When the Little Fellow went out the door and came back in the window, to slip back into bed, Doug laughed heartily, and then Chaplin heard it, a death rattle: one and a half extra seconds of forced laughter. They were two minutes in.

“We can stop here.”

“No, no,” said Doug. “I’m enjoying this.”

Chaplin remembered waiting in a dirty hallway outside a flat when he was eight years old and had to tell his landlord he and his mother didn’t have the rent. “Come in,” the landlord yelled, and instead of knowing what to say, Chaplin was swamped by the sight of his toes poking through his shoes. He wriggled them, he wanted to talk to them, he wanted to found whole new civilizations with his toes, his best friends. We can all be poor together, he told them.

The projector was taking the reel of film. Kick, up, dodge, yawn, back in bed. Repeat. Four minutes, ten seconds. After the bedrest faction, it was breakfast, and the Little Fellow needed an egg, so he went into the yard and wrestled chickens and tried to get one to lay, but it was a rooster, and then he wrestled another, and that was also a rooster. He brought a hen into the kitchen (six minutes in) and put her in a pan on the stove and told her to hurry up and lay an egg. His eyes rolled, he poked his tongue into his cheek, he chewed as if the mere fact of its being him doing so rendered the moment amusing.

By the time the assembly of shots had crawled to a conclusion, Chaplin’s eyes were closed. A flurry of black, unexposed positive film, scratched, and then the sheer white of the incandescent bulb hitting the mirrored screen.

“Isn’t there more?” asked Doug. “Was that ever eight minutes?” The lights came up, and Doug saw Chaplin’s face, and he didn’t say anything else.

“Please,” Chaplin said. “Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

Doug stood. He put both hands on the seats in front of him, and for a terrible moment, Chaplin thought he might vault onto them, and run on the arms of the chairs out of the theater and across Sunset. “They don’t all have to be genius, you know.”

“Oh, God.”

“Really—the important thing is, just bang it out, old man. Set up a problem, throw a monkey wrench, give ’em a hill of beans to climb over, and fade out.”

“But—”

“It’s so simple. What’s the film about, Charlie?”

“He doesn’t want to get out of bed.”

It had been said as if he were a schoolboy idiot with chalk on his sleeves. Doug’s hale response was sticky with discomfort. “Ah, yes, well, anything else?”

Chaplin leaned forward, forehead touching the wooden back of a chair, fingers rubbing the velvet seatback.