a Witch Hunt and black listing the Red Scare tore Hollywood apart in the 50s and careers were ruined at the top of that list was one of the greatest filmmakers in history Charlie Chaplan I'm Anne boock and welcome to between the covers film historian and bestselling author author Scott Iman has a new book it's his 16th about the little known story of Charlie Chaplain who was caught up in the political climate after World War II chaplain was the most beloved comedian and filmmaker in the country which makes this story of his fall from grace even more stunning the title is Charlie Chaplain versus America when art sex and politics collided Scott Iman welcome hi Ann good to see you it's so nice to see you this book is incredible but I'm going to flip to the very end of the book it's your author notes and you say it takes you this is the story that took you 60 years to write so I know I'm being a little tongue and- cheek here but what ises a 60-year Journey look like Charlie Chaplain was my entry level into silent movies and Classic Hollywood essentially I fell with him when I was 12 13 years old I bought a uh 8mm print of Easy Street a two reeler he made in 1917 for 995 and I watched it over over again in my bedroom on my 8 millimeter projector uh and that was it I was enchanted I was en raptured I was in love uh and I never thought seriously of writing a book about him because bookshelves grown under the weight of CH books about Charlie Chaplain I know I've read them all but when the pandemic hit I was looking around for something to do because I didn't know if it was going to take a year or five years or however long it was going to take cuz the libraries were all closing and uh I realized the chaplain archives were completely digitized so I could do a lot of the research for a book on Charlie Chaplain from my house so without the pandemic I never would have thought of writing a book about Charlie Chaplan so it was a series of of happen stance happy happy coincidences really this book Charlie Chaplan vers America is a different different Charlie Chaplan story this takes this is the years of Exile from the United States so before we look at that particular period I want to go back to his childhood because everything is colored by what happened to him as a child if you don't know about Charlie chaplain's childhood you can't possibly understand his life uh he was born to two Music Hall entertainers of vilans his father died of alcoholism at the age of 37 his mother went uh uh uh incrementally insane she was syphilitic we know that we don't know if the insanity was a function of the syphilis or of schizophrenia profound schizophrenia what we do know is that she was institutionalized for uh uh decades uh chaplain for a Time lived on the streets uh in a catch's catch can way his anchor his Rock was his brother cydney cydney was two years older than Charlie and cydney never faced Charlie and it was Sydney who got Charlie uh into the Carno company which was the leading Vaudeville producer in England and Charlie became a star in vaille but up until uh the age of 15 16 17 it was a very very chaotic existence he he learned to read and write in a CH in a workhouse uh uh the dzian style workhouse he was basically thrown on The Tender Mercies of Victorian child welfare system which is to say good luck awful awful this man was a genius he was brilliant he was really he was a man probably one of the most enduring figures in film history this is the man that created the [ _ ] he becomes the biggest star in America at the very same time that America is adopting this is isolationist political stance why was chaplain targeted well the subtitle of the book is when art sex politics collided it was not chosen for crass commercial reasons because there was there were three parts there were three components to his uh increasing isolation and finally his Exile uh the art uh the problem began with uh movies like Modern Times And The Great Dictator which are his most popular in the 21st century uh because chaplain was a comedian who was attached to the reality of the world around him there are two kinds of comedians essentially there are comedians who mug and make faces and want to take people away from reality and there are artists who want to reflect reality in their work and chaplain was much more like Picasso than he was like Danny K or Red Skelton he didn't mug he didn't make faces uh he he he wanted to reflect the world as he saw it within the world of his films so when he made Modern Times which is essentially about uh the instability of of the depression era and how a monolithic Society treats Outsiders and then there's the Great Dictator his satire of Hitler made at a time when nobody wanted a satire of Hitler because America was a profoundly isolationist country in 1940 and continued to be until Pearl Harbor and the end of 1941 so uh by making those films he uh basically began the process of alienating uh a good 60% of the electorate and the sex he had uh uh a fairly active sex life I think we can safely say he was married three times uh there was uh a relationship with Paul at goded an actress where they were never actually married they might have been common law uh husband and wife I'm not sure what the law in California was about what constituted common law marriage they pretended to be married they went through a Mexican Divorce to give her protective coloration that they hadn't been living in sin but in fact they never were married they never had a marriage it it's seems like like the Dark Ages when when this is is what people would would be you know appalled about besides politics his other problem as you said was young women and and sex and then there was a paternity suit there was a paternity was that the last straw I think that was half of the last straw this this came to fruition in 1942 43 he had had a relationship with a young actress who was in her 20s uh she was not an actress she wanted to be an actress she had been previously the Mistress of J pauletti in Oklahoma uh she thought it would be fun to be a movie star so she came to Hollywood with a letter of introduction I was introduced to chaplain one thing led to another he signed her to a contract thought she had dramatic potential bought a play for her but she didn't have the psychological or emotional capability of of attending to the business of tending to work the relationship broke up she went back to Oklahoma and Getty then she came back to California some months later and said she was pregnant and he was the father chaplain did the math and realized he wasn't the father he couldn't possibly be the father so he refused to settle he refused to deal with her she went to the head of Hopper the