Behind the Screen (1916)
A studio stagehand covers for his lazy boss while a young woman, desperate for acting work, disguises herself as a boy to land a job alongside him. Their budding romance collides with a stagehands' strike that erupts into a runaway pie fight across the backlot.
Shot on the Lone Star lot for Mutual, Behind the Screen turns its cameras on the film business itself, using its backstage setting to stage one of Chaplin’s most elaborate pie-throwing set pieces and to slip in a gag mistaking a heterosexual kiss for a same-sex one, played for comedy years before the Production Code would have forbidden such content.
Background
Behind the Screen turns its cameras on the film industry itself, following a studio stagehand who covers for his lazy boss while a young woman desperate for acting work disguises herself as a boy to land a job working alongside him. It was shot on Chaplin’s own studio lot for Mutual, giving the film a self-reflexive quality unusual for a comedy of the period, since much of its humor comes from poking fun at the everyday mechanics of making movies.
What to watch for
Watch for the film’s extensive pie-throwing sequence, one of the most elaborate Chaplin staged during this period, which erupts out of a stagehands’ labor dispute and spreads chaotically across the backlot. The film is also notable for a gag built on mistaken same-sex intimacy: after discovering the disguised stagehand is a woman, Chaplin’s character kisses her, and a co-worker who glimpses the kiss without realizing a woman is involved reacts with mocking, effeminate alarm, a bit played for comedy well before the Hollywood Production Code would have forbidden such content outright in later decades.
