page_title: City Lights
section_title: Pre-production
hierarchical_section_title: City Lights / Production / Pre-production
caption_attribution_description: English: Promotional photograph for Charlie Chaplin's 1931 film City Lights, depicting Chaplin as the Tramp and his co-star Virginia Cherrill as the Blind Flower Girl.
context_page_description: City Lights is a 1931 American pre-Code silent romantic comedy film written, produced, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin's Tramp as he falls in love with a blind girl and develops a turbulent friendship with an alcoholic millionaire.
  Although sound films were on the rise when Chaplin started developing the script in 1928, he decided to continue working with silent productions. Filming started in December 1928 and ended in September 1930. City Lights marked the first time Chaplin composed the film score to one of his productions and it was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston. The main theme, used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl, is the song "La Violetera" from Spanish composer José Padilla. Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him.
  City Lights was immediately successful upon release on January 30, 1931, with positive reviews and box office receipts of $5 million. Today, many critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin's career, but one of the greatest films of all time.
context_section_description: Chaplin's feature The Circus, released in 1928, was his last film before the motion picture industry embraced sound recording and brought the silent movie era to a close. As his own producer and distributor (part owner of United Artists), Chaplin could still conceive City Lights as a silent film. Technically the film was a crossover, as its soundtrack had synchronized music, sound effects, and some unintelligible sounds that copied speech pattern films. The dialogue was presented on intertitles. Chaplin was first contacted by inventor Eugene Augustin Lauste in 1918 about making a sound film, but he never ended up meeting with Lauste. Chaplin was dismissive about "talkies" and told a reporter that he would "give the talkies three years, that's all." He was also concerned about how to adjust the Little Tramp to sound films.
  In early 1928, Chaplin began writing the script with Harry Carr. The plot gradually grew from an initial concept Chaplin had considered after the success of The Circus, where a circus clown goes blind and has to conceal his handicap from his young daughter by pretending that his inability to see are pratfalls. This inspired the Blind Girl. The first scenes Chaplin thought up were of the ending, where the newly cured blind girl sees the Little Tramp for the first time. A highly detailed description of the scene was written, as Chaplin considered it to be the center of the entire film.
  For a subplot, Chaplin first considered a character even lower on the social scale, a black newsboy. Eventually he opted for a drunken millionaire, a character previously used in the 1921 short The Idle Class. The millionaire plot was based on an old idea Chaplin had for a short in which two millionaires pick up the Little Tramp from the city dump and show him a good time in expensive clubs before dropping him back off at the dump, so when he woke up, the Tramp would not know if it was real or a dream. This was rewritten into a millionaire who is a friend of the Tramp when drunk but does not recognize him when sober.
  Chaplin officially began pre-production of the film in May 1928 and hired Australian art director Henry Clive to design the sets that summer. Chaplin eventually cast Clive in the role of the millionaire. Although the film was originally set in Paris, the art direction is inspired by a mix of several cities. Robert Sherwood said that "it is a weird city, with confusing resemblances to London, Los Angeles, Naples, Paris, Tangiers and Council Bluffs. It is no city on earth and it is all cities."
  On August 28, 1928, Chaplin's mother Hannah Chaplin died at the age of 63. Chaplin was distraught for several weeks and pre-production did not resume until mid fall of 1928. Psychologist Stephen Weissman has hypothesized that City Lights is highly autobiographical, with the blind girl representing Chaplin's mother, while the drunken millionaire represents Chaplin's father. Weissman also compared many of the film's sets with locations from Chaplin's real childhood, such as the statue in the opening scene resembling St. Mark's Church on Kennington Park Road and Chaplin referring to the waterfront set as the Thames Embankment.
  Chaplin had interviewed several actresses to play the blind flower girl but was unimpressed with them all. While seeing a film shoot with bathing women in a Santa Monica beach, he found a casual acquaintance, Virginia Cherrill. Cherrill waved and asked if she would ever get the chance to work with him. After a series of poor auditions from other actresses, Chaplin eventually invited her to do a screen test. She was the first actress to subtly and convincingly act blind on camera due to her near-sightedness, and Cherrill signed a contract on November 1, 1928.
caption: Still from the scene of the first encounter between the Tramp and the Blind Flower Girl.
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