Charlie Chaplin

Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Charlie Chaplin (Fake News: Fact-Checking Hollywood Babylon, Episode 8) / August 20, 2018 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The Kim Kardashian of her day, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was famous for being rich and famous—and for her marriages and involvements with rich and famous men, including Charlie Chaplin. Did Peggy really ask Chaplin on their first date if he was “hung like a horse?” We’ll investigate this and other claims made about the affair in Hollywood Babylon, and chart how the dalliance with Hopkins Joyce inspired Chaplin’s first dramatic film A Woman of Paris, and explain how a woman of the 1910s-1920s could come from nothing and become internationally famous before ever arriving in Hollywood.

SHOW NOTES:

Sources:

This episode is a response to, and includes a brief excerpt from, Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger.

Gold Digger: The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce by Constance Rosenblum

My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin

The Talmadge Girls by Anita Loos

“Peggy Joyce is Now Sure She is Through with Men” by United Press, The Southeast Missourian, May 5, 1922

“The Legend of Peggy Hopkins Joyce: She Collected Men, Chinchilla, Diamonds” by Milt Freudenheim, Toledo Blade, June 23, 1957

Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Charlie Chaplin, c. 1922

Music:

Original music was composed for this episode by Evan Viola. Most of the rest of the music used in this episode, with the exception of the intro and outro, was sourced from royalty-free music libraries and licensed music collections. The intro includes a clip from the film Casablanca. The outro song this week is “I'm a Rich Man's Toy” by The Auteurs.

Excerpts from the following songs were used throughout the episode:

The Smoke Room - Gunnar Johnsen
Sad Piano Walk 1 - Oscar Collin
1920s Chicago 3 - Magnus Ringblom
French Girls - Hakan Ericsson
French Cuisine - Magnus Ringblom
Mississippi Ramble 1 - Martin Gauffin
Wedding March in C Major - Felix Mendelssohn
Pesado Manouche 3 - John Ahlin
Pesado Manouche 2 - John Ahlin
Klezmer Feeling 1 - Gunnar Johnsen
Victoria’s Vintage Pearls - Peter Sandberg
Black and White Memories 3 - Martin Hall
My Simple Thing 3 - Peter Sandberg
Yellow Leaves 2 - Peter Sandberg
Black and White - Magnus Ringblom Quartet
Widows Dance - Hakan Eriksson
Motions 9 - Line Neesgaard

Credits:

Our special guest this week is John Mulaney.

This episode was written, narrated and produced by Karina Longworth.

Editors: Sam Dingman and Jacob Smith.

Research and production assistant: Lindsey D. Schoenholtz.

Social media assistant: Brendan Whalen.

Logo design: Teddy Blanks.

Mabel Normand (Fake News: Fact Checking Hollywood Babylon Episode 5) / July 30, 2018 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

A frequent co-star of Roscoe Arbuckle’s, Mabel Normand was the definitive female screen comedienne of her generation. But it wasn’t her association with Arbuckle that brought Normand’s career to an abrupt close and her life to an early end. Today we’ll interrogate Hollywood Babylon’s claim that Normand was a cocaine addict, explore Normand’s involvement in various scandals which did more damage than drugs, and talk about the disease that led to her early death.

SHOW NOTES

Sources:

This episode is a response to, and includes a brief excerpt from, Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger.

Goldwyn: a Biography by A. Scott Berg

Mabel: Hollywood’s First I Don’t Care Girl by Betty Harper Fussell

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann

Silent Stars by Jeanine Basinger

My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin

“Mickey (1918)” by Roger Fristoe, tcm.com

“Mabel Normand: Her Great-Nephew’s Memoir” by Stephen Normand, themabelnormand.com

Mabel Normand, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, c. 1915

Music:

Original music was composed for this episode by Evan Viola. Most of the rest of the music used in this episode, with the exception of the intro and outro, was sourced from royalty-free music libraries and licensed music collections. The intro includes a clip from the film Casablanca. The outro song this week is “Underground Movies” by The Auteurs.

Excerpts from the following songs were used throughout the episode:

The Smoke Room - Gunnar Johnsen

My Simple Thing 3 - Peter Sandberg

Pesado Manouche 3 - John Ahlin

Mississippi Ramble 1 - Martin Gauffin

Kansas City Flashback 2 - Magnus Ringblom

One Two Three 1 - Peter Sandberg

Jazz and Blue Piano 1 - Jonaton Jarpehag

Mickey (1918) - Harry Williams (lyrics) & Neil Moret (music)

Victoria’s Vintage Pearls 2 - Peter Sandberg

Black and White - Magnus Ringblom Quartet

My Simple Thing - Peter Sandberg

Credits:

Our special guest this week is Fred Savage.

This episode was written, narrated and produced by edited by Karina Longworth.

