The Charlie Chaplin Festival

As 'Charlie Chaplin' is a person and not a film title, the most significant US theatrical release specifically titled after him is the 1938 compilation 'The Charlie Chaplin Festival' (and its companion 'The Charlie Chaplin Carnival'). These were repackaged versions of his 1916-1917 Mutual Film Corporation shorts. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, works from 1938 required a renewal in their 28th year to maintain protection. While the original silent shorts (like 'The Immigrant' and 'Easy Street') entered the public domain years prior due to Chaplin's own lack of interest in renewing the original Mutual copyrights, the 1938 compilation was a new legal entity. A search of the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database and the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) shows no renewal registration for this compilation or its specific sound edit under the RKO or Chaplin names. Furthermore, Chaplin's pre-1918 body of work (Keystone, Essanay, and Mutual periods) is universally recognized as public domain due to the expiration of the maximum 56-year copyright term and/or failure to renew.