Nick and Nora Charles the bantering, romantically involved detective duo has become a well-used trope in literature, stage, screen, and television ever since. The characters first appear in Dashiell Hammett's best-selling last novel "The Thin Man" (1934). Nick is an alcoholic former private detective who retired when he married Nora, a wealthy Nob Hill heiress. Hammett reportedly modeled Nora on his longtime partner Lillian Hellman, and the characters' boozy, flippant dialogue on their relationship. (The novel also mentions that Nick was once a Pinkerton detective, as was Hammett.) The novel is considered one of the seminal texts of the hard-boiled subgenre of mystery novels,
Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition straighten the whole thing out. Arbuckle and Normand followed the Keystone tradition of showing up at an actual event and using that as background for a largely improvised film. The event in this case was the Panama-California Exposition, held in Balboa Park in San Diego, California in 1915-1916. The film is 14 minutes long. It was released on January 23, 1915, before the Exposition actually opened (March 9, 1915). Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition Fatty and Mabel at the San Diego Exposition is a 1915 American silent black-and-white short comedy film, directed by Fatty Arbuckle and starring