famous gossip columnist who loathed Chaplin uh she went to the FBI they weren't crazy about him either and uh eventually there was a paternity suit chaplain happily took a blood test the blood test proved he was not the father of the child and he lost the paternity suit anyway the jury found against him because at that point in California uh uh a blood test was not dispositive proof If it five years later it became dispositive proof and they would have thrown the case out immediately but in 1943 the shury could could overrule the results of the blood test so for 18 years he had to pay child support for a child that wasn't his you can imagine how thrilled he was about that uh as the paternity suit was getting underway he married oo O'Neal the daughter of Eugene O'Neal who was 18 years old at the time and chaplain would have been 53 or 54 another Scandal another Scandal which seemed to uh confirm the most lurd stories about his relationship with Joan Barry and the and the possibility of him fathering a child on a wedlock there was no way of knowing of course that the marriage would not only survive but flourish and they had eight children together and they were married for the rest of his life so uh all this combined with the uh uh uh disapproval of Modern Times And The Great Dictator followed by uh chaplain's prizing for the opening of a second front to Aid Russia during World War II because Russia was our Ally at the time uh to bring the war to a more rapid close because chaplain had two sons who were of draft age and who in fact did serve in the American Army and he was concerned that they were going to get killed so he wanted the war finished as quickly as possible so the sooner uh we could Aid Russia the sooner we could all defeat Hitler and go back to our normal lives but at the time uh especially uh at the time the rightwing in America didn't believe Russia could be our uh Ally they believed Russia was only our enemy in waiting so he he he ostracized himself further uh outside the mainstream by his prizing to help Rush he had a lot of enemies at at this point I I want to look at the film The Great Dictator the timing had to have been the riskiest movie he would ever make by far and it was also his first talking picture he had resisted talking films yes up to this point because he was playing the [ _ ] he liked the character he loved the character and the tra was a Universal Character uh a representation of the underclass in every country in Germany the tra was taken as German in Japan he was taken as Japanese and French he was taken France he was taken as French etc etc as soon as he was playing the [ _ ] and opened his mouth to speak the [ _ ] becomes English because chaplain had a soft English accent but it was there and he thought that by trading off universality for the currency of sound he would be the loser and the character would be the loser so in The Great Dictator he plays a Jewish Barber who essentially is the [ _ ] sort of except the Jewish Barber is far more passive than the [ _ ] ever was and he divides the character in half and who the Jewish Barber is mistaken for adenoid HL the ranting raving lunatic uh of of the double cross instead of the Nazi Insignia Scott talk a little bit about that powerful speech at at the end of the film the speech was always the way he was going to end the film he was going to end the film essentially by stepping out of character and addressing the audience not as the Jewish Barber but as Charlie Chaplain using his moral Authority accured over 25 years of of stardom and power and uh uh uh autonomy as a filmmaker within Hollywood uh to speak out on what he regarded as a mortal threat to democracy and World Peace uh the speech went through innumerable drafts he contributed a great deal to it his assistant Dan James worked on it basically anybody could come up and say what do you think about this Charlie what about saying that there are multiple multiple handwritten drafts of the speech mostly in chaplain's and uh what you see is is probably something like the 70th or 80th draft of the speech uh he shot uh six or eight takes over two days and that was it uh that was the way he ends the film he was always going to step out of character get the characters the the subsidiary characters out from under the iron boot of adenoid inkle and end with the uh the Jewish Barber uh uh making a plea for sanity and democracy I'm just going back to 70 or 80 drafts of this scene was there a lot of push back to actually doing this nobody wanted the film made the British foreign office didn't want the film made because Neville Chamberlain was the Prime Minister when chaplain started shooting in September of 1940 1939 September of 1939 I'm sorry uh American film industry didn't want the film made because nobody was making anti-nazi films in 1939 uh the Germans certainly didn't want the film made and they did their best to uh put pressure on him through a man named George gisling who was within the German Embassy in Los Angeles and he would go to the head of the Motion Picture Association a man named Joseph Breen uh and ask is chaplain going to make this movie because obviously and we be basically that he was threatening uh uh without specifying the threat it was just sort of an the tone was nice little industry you got here shame if anything happened to it and uh Breen would ask chaplain are you going ahead with this movie and chaplain said I don't have a script I'm not doing anything uh he was lying because a couple six weeks later he began building sets to make the movie he was determined to make the movie if nobody would distribute it then he would rent tents and rent halls and show it that way uh the film was going to be made uh and it was going to be shown strictly because he was determined that it be made and shown here's what I find so interesting it is absolutely relevant today Ukraine president zalinski quoted from this film quotes from chaplain saying the world needs a new chaplain but there's been only one he said no that's me I said that there's there's only been one and and uh he's right he sees himself as as a baguer uh uh in the same baguer way that the Jewish Barber saw himself fighting against overwhelming odds you know and and yes but uh uh it's it's it's the mo one of the most courageous I don't know if it's his best film but I think certainly think it's the one of the most courageous films anybody ever made because he financed his own movies he wasn't taking money from anybody else he used a million $400,000 of his own money to make the movie that no one else wanted made so he had no way of knowing whether this would be a career killer or not if that wasn't his best film in your opinion what is I like