Scott Eyman – Charlie Chaplin vs. America

I’m thrilled to introduce a true luminary in the literary and cinematic worlds. None other than author extraordinaire Scott Eyman. With an impressive portfolio of meticulously researched biographies and enthralling explorations of Hollywood’s golden age, Scott has become a household name for those who crave a deeper understanding of the lives behind the legend. From the glitz and glamor of old Hollywood to the pages of iconic historical figures, Eyman’s words uniquely make history come alive. Scott in his latest book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided is set for publication on October 31st, 2023.

Scott Eyman – Charlie Chaplin vs. America Interview Transcript

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Chaplin knew better.

00:00:01:07 – 00:00:04:23
Franklin Roosevelt knew better, and Winston Churchill knew better.

00:00:04:25 – 00:00:07:17
But there weren’t a lot of people in the public.

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Cultural arena.

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We’re willing to go against that particular mindset

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that America didn’t have to worry about Adolf Hitler.

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Chaplin was willing to put himself out there,

00:00:16:22 – 00:00:18:26
which earned in the enmity of a lot of people.

00:00:18:26 – 00:00:22:24
I’m thrilled to introduce a true luminary in the literary and cinematic worlds.

00:00:22:26 – 00:00:26:29
None other than author extraordinaire
Scott Simon.

00:00:27:01 – 00:00:30:21
With an impressive portfolio
of meticulously researched biographies

00:00:30:21 – 00:00:31:11
and enthralling

00:00:31:11 – 00:00:35:24
explorations of Hollywood’s golden age, Scott has become a household name

00:00:35:24 – 00:00:40:05
for those who crave a deeper understanding of the lives behind the legend.

00:00:40:07 – 00:00:44:01
From the glitz and glamor of old Hollywood to the pages of iconic historical

00:00:44:01 – 00:00:47:27
figures, Almond’s words uniquely make history come alive.

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Scott in his latest book,
Charlie Chaplin vs. America.

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When our Sex and Politics Collided

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is set for publication on October
31st, 2023.

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Allawi It was a fascinating read, and the
writing style makes it a joy to consume.

00:01:04:12 – 00:01:08:09
I highly recommend that you get
your hands on a copy as soon as possible.

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Scott,
thank you so much for being here today.

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Good to be here, John.

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You want to jump right in?

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The question I like to ask

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is I like to bring up
first is what brought you to this subject.

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But then I found, as I read the book,

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you mentioned that it had been a 60 year
project.

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Please tell the audience
what Charlie Chaplin is important to you

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and the movie watching audience.

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Well, he’s important to me
because he was my entry drug,

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basically in the silent movies.

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For broadening out.

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Too old movies in general.

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I had seen clips of him on the old Robert
Johnson documentaries from the 1950s

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when / was King and things like that.

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But I’d never seen a Chaplin, uncut, as it were,

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until I was, I think, 12 years old.

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12 years old?

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Yeah.

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I was 12 and I bought an eight millimeter
print of Easy Street from Black

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Hawk films in Davenport, Iowa, and.

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I was entranced immediately

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by. I couldn’t figure out why.

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Because the plot was ordinary,
the filmmaking was nothing extraordinary.

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He was extraordinary.

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Which proves to me that you don’t have
to have an extraordinary plot.

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You just need to have extraordinary
actors.

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And I was off and running at that point,
and he really fired the starting gun

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for me in terms of of my passion
for movies, for for silent film.

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I guess I was.

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I came up more in the Buster Keaton era,
and now I understand why Chaplin was so,

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so prominent during my younger years.

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Charlie Chaplin

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grew up in Dickensian poverty with a drunk
father and a mentally ill mother.

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Family was institutionalized
several times.

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Is it possible that some of the hate
for Charlie Chaplin that Americans have

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was that he was living the American dream
without being an American?

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I think that

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was probably a factor
that he never became a citizen.

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But he regarded himself basically,
he regarded himself as a lone wolf

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by necessity, because the English, the

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the tender mercies of the English
juvenile system, it certainly failed him.

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His family had failed him,
except for his brother.

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Sydney would never failed him.

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His mother had failed him through
no fault of her own,

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simply because of her schizophrenia.

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So he was basically on his own
from before puberty.

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So he didn’t have that sense of social
conditioning

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that most people have
with a semi conventional or conventional

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upbringing amongst its family friends,

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you know, going to church, this, that
and the other thing.

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He simply wasn’t a part of any of that.

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He grew up on the streets, A and B, he grew up in the theater and

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English vaudeville

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and later in American vaudeville, when the Karno company

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where he was working spent three years in America. So.

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He didn’t have that social conditioning that other people had.

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So he didn’t regard himself as he regarded himself as English,

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but he didn’t have any particular allegiance to the English system.

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He was anti-monarchist, for instance.

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He thought the whole royalty
thing was absurd.

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He accepted a knighthood in his old age,
but that was certainly understandable.

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So he simply didn’t have that idea
of any nationality as as a virtue

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or part of his identity the way most of us
do through social conditioning,

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because he didn’t have
any social conditioning, essentially.

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So when he came to America
and became rich and famous.

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And never took out American citizenship.

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The professional patriots took that amiss

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as a friend of his noted friend
named Max Eastman.

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What people didn’t understand

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was he was born in England
and came to America and made his fortune.

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If the reverse had been true,
if he’d been born in America

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and went to England and made his fortune,

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it wouldn’t have taken out
English citizenship either.

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He simply didn’t have that gene

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of allegiance to to any country.

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He’s always referred to himself
as a citizen of the world.

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Charlie Chaplin was often
presented as being a Jew, which he wasn’t.

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But how did the continual use of Judaism
as a club to beat

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Charlie Chaplin cause
the American public to turn against him?

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I don’t think
it caused the American public’s very good.

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A lot of things cause the American public
to turn against them.

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Basically 10 to 15 years of

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of demonization and in in media.

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And the failure of this film
is sure to do certainly the.

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I don’t.

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I don’t think.

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I mean,

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the American public in the 1930s and
forties was was certainly anti-Semitic.

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I mean, that that accounts for the.

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Utter refusal to get involved with World
War Two and Hitler

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until Pearl Harbor was attacked
in December 1941.

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We just wanted it wasn’t our problem.

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We didn’t have to deal with it.

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Hitler could do whatever we wanted to do
and we’d make a separate peace.

