National Post (National Edition)
CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S THE PILGRIM NOW ‘FREE’.
For the first time since 1997, the coming of a new year has introduced an entire library of culture into the public domain. In the U.S. Public Domain Days used to be an annual event until 1998 when a new law named after Sonny Bono suddenly extended copyright protections by 20 years. Now, under U.S. law, a song, book or movie doesn’t lose its copyright protections for 95 years, or until the creator has been dead for 70 years. (Canada’s laws are a bit different.) Thus, Jan. 1 was effectively the first time in the age of the modern internet that a massive batch of books, music and movies became free for all. Thousands of new public domain works, all produced in 1923, have been extensively catalogued by Duke University’s Centre for the Study of the Public Domain. Here’s a sampling from our Tristin Hopper.
YES! WE HAVE NO BANANAS
To modern ears, this sounds like a goofy novelty song whose entire premise is to mock the broken English of a Greek immigrant. And that’s exactly what Yes! We Have No Bananas is: A New York City fruit seller had a bizarre quirk of answering every question with “yes,” and his location near Tin Pan Alley just so happened to get his verbal tic noticed by songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn. Their tune making fun of him became one of the most ubiquitous hits of the early 20th century, repeatedly topping charts in the hands of hundreds of artists around the world. The song also captures a delightful bit of fruit history. New York was indeed under a banana shortage in the early ’20s caused by a Central American fruit blight. That blight would eventually claim the entire commercial crop of Gros Michel bananas, forcing producers to substitute the much blander Cavendish bananas that dominate grocery stores today.
THE WORLD CRISIS BY WINSTON CHURCHILL
“Winston has written an enormous book about himself, and called it The World Crisis,” one friend of Churchill’s reportedly quipped of this 1923 bestseller. In reality, it was the first in a six-volume series about the First World War, in which Churchill had a front row seat. The war’s Gallipoli Campaign — still one of the most traumatic events in modern Australian history — was directly conceived by Churchill while he was First Lord of the Admiralty (although, naturally, Churchill’s book passes the blame to others). Churchill would similarly write a major history of the Second World War, in which he would play an ever more direct role. But the first book of that series, The Gathering Storm, won’t be hitting the U.S. public domain until 2043.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S THE PILGRIM
For several years it’s been possible for U.S. theatres to screen early Charlie Chaplin films without worrying about a cease and desist letter. His famed “Little Tramp” character debuted in 1914 and by the early 1920s Chaplin was an international film star. But only now are some of his most memorable artistic works beginning to hit the public domain. The Pilgrim is one of the first of these; it follows Chaplin’s character as he steal’s a minister’s clothes to escape from prison and ends up being unwittingly adopted by the new parson of a frontier town. The next 13 years are going to see copyright protections expire for City Lights, Modern Times, The Gold Rush and The Circus. These story-rich films are the movies that transformed Chaplin from just another physical comedian into a living legend of cinema.
ONE OF THE FIRST WALT DISNEY FILMS
The Walt Disney Corporation often gets the blame for the United States’ increasingly illiberal copyright laws. Although Disney has made billions with popular domain classics such as Snow White, Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast, they’ve aggressively lobbied to delay the day when Mickey Mouse will eventually lose copyright protec- tion. That day is still five years off (barring any other legislative changes), but early Walt Disney creations have begun to enter the public domain. Jan. 1 likely saw public domain status definitively extended to Alice’s Wonderland, a film produced by Walt Disney while we worked with the Laugh-o-gram animation studio in Kansas City, Missouri. Intended to be the first in a series (Laugh-o-gram went bankrupt before they could complete it), the film shows Walt Disney himself as he tours a little girl around the cartoon character-filled Laugh-o-gram studios.
