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Epes Winthrop Sargent (August 21, 1872, in Nassau, Bahamas – Dec. 6, 1938 in Brooklyn, New York) was an American vaudeville critic who wrote under the pen-names Chicot[1] and Chic. He was also a screenwriter.
He was considered "one of vaudeville's most influential critics and commentators".
He was born in Nassau, Bahamas on August 21, 1872, and moved to the United States in 1878 with his parents.
He first worked as a critic for the New York paper, the Daily Mercury.[2] In the 1890s, he joined the New York Morning Telegraph.
He claimed to have critiqued the first motion picture offered in a theatre, becoming a film fan in the process."[3] In 1905, when Variety began publication, he joined them as their first reviewer and wrote for them intermittently until his death.
In 1911, he became a staff writer for The Moving Picture World. They serialized his Technique of the Photoplay, which was soon published as a book.
In 1914–1915 he wrote the stories for a large number of split-reel and one-reel silent comedies produced by Arthur Hotaling at the Jacksonville, Florida, studio of the Lubin Manufacturing Company, which included the earliest screen appearances of Oliver Hardy.[4]