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Etc., etc., etc..

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And isolationism was was the predominant.

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The ruling phase of the American
electorate probably by 60, 65% margin.

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Chaplin knew better.

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Franklin Roosevelt knew better,
and Winston Churchill knew better.

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But there weren’t a lot of people
in the public.

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Cultural arena.

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We’re willing to go against
that particular mindset

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that America didn’t
have to worry about Adolf Hitler.

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Chaplin was willing
to put himself out there,

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which earned in the enmity
of a lot of people.

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Just following up on that, I was

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I was struck
that Charlie Chaplin could be criticized

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for advocating for a second front
to help the Soviet Union

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when it was a policy
created at the conferences

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by the allied leaders of World
War Two and was supported

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by the invasion of North Africa
and 42 of Sicily and Italy in 43.

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And finally
the invasion of France in 1944.

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And during this time
we were allied with the USSR and China.

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Would you like
to give your thoughts on that?

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How we can how we can be punished for

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following American
policy or supporting American policy?

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Well, yeah.

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But there was a great deal of debate
about that particular American policy.

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And it’s understandable if you place in the context because.

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Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact.

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A couple of years before.

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Things broke down between them and suddenly Russia became our ally.

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So for the right wing in America,

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Russia was never going to be our ally.

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They were our enemy in waiting.

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And the fact that we temporarily allied

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in fighting Hitler with virtue that was virtually rule

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because they figured we would beat Hitler.

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Okay?

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And after that, Russia would go back to being our enemy,

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which is basically the way it worked out.

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So you have to give them some points
for presence on that.

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A chaplain was all in because he thought.

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There were two prior to his thoughts.

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For one thing, two of his sons were in the US Army, in Patton’s third Army,

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and he was petrified, of course, about about there staying alive.

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And he thought the more Russia’s
was involved in the war,

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the sooner the war would end,
which exactly turned out to be the case

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because Hitler insanely invaded Russia
and basically destroyed

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what was left of his army.

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And also he just thought
that he believed that.

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In terms of it wasn’t just

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America and England
fighting in one direction.

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We needed a Russia fighting
from a second direction

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to to to spread out Hitler’s defenses
and send them out, as it were.

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So it was a complicated.

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Military analysis,

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but nobody was interested
in making a complicated military analysis.

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It was a good guys versus bad guys thing.

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But I think Chaplin was right
in one respect.

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Simple logistics and expedients

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was necessary

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for Russia to be involved on our side
and vice versa.

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That said.

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They had to be eyed warily

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because Stalin was Stalin.

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Right.

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And I guess you pointed out in the book
that.

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Chaplin didn’t think.

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Stalin was exterminating people
for a color

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for ethnicity,
but he actually was doing that.

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He was completely wrong about that.

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In Stalin was anti-Semitic and homophobic
and any number of other.

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Disgusting traits,
but we didn’t know it in 1942 and 1943.

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Right.

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Okay.

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Could you weigh in on two women
that profoundly affected Charlie Chaplin’s

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life and career?

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Joan Barry and Owen O’Neill?

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Well, John Berry was.

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A woman with whom
she had a relationship with in 1940.

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Beginning in 1942.

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I believe she was 23 or 24.

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He would have been 53 or so.

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She wanted to be in the movies.
She came to Hollywood.

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She thought she had the makings of a movie
star.

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Chaplin did, too.

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For a time, he signed into a contract.

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Eventually,
the relationship shifted to the personal,

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as those relationships often do.

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She was his mistress for a while.

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She proved erratic,
to say the least, emotionally.

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She saw other people as well as Chaplin

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had relationships
with other people as well as Chaplin.

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She disappeared from his life.

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Then she came back in and out.

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She was pregnant.

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And the father.

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Inquiries to when this conception
allegedly took place.

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She mentioned December 23rd,
he realized that he couldn’t be the father

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because they hadn’t had sex on December
23rd of the previous year.

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So he refused to deal with her any more.

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She went to Hedda Hopper and said
Chaplin was the father of her child.

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And the ball began rolling downhill.

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He was eventually. Prosecuted for.

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Violating the Mann Act,

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which involved transporting women across
state lines for amoral purposes.

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And in a paternity suit
brought by Joan Berry and her lawyers.

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He was acquitted on the Mann Act after
the jury deliberated for about an hour

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because it was obviously a trumped up
charge. The paternity suit.

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The blood test he took proved
he wasn’t the father of the child.

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Validating his.

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Defense.

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And the jury found him against him anyway.

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Probably
because simply because of the combined

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publicity regarding his support for Russia

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and his predilection for young women,
which was further amplified.

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When he married Oona O’Neill,
who was 18 at the time,

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and this was shortly right after the
the John Barry trial.

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Chaplin was in his early fifties,
as I said,

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when O’Neil was the daughter of Eugene
O’Neill, the playwright.

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She was alienated from her father.

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She had gone to private schools
in New York City, was close friends.

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Numerous other debutantes.

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And they had no particular ambition

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or focus in her life
because she was 18 years old.

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They met in Hollywood.

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She was taking a screen test in Hollywood.

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They met at a party.

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They were immediately
attracted to each other.

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They got love. They married.

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They stayed married

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for the rest of Chapman’s life
than they had eight children together.

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I didn’t write that out as a question,
but the Shadow and Substance

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script was shadow,
and he had proposed that for Barry.

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And then later on for ONA.

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But was that
I don’t I’m not familiar with that story.

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Was there anything about
was he creating its ideal woman in.

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That it’s a play.

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It was it wasn’t an original script.

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It’s an adaptation of a play about a

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a domestic

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Irish domestic who sees the Virgin Mary,
I believe.

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Okay, that’s the nature of the play.

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And it was it had been done on Broadway,
not terribly successfully,

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but it was a preexisting property
that he had bought.

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Charlie Chaplin, I feel,
was caught up in a frenzy that included

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earlier Fatty Arbuckle, later
Lionel Atwill.

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Errol Flynn Well, sexual misconduct,

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a tool used against Hollywood, or did it
reflect changing mores in America?

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I think it was complicated
by the fact that Chaplin like young girls,

00:12:43:19 – 00:12:47:05
I mean, he had numerous relationships
with age appropriate women as well.

00:12:47:07 – 00:12:50:07
I’m not saying he was an exclusively
attracted to young girls.

