“I’m worried about this,” his brother, Syd, said. He was already a worrier, living life like a mouse shouldering a steamer trunk filled in its many compartments with suspicions about his livelihood and his marriage and whether something was or was not a symptom of gonorrhea. Chaplin always told him he worried too much, and Syd didn’t have the strength to argue with that, because Syd was also lazy. “Why so many dogs?”

This made Chaplin bite down on his lip. He meant to count to ten, but it came out: “I’m putting you in the movie.”

“What? Just because I asked—”

“I think I’ll do your makeup.”

On the first Monday after the pack had been established, the grub wagon showed up at noon, and the elderly Polish couple who made the sandwiches propped open their awning and displayed their assortment of dangling salamis. For several long moments, each bat of smoked meat swayed in the breeze, quietly. Then there were screams, many musical scales of excited barking, and a whirlwind of snarling fur—the awning banged shut like a screen door, and the Kowaleskis were outside of it, shaking their fists, and the dogs spilled out of the wagon, dragging their prizes through the dust, while Chaplin nodded his quiet approval.

The dogs could do anything they liked. Almost. A terrier growled at Chaplin, and that afternoon he was back at the pound. The casting process had begun.

When it was back down to seven dogs, Chaplin took them everywhere he went on the lot. When the payroll girl came to approve the raise for Carlyle Robinson (“What raise?”), Chaplin interrupted her to tell each dog to sit.

They worshipped him, and he lectured them about how that would never do, this was America, there were no kings here, one had to find one’s own way, this demonstration that he was their hero was entirely embarrassing, he wasn’t a martinet, he wasn’t D. W. Griffith, they weren’t making Intolerance, after all, to be a part of his crew was to be about intimacy, not spectacle, and because all were so rapt, he fed them biscuits.