Hello, my name is Justin LeClewer, and I'm here today with Will Sloan, and you're listening

to the Important Cinema Club. And it's finally time to talk about the little tramp himself,

Billy West. Billy West was the name, of course, of Charlie Chaplin's most prolific impersonator in the

1910s.

There was a whole Bruce Voitation-like industry of Charlie Chaplin impersonators who made movies in the

1910s.

You know, they had the derby hat, the little mustache, they had the walking stick, the cane twirling stick. And he was the best

of them. Anyway, we're not actually going to talk about Billy West. No, we're talking about Wheeler

Dryden. Oh, Wheeler Dryden, Charlie's half-brother? Uh, no, we're going to talk about the actual

little tramp himself, the OG, Mr. Charlie Chaplin. Now, for people I've listened to this podcast

before, you know that Charlie Chaplin is a favorite of Mr. Will Sloan's. Definitely an important

figure in my cinephilia. Definitely one of those people who, when I saw him as a kid, opened my eyes

to new possibilities in cinema, somebody who I grew up with, somebody who's in

my DNA. What's your relationship with Charlie Chaplin? Didn't watch him when I was a kid, didn't

really grow up with him. He is definitely not in my DNA beyond knowing him as a pop culture figure

and knowing how important his films are. And seeing a few of them over the years. Over the years.

I think maybe the first Charlie Chaplin film I saw in college. Because before that, if my parents aren't showing them to me, and I'm not stumbling upon them at, on Sunday, I mean, some of them were in public domain, weren't they? So they'd be in, like, the bootleg, uh, public domain bins and stuff like that. Oh, absolutely. I was interested in doing this episode because I know all the Chaplin movies very well. I certainly know all the features very, very well to the point where, like, I'm almost a little tired of them. Like, you actually said, do we have to do Charlie Chaplin? Like, I know it so well. Well, yeah, it was kind of at the point where like, Look, City Lights, it's a perfect film. Do I need to see it again? Do I need to see them on the statue at the beginning? Like, I know every beat of it. Like, I kind of thought, can I have 10 years off of this subject? But then the idea of experiencing them through you, a relative novice in this subject. I was interested in that.

And I threw the gauntlet down and said, I'm going to watch them all, Will. I'm going to watch

all of the ones on Letterbox that are technically listed as feature films that Charlie Chaplin himself

directed. I'm not doing none of those chaplain reviews or anything like that. You're not doing

Tilley's punctured romance.

No, but we can talk about it a little bit, even though that's technically not a Charlie Chaplin film.

...