00:12:50:13 – 00:12:52:11
He was attracted to women, is what he was.

00:12:52:11 – 00:12:55:11
So, no, I, I think

00:12:55:11 – 00:12:58:02
I think that was a tool used against him

00:12:58:02 – 00:13:03:02
by his political enemies, basically,
and a convenient

00:13:03:05 – 00:13:06:05
as a convenient vulnerability
that they found.

00:13:06:10 – 00:13:06:29
And they went it.

00:13:06:29 – 00:13:09:15
They went after him
and they went after him consistently.

00:13:09:15 – 00:13:12:13
And in the end, they won.

00:13:12:13 – 00:13:13:09
Very good.

00:13:13:09 – 00:13:15:03
This next on the political question.

00:13:15:03 – 00:13:17:07
If you don’t want to get into it,
we’ll just cut it out.

00:13:17:07 – 00:13:21:04
When the attack began after Charlie
Chaplin began working on The [GREAT]

00:13:21:07 – 00:13:21:14
Dictator.

00:13:21:14 – 00:13:24:10
You say, in essence,
that the American Boone was peaking.

00:13:24:10 – 00:13:27:22
America first
or strong isolationist Republicans

00:13:27:22 – 00:13:31:12
controlled Congress
and Hitler was not wasn’t our problem.

00:13:31:15 – 00:13:35:14
I can’t help but think
now we have rising neo-Nazi issues.

00:13:35:16 – 00:13:40:23
Majority of Americans favor a kind of
brand of isolationism and isolationist.

00:13:40:23 – 00:13:44:01
Republicans control Congress,
and Putin is not our problem.

00:13:44:03 – 00:13:48:00
Was communism, so feared that it was okay
to get in bed with fascists.

00:13:48:03 – 00:13:50:16
I’m not sure about that.

00:13:50:16 – 00:13:53:15
Working on the book
really showed me, though.

00:13:53:18 – 00:13:56:25
In a way, I didn’t
expect it because the book I it took me

00:13:56:28 – 00:13:59:19
I started working on the book
in January 2020.

00:13:59:19 – 00:14:02:10
So it’s it’s been almost four years now.

00:14:02:10 – 00:14:03:16
What it really showed me was,

00:14:03:16 – 00:14:07:24
is that everything that’s happening
now in America, it’s happened before.

00:14:07:27 – 00:14:10:22
And I have no doubt
that it will happen again.

00:14:10:22 – 00:14:13:00
That that what we’re the kind of.

00:14:13:00 – 00:14:16:00
Authoritarian politics

00:14:16:02 – 00:14:18:21
that we’re currently assailed by

00:14:18:21 – 00:14:22:02
are like a low level infection,

00:14:22:02 – 00:14:27:14
recurring infection in the body politic,
and antibiotics don’t seem to work.

00:14:27:16 – 00:14:30:01
Cultural antibiotics don’t seem to work.

00:14:30:01 – 00:14:32:21
It’s that it comes around

00:14:32:21 – 00:14:36:22
every every 20, 30, 40 years,
whether you want it to or not.

00:14:36:24 – 00:14:39:04
And that’s just the way it is
because it wasn’t me.

00:14:39:04 – 00:14:41:12
That’s what
Chaplin went through in the forties

00:14:41:12 – 00:14:44:23
and fifties was not the first time
this has happened.

00:14:44:26 – 00:14:46:06
The Blacklist era was going.

00:14:46:06 – 00:14:51:17
It began concurrently in 1947, 48,
and he was part of that.

00:14:51:20 – 00:14:54:20
He didn’t start out to be part of it,
but he became caught up in it,

00:14:54:23 – 00:14:56:13
even though he had nothing to do with it.

00:14:56:13 – 00:14:58:22
Ostensibly. And

00:14:58:25 – 00:15:00:03
then here we are again.

00:15:00:03 – 00:15:01:23
You know where.

00:15:01:23 – 00:15:07:07
The levers of government are being used to
to for social conditioning in terms

00:15:07:07 – 00:15:10:07
of what people are allowed to read,
what children are allowed to be taught.

00:15:10:08 – 00:15:13:15
Fear of the unknown. Fear of the other.

00:15:13:17 – 00:15:19:02
You know, it’s it’s all happened before
and it’s all going to happen again.

00:15:19:05 – 00:15:21:26
I don’t know how I feel about that.

00:15:21:26 – 00:15:25:24
I was struck by one of the quotes
he used in the book from Westbrook.

00:15:25:26 – 00:15:27:11
Westbrook Pegler?

00:15:27:11 – 00:15:30:28
Yeah, referring to Charlie Chaplin
as a communist.

00:15:31:00 – 00:15:34:00
And then he I think he was referring
I mean, I’m sorry,

00:15:34:03 – 00:15:38:23
I was questioning Charlie Chaplin
about being a communist, the regular use

00:15:38:23 – 00:15:42:12
the reference cheapness,
and I think that’s code for being Jewish.

00:15:42:19 – 00:15:46:16
And then he used Gestapo tactic,
he said to use stop attack tactics

00:15:46:16 – 00:15:48:25
to run Barry out of town.

00:15:48:27 – 00:15:49:04
What are

00:15:49:04 – 00:15:52:26
your thoughts on the attack attacker
relying on general prejudice

00:15:52:26 – 00:15:57:12
in branding him a comedy and a fascist
at the same time?

00:15:57:15 – 00:16:01:11
Well, that’s tough to do.

00:16:01:14 – 00:16:01:20
Well.

00:16:01:20 – 00:16:03:22
Pegler was a particularly virulent case.

00:16:03:22 – 00:16:06:21
He was probably most vicious columnist
of his era or any other era.

00:16:06:21 – 00:16:09:05
Later became a flaming anti-Semite.

00:16:09:05 – 00:16:11:21
The only people that would publish him
was the John Birch Society.

00:16:11:21 – 00:16:14:09
And I’m waiting for the John Birch Society
to be reconstituted.

00:16:14:09 – 00:16:16:20
So yeah, the

00:16:16:20 – 00:16:19:24
chaplain did have a reputation
for being tight with the flock.

00:16:19:26 – 00:16:22:14
Which actually was partially true.

00:16:22:14 – 00:16:28:05
He was generous in some ways,
but he always was conscious of his poverty

00:16:28:05 – 00:16:34:04
as a child and was always conscious
that it could happen again

00:16:34:06 – 00:16:37:06
if the dominoes began
falling in the wrong direction.

