“Yes. Jack of All Trades. There might be something linking it to a museum piece,” Chaplin said. Doug wore a tennis sweater around his neck, and had taken to wearing white shorts, and yacht shoes with canvas tops. “Are you cold?”

“I expect I’ll laugh hard enough to warm up.”

Chaplin ordered the projector to roll. He had just upgraded to a ground-mirror screen, which made the images more luminous than the old white plaster, and the projector now used an incandescent lamp, which also increased the brilliance, and when Chaplin pointed this out, Doug was duly impressed.

“This is just a rough assembly,” Chaplin whispered.

“I know.”

“I’m not sure we’ve calibrated the throw with the new projector.”

“That’s why there’s a focus. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

“And remember, it’s not edited properly.”

“Quiet, old man.”

The iris opened on a toothpick-thin cross atop a steeple, widening to show a church in a muddy village, a few shacks with laundry swaying outside, the broken fingers of a eucalyptus tree, a shabby hedgerow, a single brick building with wayward awnings that looked orphaned. In the foreground were two pigs, one sitting up and blinking over his shoulder, the other rooting in the muck.

“We also shot it with a duck.”

“Shh.”

The iris winked shut on the cross, and then it opened again on a tatted sampler that read “Love Thy Neighbor.” Then a slow tilt downward to show Tom Wilson in a rumpled brass bed. Even in sleep, hands drawn into fists, he looked like an angry hatchet. The clock read three-thirty, and in the theater, Chaplin imitated the shrill noise of an alarm bell. Wilson opened his eyes, sat up to reveal his nightshirt, and, with murder in his eyes, grabbed a boot in his hand.

“This is going to be good,” said Doug. “Your boss?”

“Shh,” Chaplin said.

A few ragged moments later, Wilson was standing over a sleeping Little Fellow. He put on his boot, and gave the Little Fellow a good one in the backside. Doug laughed, and Chaplin let out a breath. His character, onscreen, sat upright and began dressing, as if beginning the day with a boot to the rear was perfectly natural.

Chaplin watched with his thumb between his upper and lower teeth. Contractually, he needed to deliver a two-reeler, twenty minutes. He had assembled eight minutes forty seconds for Doug, and had in mind another eight or so that he hadn’t yet shot. Onscreen, he had ceased dressing and tried to go back to bed, only to have Wilson boot him again. This led to a back-and-forth, Wilson thinking each time he has finally gotten the Little Fellow awake, only to realize there’d been yet another scheme to fall between the covers. He imagined Frances seeing this.