In 1917, Chaplin made four excellent two-reelers, and received another raise and a new contract with a new set of financiers, and the independence to run his own studio. Intellectuals noticed him. The New Republic began to refer to him not as a comedian but as an artist. Not to be outdone, Edward Stone, music critic for the Los Angeles Times, concluded that Dukas’s L’Apprenti Sorcier had almost the aesthetic ambition of a Chaplin film.

Sensing a groundswell, a tulipomania of appreciation, impish critic Heywood Broun suggested of The Rink that since Chaplin fell on his behind—but only of his own free will—he had become a Nietzschean superman. “Was it in ‘Memschiches, Allzumenschliches,’ ” he asked, “or in Also Sprach Zarathustra’ that the sage declared it was comic to kick, but never to be kicked?’” To be found ridiculous by Heywood Broun was its own kind of secret-society hazing; anyone other than Chaplin would have breathed a sigh of relief.

However—and he had a pitch-perfect ear for this music—he was also beginning to be hated.

He shot a gag reel showing himself and a magician on a sidewalk facing the orchards at the corner of De Longpre and La Brea in Hollywood. The magician—actually Albert Austin, one of his company, in a Hindu turban and beard—asks what he wants; Chaplin makes some grandiose gestures toward the orchard, describing peaks and spires and onion domes, monumental architecture fit for an emperor. Austin throws down his magic wand, there is a burst of smoke, and then time-lapse photography begins: the orchard is cleared, framing goes up, plaster, brick, and stucco, and in twenty seconds, Chaplin’s new studio bursts forth from underneath the ground, and Chaplin, snapping each bill like a fresh bed-sheet, hands the magician three dollars.

Actual construction took several months. Local residents were frightened when ground was broken. Studios were awful places. Mack Sennett’s Edendale looked like the broken remains of a punch-drunk carnival in decline, whose farthest swampy edges percolated with rotting lumber and old food tins and Gordian knots of flammable nitrate stock atop bubbling fixative chemicals.

Laying the cornerstone of a studio caused as much talk as if it were a new castle, and the neighbors serfs anxious about the character of their new owner. The basin of Los Angeles and its outlying towns, from the mountains to the seashore, was more or less a sea of citrus groves, with small island settlements erupting among them. Since there was no sense of a single town, and since the residents were all transplants from other climes, natural allegiance went not to some phantom municipality but to each studio. To work at Metro was to bear that standard, and to tread the boards at Famous Players was to call Adolph Zukor your feudal lord, a situation that upset Adolph Zukor not at all.