00:16:37:10 – 00:16:41:00
So he tended his balance carefully.

00:16:41:05 – 00:16:44:10
I think his concern over
money is essentially

00:16:44:10 – 00:16:47:11
why he ended up in Switzerland
because of the favorable taxes,

00:16:47:18 – 00:16:51:05
tax basis of living in Switzerland,
being a full time residence, which was.

00:16:51:10 – 00:16:53:15
And also
he wanted to lower the temperature

00:16:53:15 – 00:16:58:06
because he’d lived in this political
inferno of of America in the Blacklist

00:16:58:06 – 00:17:01:25
era in the late forties and early fifties
and got kicked out of the country.

00:17:01:25 – 00:17:03:26
And I think he wanted

00:17:03:28 – 00:17:05:10
to lower the temperature and

00:17:05:10 – 00:17:09:01
get some peace and quiet in his life,
which he did.

00:17:09:02 – 00:17:12:02
He lived there
the rest of his life doing in the family.

00:17:12:09 – 00:17:16:04
Unfortunately,
it adversely affected his work.

00:17:16:06 – 00:17:18:08
Right. Okay.

00:17:18:08 – 00:17:21:13
I spoke with author and Film Noir expert Alan K. Rode,

00:17:21:16 – 00:17:25:04
and he told me that in Hollywood,
the Mafia use the threat of being called

00:17:25:04 – 00:17:29:13
a communist to break unions and Cal
personnel into doing what they wanted.

00:17:29:15 – 00:17:32:15
Was Charlie Chaplin in any way smeared

00:17:32:22 – 00:17:37:24
as by the Mafia types,
and especially in light of him

00:17:37:24 – 00:17:43:06
being part of United Artists, which kept
control of the money in the process?

00:17:43:08 – 00:17:44:08
No, no, no.

00:17:44:08 – 00:17:47:08
I don’t think he had any problem at all
with the mob.

00:17:47:09 – 00:17:50:07
The mob was much more concerned with

00:17:50:10 – 00:17:51:24
controlling unions.

00:17:51:24 – 00:17:54:28
They saw the mob saw unions as that
were the way in which they could get

00:17:55:06 – 00:17:59:11
a lot of money
and succeeded to a great extent,

00:17:59:13 – 00:18:00:06
they weren’t.

00:18:00:06 – 00:18:03:18
And also, Chaplin was such a lone wolf,
such a law.

00:18:03:18 – 00:18:06:07
He was a lone wolf within United Artists.

00:18:06:07 – 00:18:11:06
Really, which was the problem with United
Artists was it was formed by Griffith

00:18:11:08 – 00:18:14:22
and Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford
and Charlie Chaplin.

00:18:14:24 – 00:18:17:24
Williams heart was in it, but he was
he dropped out almost immediately.

00:18:17:26 – 00:18:19:13
All of them, basically.

00:18:19:13 – 00:18:21:13
Would control their own production

00:18:21:13 – 00:18:25:08
and put up the money for their own films
independently,

00:18:25:10 – 00:18:27:17
and they would own the bulk of the profits
they would own.

00:18:27:17 – 00:18:33:22
I believe 75 or 80% of the moneys
returned in return for putting up

00:18:33:24 – 00:18:36:00
the money, their own money for it
to make the films.

00:18:36:00 – 00:18:39:13
And it worked out
in a sort of sort of a way.

00:18:39:13 – 00:18:40:23
But in the larger context,

00:18:40:23 – 00:18:44:11
it didn’t work out because the only people
who really made money at United Artists

00:18:44:18 – 00:18:48:12
were the founders, people
that came in dragging their own.

00:18:48:13 – 00:18:53:17
Bankrolled with them Sam Goldwyn, David
Selznick, Alexander Korda

00:18:53:19 – 00:18:57:18
all came in to bulk up production
because the problem was as the capital.

00:18:57:18 – 00:18:59:14
They made a movie every four
or five years.

00:18:59:14 – 00:19:03:16
Douglas Fairbanks retired in 1933, or

00:19:03:19 – 00:19:06:19
Mary Pickford retired in 1933.

00:19:06:24 – 00:19:07:17
So they had production.

00:19:07:17 – 00:19:10:07
They didn’t have any movies coming out,
so they had to bring in other people

00:19:10:07 – 00:19:13:07
to make movies in order
to support the corporation.

00:19:13:11 – 00:19:17:04
But you couldn’t make any
money in the United States

00:19:17:07 – 00:19:19:05
as an innovative producer.

00:19:19:05 – 00:19:20:09
It was very difficult.

00:19:20:09 – 00:19:25:05
And they all eventually would drift away,
courted Selznick and the rest.

00:19:25:08 – 00:19:29:06
So. Basically United Earth was set up as a
as a convenience

00:19:29:09 – 00:19:35:02
for a handful of extremely independent
filmmakers slash artists.

00:19:35:04 – 00:19:37:27
It didn’t make a lot of sense
as a business organization,

00:19:37:27 – 00:19:42:03
which was a problem that bedeviled it
until a Victor Fairbanks eventually

00:19:42:03 – 00:19:46:09
sold it in the early 1950s, and it became
the most successful independent.

00:19:46:16 – 00:19:51:11
Operation in the movie business for almost
24, 25 years until Heaven’s Gate.

00:19:51:11 – 00:19:53:06
Really? So.

00:19:53:06 – 00:19:55:24
But that was a different,
totally different management structure

00:19:55:24 – 00:19:57:22
and a totally different business
operation.

00:19:57:22 – 00:20:01:08
Under under the original founders was.

00:20:01:12 – 00:20:02:03
Wasn’t

00:20:02:03 – 00:20:05:25
there wasn’t enough money coming through
United Artists to interest the Mafia.

00:20:06:00 – 00:20:08:27
Let me put it that. wow. Okay.

00:20:08:27 – 00:20:12:23
The Mafia was much more interested at MGM
in 20th Century Fox and Paramount

00:20:12:25 – 00:20:16:29
because they were business
operations run as businesses.

00:20:17:01 – 00:20:17:12
United.

00:20:17:12 – 00:20:21:12
Ours was run as a convenience operation
for the founders.

00:20:21:14 – 00:20:23:17
Okay. It’s very interesting.

