Man Buys Lost Chaplin Film on eBay

By Nick Dawson On November 06, 2009

From The Guardian comes this amazing story: a man bought a previously unknown Charlie Chaplin film for the princely sum of £3.20 (about $5.30) on online auction site eBay. It's not quite on the scale or enormity of the discovery of a proper print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (which, incidentally, will be playing for the first time at Berlin next year), but still the emergence of Chaplin's Zepped is a great story.

Here's more from Charlotte Higgins' write-up:

Morace Park was footling around on eBay looking for antiques when he stumbled on an item that was listed casually as an "old film" – and even then he was really more interested in the tin it was in.

[...] Park – who, when he is not buying and selling antiques as a hobby, runs a company that develops products with inventors – bought the film "from someone else who deals in bits and bobs". When his parcel arrived, he didn't even bother to open it for a while. But when he did, he unfurled a little of the film and saw the title: Charlie Chaplin in Zepped. "I Googled it," he said, "and then my interest was pricked. I couldn't find any sign of it on the internet."