Mystery in a film can

35mm images of Charlie Chaplin subject of new doc

By CYNTHIA LITTLETON

U.K. businessman Morace Park's 35mm film, which contains images of Charlie Chaplin, is the subject of a new documentary.

Morace Park, a British businessman and antiques dealer, thought he was bidding for a vintage film can when he placed an order for a collection of odds and ends on eBay a few months ago.

Little did he know that the contents of that can would send him on the trail of a mystery involving Charlie Chaplin, Zeppelin bombers and Britain’s morale effort in WWI.

Now Park’s quest to authenticate the 6-minute, 35mm film that he found inside the can is the subject of a documentary that he and a friend, John Dyer, are producing through their new Clear Champion production banner.

Park got excited when he first eyeballed the fragile frames and saw the image of Chaplin. The film had a title slate, “Zepped,” but no other information about its origin or producers.

Park and Dyer, a film buff who previously worked for the British Board of Film Classification, discovered that the film was a 1916 propaganda piece designed to rally the spirits of Britons terrorized by Germany’s zeppelin bombers.

The film contains rare footage of zeppelins hovering over London, as well as a shot of a newspaper front page triumphantly reporting the downing of three airships. There’s also a bit of animation “that looks like it comes straight out of Monty Python,” Park says.

Park and Dyer found a newspaper review of “Zepped” from the era that filled in a lot of details. They even learned that theater managers were instructed to lead auds in singing “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” while the film unspooled.

But the source of the Chaplin footage remained a question mark.

After a trip to Los Angeles to meet with a number of film experts, and a trip to the Bay Area to the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, Calif., they learned that the Chaplin footage is likely outtakes from shorts he made for the Essanay banner in 1914 and 1915, including “His New Profession,” “A Jitney Elopement” and “The Tramp.” How it was that these clips, which are strung together in a narrative fashion, were contributed to “Zepped” is among the questions Park and Dyer aim to sort out with the aid of Chaplin scholars and others.

“Each stone that we uncover, we find another couple of stones,” Park says.

Dyer convinced Park that their adventure would be worthy of a docu film itself. The two have put up their own coin and raised more money from mutual friends in the village of Henham, outside London, to hire a film crew to chronicle their labors.

“We’ve bought this ticket to ride and we’re going to let it roll,” Dyer assures.