00:20:23:17 – 00:20:26:13
Regarding movies
such as the Red Dawn remake,

00:20:26:13 – 00:20:30:00
digitally replacing the Chinese flags
after they were hacked,

00:20:30:03 – 00:20:33:17
the Top Gun to making the enemy
an unknown country.

00:20:33:20 – 00:20:37:25
Should films make a stand on social
and political ideas?

00:20:37:28 – 00:20:40:00
Depends on the filmmaker.

00:20:40:02 – 00:20:43:02
If they want to put themselves out there,
sure, why not?

00:20:43:02 – 00:20:43:24
So you don’t

00:20:43:24 – 00:20:47:22
think it’s outside their purview,
that their purview is just entertainment?

00:20:47:25 – 00:20:50:03
No, no, no, no.

00:20:50:03 – 00:20:53:09
Charlie Chaplin would have existed
if all he was doing was entertaining.

00:20:53:11 – 00:20:55:18
The Great Dictator (1940) wouldn’t exist if only thought he was doing

00:20:55:18 – 00:20:56:07
was entertaining.

00:20:56:07 – 00:20:59:07
Modern Times (1936) wouldn’t exist if he was just being entertaining.

00:20:59:09 – 00:21:02:09
They’re all very plugged in to what’s going on in the world,

00:21:02:09 – 00:21:03:12
what’s going on in the world.

00:21:03:12 – 00:21:07:18
Outside the studio walls at the period Chapple is making up.

00:21:07:20 – 00:21:09:22
And that’s why they’re still relevant today,

00:21:09:22 – 00:21:12:04
because nothing has changed that much, really.

00:21:12:04 – 00:21:14:27
I mean, you look at Modern Times (1936)
and it’s about.

00:21:14:27 – 00:21:18:24
It’s about people’s adherence to tools,
despite

00:21:18:26 – 00:21:21:01
a past the point of sanity.

00:21:21:01 – 00:21:24:14
What would Chaplin out make out of

00:21:24:16 – 00:21:27:00
smartphones?

00:21:27:00 – 00:21:29:08
And this involves drug addiction

00:21:29:08 – 00:21:33:13
and labor unrest and civil and civic

00:21:33:16 – 00:21:37:07
unrest in modern times as mandated at all.

00:21:37:14 – 00:21:42:23
Just watched that recently is weird
amazing film the but don’t know

00:21:42:25 – 00:21:47:03
if I’m reading it right
don’t I see a pushback every time?

00:21:47:06 – 00:21:50:17
Maybe when actors
try to make a stand outside of the movies.

00:21:50:17 – 00:21:55:19
But I was thinking there’s a general trend
now pushing back against Hollywood

00:21:55:21 – 00:21:58:21
to come out with a position.

00:21:58:23 – 00:21:59:16
In a movie.

00:21:59:16 – 00:22:03:23
It was always that’s always been a
that’s always been a factor.

00:22:03:25 – 00:22:04:20
There have always been people

00:22:04:20 – 00:22:06:27
who want to put themselves out there
and make statements.

00:22:06:27 – 00:22:09:21
And there’s also a group of people
who say movies are for entertainment.

00:22:09:21 – 00:22:11:22
That happened in the 1920s.

00:22:11:22 – 00:22:13:11
It happened in the thirties
with the Warner

00:22:13:11 – 00:22:15:20
Brothers,
were making Wild Boys of the Road

00:22:15:20 – 00:22:20:11
and and I was a fugitive from a chain gang
and very socially conscious.

00:22:20:13 – 00:22:22:17
It happened in the fifties
when Burt Lancaster was

00:22:22:17 – 00:22:26:10
making Sweet Smell of Success
or Birdman of Alcatraz.

00:22:26:11 – 00:22:27:12
It happened in the sixties

00:22:27:12 – 00:22:31:24
when they were making Easy Rider
and all those movies that involved

00:22:31:24 – 00:22:35:24
nudity and and sex and carnal knowledge
and all this, that and the other thing.

00:22:35:29 – 00:22:38:04
There’s always been people
protesting against

00:22:38:04 – 00:22:42:23
what are basically regarded by posterity
as cutting edge movies in every era.

00:22:42:26 – 00:22:45:00
Okay, So same as it ever was.

00:22:45:00 – 00:22:45:28
Basically.

00:22:45:28 – 00:22:46:25
Okay.

00:22:46:25 – 00:22:50:26
All right. Reaction produces reaction.

00:22:50:28 – 00:22:54:16
You mentioned this before and Blake,
one of your conclusion.

00:22:54:16 – 00:22:58:11
So it’s Charlie
Chaplin is a testament to perseverance

00:22:58:13 – 00:23:02:03
and his getting the Oscar
and his knighthood.

00:23:02:09 – 00:23:05:11
And it’s film’s continued popularity.

00:23:05:14 – 00:23:06:02
Really?

00:23:06:02 – 00:23:09:18
How does that
how does his vindication later

00:23:09:18 – 00:23:13:19
in life reflect back on his perseverance
trend?

00:23:13:21 – 00:23:15:06
Well.

00:23:15:06 – 00:23:19:03
Chaplin was a commercial monument

00:23:19:05 – 00:23:22:28
for from 1913
when he started making movies.

00:23:23:01 – 00:23:26:01
It’s a 1947 basic.

00:23:26:04 – 00:23:29:04
He had his first flop in 1947
with Monsieur Overdue

00:23:29:10 – 00:23:33:27
Limelight, the film he made the year
he was banned from America or Rio.

00:23:34:00 – 00:23:36:29
It was rescinded,
although that amount of the ban.

00:23:36:29 – 00:23:39:03
Was a great commercial success
all over the world

00:23:39:03 – 00:23:40:26
and didn’t do badly in America either.

00:23:40:26 – 00:23:43:18
And especially compared to the Sherpa do.

00:23:43:18 – 00:23:47:03
So he was, with one single exception,

00:23:47:10 – 00:23:52:19
a very, very commercial filmmaker
throughout his career in America.

00:23:52:21 – 00:23:55:20
The two films he made after he left
America were both.

00:23:55:20 – 00:23:57:23
Very marginal, very marginal movies.

