Waiting For Chaplin

Last week, I got to visit the Motion Picture and Television Fund Retirement Home in Woodland Hills to profile five retirees about their life in the movies. The profiles will appear in the Nov. 26 "Oscar Preview" issue of Variety. Since the profiles are so short, there were lots of great anecdotes that didn't make the cut. Some of my favorites:

Director Charles Jarrott (Anne of the Thousand Days; Mary, Queen of Scots) wanted to make a film about Nicholas and Alexandra. Since it was the '70s, his choice for leading man was none other than Robert Redford, but Redford wanted to play the villain of the piece, Rasputin! Can you imagine? Needless to say, they couldn't come to an agreement and the picture didn't get made, at least not by Jarrott. The director also recalled with understandable disappointment that Chaplin came to the set of Anne but was too shy to actually come in and stood outside in the hallway the entire time, so Jarrott hadn't even known he was there!

Betty Freeman, the widow of Oscar-winning sound effects man Charles Freeman (Portrait of Jennie), told of how her husband worked with Charles Chaplin on his last film. They would typically wait in the evenings at Chaplin's studio (I'm guessing it was the one at Sunset and La Brea) for him to show up and review the dailies. One night they waited and waited and finally someone thought to look out the window: Chaplin couldn't get in the gate and no one heard him calling, so he'd started to climb the fence! Fortunately, they were able to get him down and inside the studio.

Perhaps most delightful of all was 97-year-old animator Ruthie Thompson, who talked about knowing Walt Disney as a child and how he remembered her years later and offered her a job. The way she talked about the studio in the '30s and '40s, where you could make a suggestion in person to Walt and it would be done, is astounding.

The interviews were great fun to conduct, memory lapses and hearing aid issues aside, it was a real delight and the home itself was lovely and completely modern, at least the part I saw. Not a bad place to end up, I think.