Inside the Bay Area silent-film museum that honors Charlie Chaplin

There is perhaps only one place in America that shows weekly silent movies on antique projectors using the original film prints, the light flickering across the screen as stories unfold. And that is the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in the Fremont community of Niles, a historic Hollywood-type enclave where Charlie Chaplin made his early movies.

The museum is located inside a 1913 movie theater that’s been restored to its original glory, give or take some exposed lath and plaster. On a recent afternoon, a tour guide leads a group up to a projection room overlooking rows of wooden seats and an upright piano that’s played during screenings.

He raps on the roof of the booth, which is paneled in tin, in case the celluloid accidentally ignited and caused a fireball.

“I like doing that – it lets me know the ceiling won’t fall in,” he says. “If you look on the wall, there’s some charcoal writing from the old manager that says ‘Spit In Box.’ A hundred years ago, you couldn’t smoke up here, but you could have chewing tobacco, and the manager didn’t want to scrape sticky brown spots off the floor.”

The museum has an archive containing roughly 14,000 old film prints, some from the Em Gee Film Library in Los Angeles, others donated by the film preservationist David Shepard and more acquired through sometimes strange means. (Valuable footage of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s opening ceremonies, for example, was found underneath a house in Los Altos.) There is an equipment repair-and-restoration room, a film-research library, a darkroom and hulking projectors, like a 1912 Motiograph made by Chicago’s Enterprise Optical Manufacturing Co.

“Those seats right there are original to the 1913 theater,” says the docent, indicating a row of four chairs holding a bowler hat and bamboo cane. “We put stuff on there, so people don’t sit on them.”

The museum’s name derives from the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, a Chicago-based operation run by Gilbert Anderson and George Spoor. Anderson’s obsession with Westerns led him to Niles, where its hot, dusty weather and brown hills recalled an Old West town. In 1912, the company began building studios, actors’ cottages and prop workshops and went on to make more than 350 silent films there. (The Niles studio shut down in 1916 and was razed by the 1930s.)

Many of the movies chronicled the exploits of Broncho Billy, played by Anderson who was said to be the first Western movie star. A lot of the films were shorts, such as 1915’s “Versus Sledge Hammers,” which has an IMDB summary that deserves mentioning: “The Count received word through a matrimonial agency that Sophie Clutts will inherit a million dollars and goes to her father’s hotel to win her hand. Mustang Pete, however, is in love with Sophie, and when he discovers the Count is making love to her, proceeds to insult him. The Count challenges Mustang to a duel. Being a blacksmith, he chooses sledge hammers as weapons.”

In 1914, the studio lured an early-career Charlie Chaplin in with a then-unheard-of signing bonus of $10,000. Chaplin made 14 films for Essanay, five of them in Niles, including one of his most famous productions, “The Tramp.” Chaplin traveled with his own special crew of cameramen, actors and even a producer – but despite all this highfalutin’ staff, still managed to create moments that were rather Chaplinesque in their ridiculousness.

“They were on location in Oakland for their first film, ‘A Night Out,’ and a crowd had gathered around the Hotel Oakland while they were filming,” says Niles Essanay museum president David Kiehn. “A policeman saw the crowd on the street, and it looked like Charlie was kind of wrestling with (co-star) Ben Turpin during the scenes. This policeman was trying to disperse the crowd and arrest Chaplin – then saw the film camera, stopped in his tracks and let the filming continue from there.”

Chaplin eventually left to work for a different company in L.A., but his memory is honored every summer in the museum-sponsored Charlie Chaplin Day festival. “We bring in guests and Chaplin experts and have costumes we sell at our store,” says Kiehn. “The Chaplin lookalike contest – we have a guy from Canada – is very popular and draws crowds.”

Also in the museum’s vaults are snapshots from the earliest days of film, such as a Miles Brothers short called “A Trip Down Market Street” shot from a cable car four days before the Great 1906 Earthquake destroyed the city. Kiehn identified the film’s portentous date himself by studying license plates and contemporary weather reports, some nice detective work that landed him on “60 Minutes” with Morley Safer. (The short is now in the Library of Congress’ national registry of historically significant films.)

Other short footage includes a gravity car chugging on Mount Tamalpais, a 1905 Colma boxing match between Jimmy Britt and “Battling” Nelson, and the aviator Lincoln Beachey racing an airplane around a horse track.

“Beachey was killed during the Panama–Pacific Exposition,” notes Kiehn, “when his plane plunged into the San Francisco Bay, and he drowned.”

“Our first question that we ask the audience is, ‘Who has come the farthest?’ In any given show, there might be people from other states or countries – people have come from Asia, South America, Canada and Europe,” says Kiehn.

“We’re showing films in a silent theater that were shown 100 or more years ago in a town that made silent films and where Charlie Chaplin made films – that’s a pretty unique situation.”

Details: The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum is open from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends at 37417 Niles Blvd. in Fremont; free admission. Films ($8-$10) are screened on Saturday nights in the Edison Theater, with a Laurel and Hardy talkie matinee one Sunday each month. Find the schedule and more details at nilesfilmmuseum.org.