00:23:57:23 – 00:24:01:15
So you can really say

00:24:01:18 – 00:24:03:28
his nonconformity

00:24:03:28 – 00:24:06:28
worked for him, I believe, as an artist

00:24:07:01 – 00:24:09:27
in terms of both the films themselves

00:24:09:27 – 00:24:14:00
and their relevance in the modern era and,
and with the audience of the period

00:24:14:00 – 00:24:17:19
and since of because they don’t

00:24:17:21 – 00:24:20:18
they don’t conform to the the.

00:24:20:18 – 00:24:23:09
The conventional wisdom of the era
in which they were made.

00:24:23:09 – 00:24:24:24
One of the chaplains morality.

00:24:24:24 – 00:24:27:24
Not conventional. Social. Moral.

00:24:27:25 – 00:24:29:02
Bring it.

00:24:29:02 – 00:24:32:10
You’ve written so many great books,
from John Wayne to Cary Grant

00:24:32:10 – 00:24:36:04
to John Ford all across the spectrum.

00:24:36:07 – 00:24:39:20
Which one is your favorite
out of the books you’ve written and why?

00:24:39:22 – 00:24:43:25
I can tell you
which ones I enjoyed writing the most

00:24:43:27 – 00:24:44:14
that I could

00:24:44:14 – 00:24:47:15
tell you, because some of are more
pleasurable to write than others.

00:24:47:17 – 00:24:49:17
For bizarre reasons.

00:24:49:17 – 00:24:53:27
But I can’t tell you which one is the best
or the most effective,

00:24:54:00 – 00:24:57:07
because by the time you’re finished with
the book, you’re too close to the book.

00:24:57:09 – 00:25:00:23
You know,
you’ve read every since 150 times

00:25:00:25 – 00:25:03:25
and the jokes aren’t funny
and the drama is not dramatic.

00:25:03:25 – 00:25:06:10
It’s the same problem a filmmaker has.

00:25:06:10 – 00:25:08:28
After a year of,
you know, you shoot the film

00:25:08:28 – 00:25:11:21
and you sit with it for nine
or ten months or a year

00:25:11:21 – 00:25:14:05
and you’re doing the special effects
and you’re editing

00:25:14:05 – 00:25:17:05
and re-editing and cutting
and adding this and subtracting that.

00:25:17:08 – 00:25:19:07
And after a while,
you have no idea what you’re looking at.

00:25:19:07 – 00:25:21:22
It feels like oatmeal.
It’s the same thing with the book.

00:25:21:22 – 00:25:26:14
It just you just you get
you get your over overly saturated with.

00:25:26:18 – 00:25:27:28
So your first reader.

00:25:27:28 – 00:25:31:18
Or readers are crucial or crucial.

00:25:31:21 – 00:25:35:21
I can tell you there were a couple of
books that I really enjoyed working.

00:25:35:23 – 00:25:38:23
Love working on my Lubitsch biography.

00:25:38:23 – 00:25:41:23
I loved the entire three or four years
I was on it.

00:25:41:24 – 00:25:43:23
I loved working on ink and Jim.

00:25:43:23 – 00:25:47:00
I loved working on Chaplin.

00:25:47:03 – 00:25:49:16
Chaplin because it was.

00:25:49:16 – 00:25:51:18
The fulfillment of a dream deferred.

00:25:51:18 – 00:25:52:25
Because I always loved him,

00:25:52:25 – 00:25:56:09
but I never really thought
I was going to write about him.

00:25:56:11 – 00:25:57:03
But it was.

00:25:57:03 – 00:26:00:27
But the pandemic gave me the chance
to write about it, basically.

00:26:01:00 – 00:26:02:09
Okay.

00:26:02:09 – 00:26:04:29
The the Hank and Jim.

00:26:04:29 – 00:26:06:15
Because.

00:26:06:15 – 00:26:08:15
I love both actors

00:26:08:15 – 00:26:10:26
and they’re completely different actors
and they’re completely different

00:26:10:26 – 00:26:12:04
human beings,

00:26:12:04 – 00:26:17:17
and yet they had a bond of love
and friendship that never was breached.

00:26:17:19 – 00:26:22:22
And I found that ennobling
and instructive,

00:26:22:24 – 00:26:24:08
both personally and professionally.

00:26:24:08 – 00:26:26:01
Lubitsch

00:26:26:01 – 00:26:28:12
Because I always loved his films

00:26:28:12 – 00:26:30:24
and luckily when I wrote the book

00:26:30:24 – 00:26:33:24
there were a lot of people still alive
who knew Lubitsch

00:26:33:26 – 00:26:36:25
and I spent all this time in California
talking to them.

00:26:36:25 – 00:26:40:06
And they were a lot like Lubitsch
people like Billy Wilder.

00:26:40:09 – 00:26:44:25
People like William Wyler,
people like Wyler’s wife Talley,

00:26:44:27 – 00:26:48:16
because the people
because Lubitsch was the personality.

00:26:48:16 – 00:26:52:04
He was the people that gathered around
Lubitsch His circle,

00:26:52:04 – 00:26:55:04
his circle of friends were a lot like him.

00:26:55:09 – 00:26:58:04
So I was able to intuit

00:26:58:04 – 00:27:01:18
who he was
and what he was from the heart of the

00:27:01:20 – 00:27:04:09
and the humor and the vitality,

00:27:04:09 – 00:27:08:27
the intellectual vitality of his friends
and his relatives that I that I talked to.

00:27:09:00 – 00:27:14:17
So it was a a surprising experience
because I hadn’t expected that.

00:27:14:19 – 00:27:15:19
I hadn’t expected that.

00:27:15:19 – 00:27:16:28
I thought people would talk about him

00:27:16:28 – 00:27:21:09
objectively
and with a certain amount of dispassion.

00:27:21:12 – 00:27:24:12
But instead, people’s faces just lit up.

00:27:24:12 – 00:27:25:01
And they were

00:27:25:01 – 00:27:26:03
it was like they were talking about

00:27:26:03 – 00:27:29:17
their favorite uncle
or their favorite grandfather.

00:27:29:19 – 00:27:31:21
And everybody talked to them with love.

00:27:31:21 – 00:27:33:10
Except. Except.

00:27:33:10 – 00:27:36:18
There was only one actor
who didn’t like him, but everybody else

00:27:36:18 – 00:27:39:23
I talked to and there were probably 30
or 40, including his doctor.

00:27:39:26 – 00:27:40:27
30 or 40 people.

00:27:40:27 – 00:27:43:06
Everybody else
adored him as a human being.

