Jackpot!

It was a great time for comedy in Portland a couple of weeks back, with Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter (Stella, The State, Michael and Michael Have Issues) in town. Black was doing a comedy routine tour and stopped at Helium Comedy Club and Showalter was on a book tour and stopped to do a performance at the Mission Theater. Before his Mission show, Showalter did a free reading at Powell’s from his new book, Mr. Funnypants. Knowing there was a good chance I would run into him, I brought Charlie Chaplin along. This picture is priceless and when I posted it on the Film Center’s Facebook and Twitter page, people went nuts. Janus Films even retweeted it!

 

Hanging out at Powell's Bookstore.

Charlie Chaplin.

“Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.” —Charlie Chaplin.

The Northwest Film Center kicks off a month long Charlie Chaplin retrospective this Friday, March 11. Chaplin was one of the most influential and creative actors working in the silent film era. This fifteen film series includes some of his best silent work (City Lights, The Gold Rush), the four “talkies” he made in Hollywood (The Great Dictator, Limelight, A King In New York, and Monsieur Verdoux) and a film he wrote and directed but did not star in (A Woman of Paris). Of course, many people have seen Chaplin films, but I would venture few have seen them on 35mm. So I think this series will could do really well in Portland. My plan is to market Chaplin using social media strategies via Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, while using a Charlie Chaplin cardboard cut out prop.

Charlie Chaplin has name recognition, and he certainly has face recognition. To market this series, I wanted to play on the face recognition. So I ordered one of those Charlie Chaplin cardboard cut outs you see in movie memorabilia stores. Ironically, Chaplin shipped from Hollywood and I easily put him together last weekend. The cut out stands at 5’4″, and after fact checking, I confirmed that his height was, in fact, 5′ 4″. I should also mention here that I discovered a website where you can check the height of celebrities (http://www.celebheights.com/). Here is a photo on Chaplin outside of Kettleman Bagel Co. on NE Broadway.

After bagels, Chaplin and I visited the Portland Art Museum for Free Family Sunday. I knew this would be a good fit to promote Chaplin because of the high traffic (about 2,000 people attend the event) and the Chaplin films are suitable for families. With the help of my boyfriend, and Chaplin, we handed out about 1,000 fliers and took some photos of Charlie with fans. Throughout the day I used social media to tie everything together, including Tweeting the progress, Facebooking the event, and uploading the photos to Flickr. The participants were excited about Chaplin and having their photo taken with him.

Tomorrow I am going on another outing with Chaplin to take photos of him around the city. Posts will be @nwfilmcenter on Twitter and on Facebook and Flickr by searching for Northwest Film Center. A follow-up post to come on the progress.

More information can be found at: http://www.nwfilm.org/screenings/32/292/.