HAROLD LLOYD’S SAFETY LAST! (THE ONE WHERE HE WRESTLES A CLOCK)
Although Harold Lloyd’s name has drifted somewhat into obscurity, Safety Last! definitely ranks as one the iconic comedies of the silent film era, up there with Buster Keaton’s The General and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. Like a lot of 1920s slapstick films, it also featured unbelievably dangerous stunts. The most iconic of these is Lloyd scaling the side of a building and dangling from a clock — a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that Lloyd had blown off half his hand in a film accident only a few years before.
THE CHARLESTON
If a movie flashes back to the 1920s, chances are good that this song will be playing to set the mood. The Charleston dance and its accompanying song were an incredibly novel experience for the polka and square- dancing-accustomed masses of the 1920s United States. One of the surprising things about hearing the original, however, is how slow it is: The amped-up swing band Charleston wouldn’t be popularized until the late 1930s.
THE PROPHET BY KAHLIL GIBRAN
The most famous book by the Lebanese-american author Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet remains one of the most widely read and most translated books of the 20th century, often rivalled only by the Bible in terms of gross sales. Thanks solely to this book, the New Yorker has even referred to Gibran as history’s third bestselling author, behind only William Shakespeare and Lao-tzu. The book is a collection of 26 prose poems, all of them meditations by the fictional prophet Almustafa. It’s essentially a highly quotable holy book without an attached religion, and its popularity was helped along hugely by becoming a staple of the 1960s counterculture. Public domain is probably best for everyone in the case of The Prophet, whose massive earnings have often proved to be more of a curse than a blessing. Gibran gave the book’s U.S. royalty rights to his hometown, which prompted a wave of vicious infighting that required the intervention of the Lebanese government. Now, the only way to make royalty money off the work is via a 2014 film adaptation of the book starring Salma Hayek and Liam Neeson.
CECIL B. DEMILLE’S THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
This isn’t the most famous Ten Commandments; the 1956 epic with Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharoah. Rather, this is a silent film that briefly dramatizes the biblical story of Exodus before launching into a preachy morality tale about a crooked contractor who fatally crashes his speedboat after systematically violating the ten commandments. Nevertheless, the film was one of 1923’s biggest box office hits, and wowed audiences with its recreation of the parting of the Red Sea, achieved by slicing a giant slab of Jell-o in half.
KING PORTER STOMP BY JELLY ROLL MORTON
Jelly Roll Morton often claimed to have invented jazz, and according to the jazz-lovers at National Public Radio “most jazz historians would agree.” King Porter Stomp is his most famous work, and would become one of the most recognizable standards of the Big Band era. Like other ubiquitous jazz hits like Ain’t Misbehavin’ or Stardust, this is one of those songs that everyone has unwittingly heard hundreds of times. Now that artists can record a cover without cutting a cheque to whomever owns Morton’s copyrights, you can likely expect to be hearing it a lot more. As has been the case with It’s a Wonderful Life and the works of James Joyce, among thousands of others, works often undergo a renaissance after passing into the public domain.
EMILY OF NEW MOON BY LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY
The Anne of Green Gables series lost its copyright years ago, which is why the book will occasionally show up on Amazon with a buxom blond on the cover. However, this is the first time that one of Canada’s most popular authors has seen her second-most-popular character pass into the U.S. public domain. Like Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon is also an orphan girl growing up in Prince Edward Island, but according to some Montgomery fans, the Emily series is better-written and follows a much more rounded character. Now that producers aren’t on the hook for royalties, it could be following Anne of Green Gables in getting its own Netflix series. In her home country, however, all of Montgomery’s works have been public domain in her home country for years.
WORKS BY P.G. WODEHOUSE, AGATHA CHRISTIE, D.H. LAWRENCE
Robert Frost’s most famous creation, 1916’s The Road Not Taken, is already in the public domain. However, 2019 is the first year that Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening can be overlaid on a Super Bowl ad without legal consequences. The year 1923 saw plenty of lesser works published by 20th century titans that are now free for all. The Duke University Public Domain Day list includes Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Links, two P.G. Wodehouse books and one of the first novels by Aldous Huxley.