00:27:43:06 – 00:27:47:07
And that was that was unexpected.

00:27:47:10 – 00:27:50:03
Unexpected. Very nice.

00:27:50:03 – 00:27:53:25
This is kind of a fluff question
as we start to wind down.

00:27:53:27 – 00:27:57:10
What which Chaplin film
do you enjoy the most and why?

00:27:57:14 – 00:27:59:07
If you can answer that question, I can.

00:27:59:07 – 00:28:01:24
Tell you I’m
not that crazy about my shirt or do.

00:28:01:24 – 00:28:02:08
I just.

00:28:02:08 – 00:28:03:22
It feels like homework to me.

00:28:03:22 – 00:28:05:18
I love the kid.

00:28:05:18 – 00:28:07:07
I love the gold rush.

00:28:07:07 – 00:28:10:04
I think Citylights is probably
his greatest film

00:28:10:04 – 00:28:15:01
objectively as a viewer,
which is a critic, shall we say?

00:28:15:03 – 00:28:16:08
I’m not sure.

00:28:16:08 – 00:28:19:09
It might be to

00:28:19:11 – 00:28:22:27
too insular for a general audience
to really go for it.

00:28:23:02 – 00:28:27:24
I think the general audience is favorite
would be modern times know

00:28:27:26 – 00:28:31:27
because it’s really relevant,
because it doesn’t really seem to age

00:28:31:29 – 00:28:35:05
in terms of the content and what the movie
is saying and what it’s about.

00:28:35:07 – 00:28:36:21
I like the Great Dictator a lot.

00:28:36:21 – 00:28:39:04
I think it’s the most courageous movie
he ever made

00:28:39:04 – 00:28:41:29
and one of the most courageous movies
anybody ever,

00:28:41:29 – 00:28:44:06
because nobody wanted to make it.

00:28:44:06 – 00:28:46:07
United Artists
didn’t really want to make it.

00:28:46:07 – 00:28:49:10
The British Foreign Office didn’t want
it made because Neville Chamberlain was

00:28:49:10 – 00:28:50:21
it was the prime minister

00:28:50:21 – 00:28:54:27
and he was engaged in appeasing
Hitler and hoping he’d go away.

00:28:54:29 – 00:28:56:20
Franklin Roosevelt wanted to.

00:28:56:20 – 00:29:00:14
And Chaplin wanted it made,
and that was about it, really.

00:29:00:16 – 00:29:03:10
The letter in the book that I reproduced
from Jack Warner.

00:29:03:10 – 00:29:06:26
Jack Warner at a conference with Jet
with Roosevelt in the White House.

00:29:06:28 – 00:29:11:07
And Roosevelt had brought up Chaplin’s
plans to shoot the Great Dictator.

00:29:11:10 – 00:29:14:01
And he told Warner that he thought
it was a really important movie

00:29:14:01 – 00:29:17:11
and Chaplin should go ahead with it,
even though there were terrible headwinds.

00:29:17:15 – 00:29:21:24
Because Chaplin was immature the way we
distributed distribute the film, he might.

00:29:21:27 – 00:29:22:13
So he said,

00:29:22:13 – 00:29:26:12
I’ll read also, I’ll put up tents,
I’ll show the film any way I can, any.

00:29:26:15 – 00:29:30:13
And I have no doubt that he worked
and he put up his own million, 4

00:29:30:13 – 00:29:33:16
million, $400,000 of his own money,
considerable amount of money.

00:29:33:16 – 00:29:37:00
In 1939, when he started shooting

00:29:37:02 – 00:29:41:13
and he starts shooting in September 39,
it comes out in October 40.

00:29:41:15 – 00:29:43:27
And America
is still an isolationist country

00:29:43:27 – 00:29:45:28
because Pearl Harbor
is not till December 41.

00:29:45:28 – 00:29:49:27
And it’s a huge hit in spite
of a lot of people who thought

00:29:49:29 – 00:29:54:04
he was sticking his toe in places
he shouldn’t have been because

00:29:54:06 – 00:29:57:06
politics are serious
and movies are not serious.

00:29:57:08 – 00:30:00:02
And Chaplin understood that.

00:30:00:02 – 00:30:02:04
You can’t reason with a mad dog.

00:30:02:04 – 00:30:04:21
You can’t make deals with a mad dog.
They won’t.

00:30:04:21 – 00:30:06:29
They won’t abide by the deal.

00:30:06:29 – 00:30:09:29
You know,
you have to defeat them or kill them.

00:30:10:02 – 00:30:13:24
And that’s what the Great Dictator
is ultimately about.

00:30:13:26 – 00:30:17:05
You cannot appease people like Hitler

00:30:17:07 – 00:30:20:05
and Chamberlain didn’t understand that.

00:30:20:05 – 00:30:23:02
Churchill did. Roosevelt did. Chaplin did.

00:30:23:02 – 00:30:25:15
There weren’t an awful
lot of people who understood that.

00:30:25:15 – 00:30:26:21
Amazing.

00:30:26:21 – 00:30:28:28
These are for my final question.

00:30:28:28 – 00:30:32:24
What have I forgotten to ask you
that you want to say about this book?

00:30:32:27 – 00:30:35:24
The reason I wrote
it is because nobody else did.

00:30:35:24 – 00:30:39:09
Basically, there are dozens
and dozens of books about Shirley Jo,

00:30:39:11 – 00:30:42:15
which actually stopped me from writing
about Charlie Chaplin because a very well,

00:30:42:22 – 00:30:46:00
everybody’s done it
one way or the other based on it.

00:30:46:03 – 00:30:48:21
And I was sitting there in January 2020
and the world’s

00:30:48:21 – 00:30:52:06
closing down
as the pandemic slides across the world.

00:30:52:10 – 00:30:53:13
And I had nothing to do.

00:30:53:13 – 00:30:56:19
I just shipped off Cary Grant
and I was twiddling my thumbs.

00:30:56:19 – 00:31:02:13
And generally I’d take six months
or a year off between books

00:31:02:15 – 00:31:04:08
to recharge my batteries.

00:31:04:08 – 00:31:06:29
But I thought, Well,
who knows how this is going to go?

00:31:06:29 – 00:31:09:02
You know, this pandemic thing.

