User:Wildroot/Chaplin

Production

Locations:

• Disney Studios, California, USA
• Lake Geneva, Switzerland
• London, England, United Kingdom
• Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raleigh Studios, Hollywood, California, USA
• Universal Studios, Los Angeles, USA
• Vevey, Switzerland

Filming dates: October 14, 1991 to February 21, 1992

Reception

• http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=chaplin.htm
• http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1992/0CHLN.php

Based on 43 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 63% of the critics enjoyed the film with an average score of 5.9/10.

• http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/reviews/Chaplin
• 2 other positive
• http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19930108/REVIEWS/301080301/1023
• http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/5947175/review/5947176/chaplin
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103939/awards (5)

External links

• Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
• The DVD?
• Sir Richard, as director and producer, went through his customary struggle to secure money to make it. Shooting finally began in California in early January, then moved to the comedian's native London. The movie of Charlie Chaplin's life came about almost by accident. After "A Chorus Line" in 1985 and "Cry Freedom" in 1987 -- Sir Richard's films about struggling hoofers and a struggling South African -- the director had planned to bring the life of Tom Paine to the screen. But in 1988 he was informed that Universal would pass on the $50 million film. What to do instead? At dinner one night, Diana Hawkins, the director of his film company, Marble Arch Productions, made a rash promise: she would come up with an alternative subject. "Don't be ridiculous; you can't think of a film just like that," said Sir Richard. "Yes, I can," she said -- and the next day Chaplin's name occurred to her. Why not? The more she thought and read about the comedian, the more she realized that a film about Chaplin would meet Sir Richard's desire to make an epic biography. Less than a week after she had made her promise, Miss Hawkins solemnly presented Sir Richard with an envelope containing a cardboard tramp in silhouette. "He asked what the film would be called," Miss Hawkins recalls. "I said 'Chaplin,' and he said no, 'Charlie,' and I knew it was going to work." Sir Richard had been a Chaplin fan since seeing Chaplin's "Gold Rush" at the age of 10 and realizing that he, too, wanted to be an actor. Besides, he had gotten to know Charlie Chaplin, his fourth wife, Oona O'Neill Chaplin, and their children slightly in later life: "He was a very sweet, gentle old man," Sir Richard says. "My abiding memory is of him sitting in a wheelchair, and Oona going out of the room, and his eyes scarcely leaving the door until she returned. I have never seen a couple so devoted." That acquaintance helped now. Sir Richard called three of Chaplin's eight children by Oona -- Victoria, Annie and Geraldine -- and had them intercede with their mother. Mrs. Chaplin had rejected every previous approach to make a movie of her husband's life, but Sir Richard's reputation and "Gandhi," which she had seen 10 times, changed her mind. She told him he could make the film and have access to private letters and the Chaplin archives. The only condition was that she herself would do nothing, not even read the script. "Total freedom," Sir Richard says. "Frightening. No one to blame but me." Oona Chaplin died at the age of 66 last fall, before filming began. Sir Richard wanted one of Chaplin's children in the movie for sentimental reasons -- "and Geraldine was the actress, and you need somebody who looks like Charlie Chaplin to play Charlie Chaplin's mother. She looks phenomenally like him." The problem was in casting the main role. He was determined to use a relatively obscure actor. But where could he find one who was only 5 feet 7 inches and capable of playing any age between 17 and 83? The person playing Chaplin also needed to have charisma and a flair for mimicry. Sir Richard tested seven actors, all of whom did pretty good tramp imitations. But the one who leaped out of the screen was the 26-year-old American, Robert Downey, Jr. Geraldine Chaplin, who came to Los Angeles to see the results of Mr. Downey's screen test, turned around in stupefaction after 20 minutes. "I was flabbergasted and in a way horrified," she remembers. "I had thought my father was unique. But Robert has the same silhouette, the same way of standing, the same way of pondering. And the way he moves, his hands, everything. To watch him still gives me a very, very weird feeling." Mr. Downey immersed himself in research about Chaplin. He went as far as teaching himself to play tennis with his left hand, as the comedian did. In the end he acquired the right accent for the private Chaplin and the right body language for the professional one. So close was the physical match that Sir Richard decided to insert extracts from Chaplin's original films into the action. Universal, however, pulled out of the $32 million project last year, leaving Sir Richard with a choice of abandoning "Charlie" or raising the money himself. Fortunately, the head of Carolco, Mario Kassar, was a Chaplin fan and offered help. It took six months for the two men to round up the international financing and the combined talents of Bryan Forbes, William Boyd, Tom Stoppard and William Goldman to complete a script that would cover the comedian's life in 135 minutes. Not until this year could shooting begin. Chaplin's former studios, on La Brea Avenue, are now surrounded not by orange groves but by urban Los Angeles. The studios had to be rebuilt in Fillmore, 60 miles north. The slum houses in London had either disappeared or been modernized, so they, too, had to be reconstructed, this time on derelict land near King's Cross Station. Chaplin's formative years will be seen, as they should be, against the same dreary background Geraldine remembers from the late 50's and early 60's: mean little streets, drab two-story dwellings and, rising behind them, enormous gas tanks and a gray London sky. But there are more cheerful London locations. In the East End, the Hackney Empire Theatre, with its red-and-gold rococo interiors, has been restored to Victorian splendor, which makes it an appropriate setting for the routines that first established Chaplin as a vaudeville performer. For Geraldine Chaplin, the problems have been a little different. She has had to learn to do a Cockney accent, sing a music hall song and sit and move in an uptight Victorian way. But emotional spontaneity has not been difficult. "I always saw my father's fame and adulation and glory, because he was 54 when I was born," she says. "But I did also see how depressed he'd get at Christmas, seeing the presents and remembering the horror of his background." Ms. Chaplin has concentrated on doing the part as professionally as possible. But it has not always been easy. There was the scene when the authorities came to take away Charlie and Sydney, his half brother. "There was a knock on the door, and they said, 'Mrs. Chaplin, are these your children?' And it threw me. For a moment I thought they'd got the wrong name, and then I thought, 'Oh, no, it's me, I'm Mrs. Chaplin.' And I realized it was all about my father and my own grandmother."

• An actor could easily feel intimidated by the task of miming the great mime (17-83). "Learning pantomime was the hardest thing I've ever tried to do," Mr. Downey says. "I worked on it so hard. I'm not exactly an intuitive guy." Yet, with a depth of feeling that separates him from someone merely plugging his latest film, Mr. Downey says he believes he was born for the role. "Chaplin has been an undercurrent my whole life," he says. Mr. Downey was 22 -- and steeped in Chaplin lore -- when he bought a house in the Hollywood hills in which, it was said, Chaplin had lived. Last year, at the Museum of the Moving Image in London, he got someone to open a glass case so he could try on a pair of Chaplin's shoes. "They fit perfectly," he says. "We have the same feet." And when he was filming in Switzerland, where Chaplin lived in self-imposed exile until his death in 1977, one of Chaplin's former maids approached Mr. Downey with a gift. "She gave me one of the real Tramp wing collars," he says. Mr. Downey glances around the restaurant as if to make sure no one has overheard and whispers, "I keep it in a safe."

Downey prepared extensively, learning how to play the violin and tennis. He even had a personal coach in order to imitate Chaplin's posture and way of carrying himself.