In response to such contempt, King-Bee tended to emphasize West’s extraordinary work ethic. “There is no break between pictures at the King-Bee studios,” wrote Ed Rosenbaum Jr., the studio publicist. “A picture that shows the funny Billy West in a sanitarium was finished one day at 12 noon, and at one o’clock he was in a pugilistic comedy that promises to be a knockout.” Studio manager Nat Spitzer told Motion Picture World that the studio housed enough sets so that when filming two movies simultaneously, “Billy, inasmuch as it is not necessary for him to change his costume, can simply walk from one scene into the other and keep the two scripts going at once.”

These working conditions could explain the general hackiness of a lot of West’s films. Consider a regrettable gag from The Hobo: While working at the train station, Billy meets a blackface man and his overweight wife, receive a crate marked “Handle with Care.” When they open it, the couple’s nine children emerge. Billy gives the family a watermelon, and the camera lingers on the cheery bunch eating it on the curb. In his films as writer-director, Chaplin resorted to race-based humor exactly once, in A Day’s Pleasure (1919), in which a black jazz band turns white from seasickness. This film, cobbled together to satisfy his distributors during the long production of The Kid, came at a self-admitted personal low-ebb. Otherwise, he took pride in avoiding such material.

Conditions could hardly have been rewarding for West, who was approaching his tenth anniversary as a comedian and must have aspired to more than copying someone else. He might have looked forward to a five-reel feature that King-Bee announced in the trades–a version of the King Solomon story called Old King Sol–but the film was cancelled, and he continued to churn out shorts at a punishing rate. A notice in Variety in June 1918 mentioned that West had made 25 comedies since 1916 without any vacation. This workload–which would have also included hours of watching and re-watching Chaplin’s films–couldn’t have made the beatings from the press any easier.

This might be why in 1919, three months after signing a four-year contract with the Bull’s Eye Film Corporation (which absorbed King-Bee), West defected to join the Emerald Motion Picture Company. An announcement in Exhibitor’s Herald said that Emerald would distribute 24 new comedies from the newly formed Billy West productions, with West acting as his own producer/director. To the press, Emerald president Frederick J. Ireland addressed West’s earlier work apologetically:

“Mr. West, in the past, has proven the hold he has upon the hearts of the public. His artistic talent has been fully recognized, and I do not profess to be able to improve his artistry, but after seeing a number of pictures in which Mr. West was presented, I was convinced that he was never given the right embellishments or ensemble to justify his clever work. The shadow of cheapness and rush was always evident. In producing pictures with Billy West as the star, the cost of production will be given no consideration by the Emerald Company. The very best in players and production is our aim.”

Bull’s Eye struck back with a two-page ad in Exhibitor’s Herald, claiming it owned not only Billy West’s services, but also his name. Bull’s Eye sought an injunction against Emerald’s films, and warned theatre owners that when the case came to trial, exhibitors using the “Billy West” name without permission could face prosecution. In the meantime, Bull’s Eye continued producing its own “Billy West” comedies, with comedian Harry Mann impersonating Billy West impersonating Charlie Chaplin. Though Emerald’s publicity announced that he was a “magnet of the screen” and “America’s own comedian,” West now fought the injunction by testifying to his own mediocrity. He presented the court with affidavits from exhibitors who cancelled their contracts, and according to Exhibitor’s Herald:

“The defendant, further answering, expressly denies that he has certain unique and peculiar characteristics as comedian and denies that these peculiarities are well known to the motion picture trade, and to the people who attend motion picture theatres and denies further that a great many people go to motion picture theatres when they see a Billy West comedy advertised; and answering, further, denies that his humor appeals to a great many audiences.”

A few months earlier, West wrote the opposite in an open letter in Exhibitor’s Herald titled, “An Honest Declaration.” He stated that he severed relations with Bull’s Eye on February 16, 1919, and accused the company of trying to “willfully defraud the public” with their faux-West faux-Chaplins. The letter gives a sense of how he viewed himself:

“For ten years, I have worked earnestly and incessantly, both on stage and screen, to make my name a valuable trade-mark, and I do not intend to allow others to profit by my labor. I am now under contract to the Emerald Motion Picture Company to produce genuine Billy West Comedies, and I positively declare that no other company has right or title to my name.”

He signed it, “Yours for truth and fairness, the Only and Original, Billy West.”

CHAPLIN MATURED AS a filmmaker with The Immigrant (1917), his penultimate film for the Mutual Company. This simple, evocative two-reel short begins on a grimy trans-Atlantic steamship, where the Tramp is one of many poor immigrants en route to the United States. He meets a destitute woman and her sick mother, and, learning that they had been robbed, slips them his poker winnings. The film rejoins the Tramp weeks later, “hungry and broke” in an unfamiliar city. He finds a coin on the sidewalk and enters a café, where he again meets the woman. Her mother is now dead, and the Tramp offers to buy her a meal, but when the time comes to pay, realizes the coin fell through a hole in his pocket.