ABC News Nightline The Tramp: Charlie Chaplin

In 1914, Charlie Chaplin was an obscure British vaudeville actor touring America when he walked into the Keystone Studios in California. He then proceeded to crank out over 30 films in the following eleven months, sometimes making over two films a week, many of which he directed. It was during this time that he adopted his classic tramp character, a landmark moment in film history. In the haste to get the films out, negatives were destroyed, and maybe only twenty prints were made which were then duplicated. Those negatives were then copied, so the films quickly got damaged. Movie theaters would often cut them down (with no real expertise) to save time, so whole scenes were lost. Some films even had different endings. What were left were dozens of different versions of the same film. They were even re-issued with new titles. In 2005, the British Film Institute, together with Cineteca in Bologna, Italy, began scouring the world's archives and private collections for as many different versions as they could find and then painstaking reassembling a new master copy from all the different permutations, to bring them back as close as possible to the original version. Anchor: Ted Koppel. Correspondent: Sue Ellicott. This "Nightline" show also contains the following story: Election Results