Editors: Sam Dingman and Jacob Smith.

Research and production assistant: Lindsey D. Schoenholtz.

Social media assistant: Brendan Whalen.

Logo design: Teddy Blanks.

Monsieur Verdoux: Charlie Chaplin's Road to Hollywood Exile (The Blacklist Episode #7) / March 28, 2016 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Picking up where last week’s episode left off, we’ll catch up with Chaplin’s post-The Great Dictator activism, talk about Chaplin’s savage satirical follow-up, Monsieur Verdoux, and explain the witch hunt that ended with him forced to leave his adopted home, and Hollywood career, behind.

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Here is a list of published sources that the entire season draws from:

The Red and the Blacklist: An Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate by Norma Barzman

Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo

Trumbo: A biography of the Oscar-winning screenwriter who broke the Hollywood blacklist by Bruce Cook

When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics by Donald T. Critchlow

Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten by Edward Dmytryk

City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

Hollywood Radical, Or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist by Bernard Gordon

I Said Yes to Everything by Lee Grant

Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman

Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky

West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein

The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60 by Larry Ceplair

Sources specific to this episode:

Chaplin's War Trilogy: An Evolving Lens in Three Dark Comedies, 1918-1947 by Wes D. Gehring

My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd

The Gordon File: A Screenwriter Recalls Twenty Years of FBI Surveillance by Bernard Gordon

“When Chaplin Became The Enemy” by J. Hoberman, NY Times, June 8, 2008

“Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America” by John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw

Excerpts from Chaplin’s FBI file can be found on the FBI’s website.

This episode was edited by Henry Molofsky, and produced by Karina Longworth with the assistance of Lindsey D. Schoenholtz. Our logo was designed by Teddy Blanks.

Blacklist Flashback: Charlie Chaplin During World War II / March 21, 2016 by Karina Longworth

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Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

In 1922, Charlie Chaplin was one of the most beloved men in the world. In 1952, after over a decade of being publicly shamed, he was essentially manipulated into self-deportation. What happened in between? We’ll explain over two episodes, beginning with this flashback to an episode that originally ran in March 2015, detailing Chaplin’s politics, his fascination with Adolf Hitler, the making and release of The Great Dictator, and the sex scandal that gave J. Edgar Hoover an opening to persecute Chaplin.

This episode originally debuted in March 2015. The original show notes for the episode contains sources, soundtrack information and more.

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Charlie Chaplin plays the flamboyant dictator of Tomania

MGM Stories Part Two: Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst and Citizen Kane / September 21, 2015 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

Marion Davies is enshrined in memory as the gorgeous but questionably talented mistress of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst -- thanks in part to the depiction of a Davies-esque character in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. But Davies’ involvement with the much older Hearst both ensured she would have a movie career, and perhaps doomed Davies to ridicule and limited stardom. This episode will explore how Davies and Hearst hooked up, the mutually beneficial working relationship between Hearst and Louis B. Mayer, the souring of that relationship over MGM’s (mis)use of Davies and Mayer’s effort to block the release of Kaneon Hearst’s behalf

Special thanks to Larry Herold, who reprised his role as Orson Welles. This episode was edited by Henry Molofsky. Our research intern is Allison Gemmill.

Sources for this episode:

Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman

The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution by Scott Eyman

The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies

Marion Davies by Fred Guilles

Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion and Propaganda in the Movies by Louis Pizzitola

Silent Stars by Jeanine Basinger

This is Orson Welles by Peter Bogdanovich

Star Wars Episode XI: Charlie Chaplin / March 17, 2015 by Karina Longworth

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.

The most successful film of Charlie Chaplin’s career was also the most controversial: in The Great Dictator, Chaplin viciously satirized Hitler before the US entered World War II, and the comedy helped rally a previously war-shy American public. We’ll explore the connections between Chaplin and Adolf Hitler, and explain why most of Hollywood tried to stop The Great Dictator from being made. Then we’ll switch gears to discuss how Chapin’s wartime activism and his troubled personal life collided to benefit J. Edgar Hoover, who spent thirty years trying to prove that Chaplin was dangerously un-American.

Show Notes:

The impetus for this episode was a documentary produced and aired by TCM, which I first saw about a year ago, called The Tramp and the Dictator. The film was co-directed by Michael Kloft and the great silent film historian Kevin Brownlow (if you haven't seen his series Hollywood, on the silent era, find it and watch it post haste), and it tells the story of how and why Chaplin made The Great Dictator, using previously unseen material shot on the set of the film. I thought it would be interesting to contrast this aspect of Chaplin's war experience with the section of City of Nets in which Otto Friedrich describes Chaplin's personal life and the scandals it caused during the war years as a kind of prelude to the legal issues that would get him thrown out of the US a few years later.