Trivia / City Lights

• Banned in China: When the film was re-released in 1950, it was banned in Memphis by censor Lloyd T. Benford because of Chaplin's "immoral" character. This judgement resulted from several personal incidents that plagued Chaplin's career.
• Deleted Scene:
  • A scene intended for the first reel involves the Tramp's repeated unsuccessful attempts to dislodge a piece of wood stuck in a street grating. From this simple idea, Chaplin created seven minutes of hilarity, before deciding it didn't fit in with the rest of the film. Fortunately the footage survived.
  • The opening reel and a dream vision of Chaplin handsomely uniformed were deleted.
• Development Hell: One reason why the film became the last great silent movie is that it took almost three years to produce, mainly due to Chaplin's relentless perfectionism.
• Doing It for the Art: Charlie Chaplin spent $1,500,000 of his own money in making the film. A river was built at Chaplin's studio, which covered an area of five acres and cost $15,000 to construct. Two streets representing a downtown business section were also constructed at a cost of $100,000.
• Hostility on the Set: Charlie Chaplin didn't get on with his leading lady, Virginia Cherrill. At one point, he fired her for showing up late from an appointment, but recast her (double her original salary) when a replacement couldn't be found.
• Invisible Advertising: According to his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin was angered over United Artists' lack of pre-release publicity and decided to exhibit the picture himself. He spent his own money to rent the George M. Cohan Theater and took out half-page advertisments to publicize the fact.
• The Other Marty:
  • Henry Clive was originally cast as the millionaire, but when he refused to fall into the water in a necessary scene, Charlie Chaplin fired him and hired Harry Myers. Some sources say that Clive had a cold at the time and asked Chaplin if they could wait until the sun had warmed the water before getting in. Chaplin responded by promptly replacing him with a new actor.
  • At one point, Virginia Cherrill came back to the set late from an appointment, keeping Charlie Chaplin waiting. Chaplin, whose relationship with Cherrill was not friendly, fired her on the spot. He intended to reshoot the film with Georgia Hale, his heroine from The Gold Rush, playing the flower girl; he even reshot the final scene between the tramp and the flower girl with Hale in the role. However, Chaplin had already spent far too much time and money on the project to start over. Knowing this, Cherrill offered to come back to work - at double her original salary. Chaplin reluctantly agreed and the film was completed.
• Referenced by...: In Three Days to Never, Charlie Chaplin works symbolic imagery into City Lights as part of a magical ritual to attempt to bring his son back from the dead. An earlier movie he worked on but never shown to the public is part of the MacGuffin; Albert Einstein talks Chaplin out of showing the movie, as the mojo generated by the imagery would likely fry some audience brains.
• Troubled Production: Chaplin was stressed about making a silent film when Hollywood had quit silent movies, but at the same time, he didn't feel that the Tramp would work in a talking film. Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill couldn't stand each other; as noted elsewhere on this page, he at one point fired her and tried to replace her with Georgia Hale. He also had a lot of Writer's Block and struggled a great deal with certain aspects of the story, like how to make the blind girl believe that the Tramp is a millionaire. In the end, photography took two years, from December 1928 to September 1930, which would be a long time to make a movie in the 21st century and was an insanely long time for that era.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, the film would not have the Tramp. Instead, the original concept was about an elderly clown who starts to lose his sight and tries to hide his blindness from his daughter. Chaplin quickly abandoned the idea and ended up with the premise of the Tramp falling in love with a blind flower girl.
  • For a subplot, Charlie Chaplin first considered a character even lower on the social scale, a black newsboy.
  • Chaplin considered setting the film in Paris. This is probably why he called it City Lights, Paris being the City of Lights.

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