00:31:09:02 – 00:31:10:03
And I thought about Chaplin,

00:31:10:03 – 00:31:13:29
and then I started just leafing through
all these books that I have in my library,

00:31:14:01 – 00:31:17:14
and none of it really got into the nuts
and bolts of what happened

00:31:17:16 – 00:31:21:01
and the mechanics of what happened
and the the snowball effect

00:31:21:01 – 00:31:25:01
of what happened,
and then gradually being ostracized

00:31:25:03 – 00:31:29:02
socially, politically by the right wing
and the effect

00:31:29:02 – 00:31:31:29
it had on the American public,
the general American.

00:31:31:29 – 00:31:34:09
Even the David Robinson book,
which is an excellent book,

00:31:34:09 – 00:31:39:11
I think kind of let’s
throw it in a couple of pages.

00:31:39:13 – 00:31:42:27
And I just thought, well, okay,

00:31:43:00 – 00:31:45:04
maybe it’s time, maybe it’s time.

00:31:45:04 – 00:31:48:27
And then as I was working on the book,

00:31:49:00 – 00:31:52:00
with the cooperation of the Chapman estate
and the Library of Congress,

00:31:52:00 – 00:31:55:10
when they finally reopened
and the Nixon Library

00:31:55:10 – 00:31:57:19
when they finally reopened
the Truman Library,

00:31:57:19 – 00:32:01:15
when they finally reopened
all this material,

00:32:01:18 – 00:32:04:28
putting it together
was like working out this magnificent

00:32:04:28 – 00:32:08:18
jigsaw puzzle that no one else had because
no one else had ever approached it.

00:32:08:18 – 00:32:12:26
From the point of thinking of this
from this map, the micro view.

00:32:13:02 – 00:32:16:02
Everybody else had done Chaplin
through the macro, and I was doing

00:32:16:08 – 00:32:21:17
basically a macro view of this one
specific period in his life.

00:32:21:20 – 00:32:26:09
What led to it, what happened during it
and what happened after it?

00:32:26:11 – 00:32:29:11
Crystal It was it was

00:32:29:13 – 00:32:30:24
the narrative was different.

00:32:30:24 – 00:32:34:20
The narrative was difficult
because it’s not as the reality

00:32:34:20 – 00:32:38:25
is that it
reads smoother than it actually was.

00:32:38:27 – 00:32:41:15
It was a chaotic period for him
where he’s being it was like

00:32:41:15 – 00:32:45:16
he was on a roller coaster,
getting jerked around constantly,

00:32:45:19 – 00:32:47:06
sometimes of his own making.

00:32:47:06 – 00:32:50:25
But it was a very jerky ride
and I didn’t want to make it a jerky ride.

00:32:50:25 – 00:32:53:16
You want to make it comprehensible
in a narrative way.

00:32:53:16 – 00:32:58:20
So that was difficult to achieve
because there are so many factoids

00:32:58:20 – 00:33:02:06
and nuggets and things
happening at the same time simultaneously.

00:33:02:08 – 00:33:06:19
So it was it was a difficult book to pull
off technically, if indeed I call them.

00:33:06:22 – 00:33:07:20
Fantastic.

00:33:07:20 – 00:33:11:10
You know, I was just noting that you said
you did it during the pandemic,

00:33:11:10 – 00:33:14:10
and that puts you in some
pretty good company with the Sir Isaac

00:33:14:10 – 00:33:17:21
Newton and William Shakespeare,
both working in the pandemic

00:33:17:21 – 00:33:20:17
and coming out with
something really wonderful.

00:33:20:17 – 00:33:22:24
I wouldn’t put myself in that,

00:33:22:24 – 00:33:24:27
but no, it’s it’s

00:33:24:27 – 00:33:28:03
a different experience
when you don’t leave the house

00:33:28:03 – 00:33:31:03
for three months,
four months, six months at a time.

00:33:31:07 – 00:33:32:09
As opposed to.

00:33:32:09 – 00:33:36:03
So your concentration is
is is not being diverted, you know,

00:33:36:05 – 00:33:37:12
and there’s an upside to that.

00:33:37:12 – 00:33:42:09
And there’s also a
downside of that because you

00:33:42:11 – 00:33:43:22
I think you lose your you can

00:33:43:22 – 00:33:47:17
easily lose your objectivity
because you’re so focused.

00:33:47:20 – 00:33:50:29
It can get you get a little OCD
and you don’t really want that

00:33:51:05 – 00:33:55:03
because just because you think
it’s working doesn’t mean anybody else

00:33:55:03 – 00:34:00:00
is going to think it’s working because
you lose your objectivity that way.

00:34:00:02 – 00:34:01:22
Well, this book is fantastic.

00:34:01:22 – 00:34:03:17
I really enjoyed reading it.

00:34:03:17 – 00:34:04:29
I looked at it when I got it.

00:34:04:29 – 00:34:06:18
I’m like, That’s a lot to go through.

00:34:06:18 – 00:34:11:26
But it just read so well and it’s
so fascinating and so well put together.

00:34:11:29 – 00:34:13:01
Congratulations.

00:34:13:01 – 00:34:16:15
And I highly recommend
this book that everybody,

00:34:16:22 – 00:34:19:15
thanks to this huge can appreciate it.

00:34:19:15 – 00:34:24:09
And before we sign off, where can people
find you where they can get the book?

00:34:24:09 – 00:34:25:25
What else do you want to know?

00:34:25:25 – 00:34:28:25
You have social media
You want. I do. I do.

00:34:28:25 – 00:34:30:25
I do. Scott Amazon.com.

00:34:30:25 – 00:34:33:18
Yeah, I’m. I’m around. I’m around.

00:34:33:18 – 00:34:35:10
Not hard to find.

00:34:35:12 – 00:34:36:00
Okay.

00:34:36:00 – 00:34:37:14
And that’s it.

00:34:37:14 – 00:34:40:04
Thank you very much again
for coming on the show.

00:34:40:04 – 00:34:41:01
I really appreciate it.

00:34:41:01 – 00:34:43:09
And I think that people are really going to enjoy it.

00:34:43:09 – 00:34:43:29
Thank you.

00:34:43:29 – 00:34:45:00
I appreciate.

00:34:45:00 – 00:34:45:21
All right.

00:35:02:25 – 00:35:04:00
Thank you very much.

00:35:04:00 – 00:35:06:16
Thank you, sir. Try to stay dry. Bye bye.

00:35:06:16 – 00:35:06:24
Bye bye.