize Chaplin once lived in Chicago for a short time.
In late 1914, Essanay Studios in Chicago hired Chaplin away from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, offering him a higher salary and his own production unit. Chaplin made 14 short comedies for Essanay in 1915, at both the Chicago and the Niles, Calif., satellite studio location. While in Chicago, Chaplin lived at Brewster Apartments, 2800 N. Pine Grove Ave., a beautiful space in the Romanesque-Revival-style structure, which stands today as one of Chicago’s oldest buildings, dating to 1893. However after just one year, Chaplin complained about the weather in Chicago and returned to California.
Chaplin then joined forces with fellow Hollywood luminaries Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Mary Pickford and D. W. Griffith to form their own distribution company United Artists in January 1919. Pickford, who often didn’t see eye to eye with Chaplin, did regard his film “The Kid” as one of her favorite Chaplin productions, telling the press: ” ‘The Kid’ is one of the finest examples of the screen language, depending upon its actions, rather than upon subtitles.”
While many of their films enjoyed first runs at the Hoosier Theatre in Whiting, neither Chaplin nor Pickford ever appeared in person to promote any of their movies at the Northwest Indiana property.
However, other famed names did perform or participate in promotional appearances at the movie house, including W.C. Fields, radio team Amos and Andy and slapstick kings the Three Stooges. During the war relief efforts, actor James Cagney came to the theater to sell war bonds.
Chaplin’s “The Kid,” is special for many reasons, adding to unique and special opportunity provided with Sunday’s screening in Whiting. Besides the portrayal of poverty, an orphan story and the cruelty of welfare workers of the day, all reminiscent of Chaplin’s own childhood in London, this also is a film which was almost never seen.
After the movie was completed in 1920, the film project was included as part of the messy divorce for Chaplin and his first wife Mildred Harris, who was seeking much of Chaplin’s assets. Chaplin said he and his film editors “smuggled the raw negative” to Salt Lake City packed in coffee cans (which would not by searched in the Mormon faith-based vicinity, since the followers do not consume caffeine) and completed for post-production in a room at the Hotel Utah until his marital legalities were complete.
If you watch the film closely, it also includes 12-year-old actress Lita Grey, who portrays an angel in the film, and became Chaplin very young and controversial second wife from 1924 to ’27.
Philip Potempa is a journalist, author and the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center.