modern times I think City lights is a great great film but it's it doesn't involve the world outside the city lights is about the [ _ ] it's the furthest reach he could take that character you know and then he he kind of retrieves from the density of the [ _ ] in modern times to putting the [ _ ] in a different environment so we get a picture a bigger picture of the overall but as I said chaplain was a man connected to his times to a great extent we touched on this a little bit but there's this government investigation that becomes an absolute obsession 2,000 pages I believe you wrote that in the FBI FBI file on chaplain alone and then they the gossip columnist you mentioned head a hopper this is like the original cancel culture with with these gossip columnists well it was the the FBI leaked a lot of sometime in some cases information in other cases disinformation to columnists and to newspapers over over a period of about 10 years from 1942 to 1952 uh there was something almost every week some negative story about Charlie Chaplain in one columnist's column or in a newspaper story and some of them were just lunatic disinformation my two favorite pieces of disinformation uh 1947-48 there was a story in the newspapers that chaplain was cooperating with the uh uh hagana uh to kill British soldiers in Palestine uh but my favorite uh was shortly after I kicked out of the country in 1953 when there was a story printed that he was going to adopt the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who had just been put to death for spying for Russia um and he most of these stories he didn't even bother to reply to because he he he would have been issuing statements every week uh so it was this constant flood of disinformation meant to uh cut the ground out from under him and his relationship with the American public essentially I can only imagine what this would have been like if social media were in Charlie chaplain's time it wouldn't have been every week in the newspaper it have been every five minutes every hour every hour exactly exactly but the pattern was set in the 1940s with the government dealing with Charlie Chaplain because if you look at the FBI file and the attendant waves created by the FBI investigations uh it's clear that the entire security apparatus of America was engaged in examining Charlie Chaplan and and and investigating Charlie Chaplan for a period of 10 years his mail was opened his house was surveilled uh uh his phone was tapped his income taxes both corporate and personal were were audited and at the end of it all they knew that a he had paid his taxes and B he was never a member of the Communist party and was not a communist and had never given a dime to the Communist party so they didn't have anything to actually banish him from the country he'd never been convicted of a misdemeanor let alone a felony as we said earlier he was haunted by poverty as a youth Scandal followed him everywhere he went the one bright light that I see in his life is meeting unaa O'Neal Who was a teenager when he met her I'm reading this and I'm thinking this shouldn't work no and yet it did this was a real Union a real love story and a great marriage the secret I think to the marriage was that each of them gave the other unquestioning acceptance uh chaplain didn't want her to be anything other than what she already was and she didn't want chaplain to be anything other than what he already was uh and both of them desperately needed that and neither of them had ever had that in Uno had grown up under the thumb the distant thumb of her father who she didn't really know very well her parents had been divorced when she was very young and no matter what una did it was wrong in her father's eyes he just gave her nothing but contempt and rage generally with with very angry letters uh because she actually didn't spend that much time with him uh and she was uh independent and very smart and very funny Sydney chaplain Charlie's son who he named after his brother uh told me that uh he said Uno was great he said my mental image of una is of her walking around the house carrying a Philip Roth novel he said that was how I think of una she was extremely well- read extremely intelligent extremely articulate a spectacular wife and a spectacular mother she was the whole package and and chaplain adored her unreservedly they had a long marriage and a lot of children till his death they had eight children together and they were happily married until he died in 1977 when they left the country who was it harder on him she was angry he was enraged uh she could go back and forth she was a citizen uh he was not a citizen he never took out American citizenship he was a resident alien and by resending his re-entry permit uh pending an investigation he would have to appear at a hearing he was heading to England to open his film Limelight and do some publicity and that's when the attorney Harry Truman's attorney general uh rescinded his re-entry permit what he did not know was that a week after the re-entry permit was rescinded the ins had a meeting in which they all came to the conclusion that if he came back and if he appealed the banishment they'd have to let him back in because he'd never been he' never done anything uh to Warrant legally being banished he'd never been convicted of a felony let alone or a misdemeanor or anything so they actually had no grounds but chaplain was Furious his back was up and he said I believe the quote is I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was president and he only came back 20 years later when he was awarded an honorary Oscar uh in 1972 uh that was the only time he returned to America after that uh and una uh could go back and forth and after his death she had bought bought an apartment in New York and she spent a fair amount of time in New York uh but Charlie was very ambivalent about America up until close to the end of his life but he there were certain things about America he missed whenever he would have visitors coming from from California he would ask them to bring Almond Joys as stuff as many Almond Joys in your suitcase as you possibly can he loved American candy bars and he couldn't get them over in Switzerland the book is a remarkable job it's it's such an honest look at this complicated man he was courageous he was persistent he was arrogant what do you think he would want to be remembered for his films his films he poured everything into his films he was obsessive compulsive to a degree I think maybe Stanley kubri would be an equivalent I can't think of another filmmaker quite as OCD as chaplain was chaplain would shoot hundreds of takes to get a sequence and then he go back and reshoot it after looking at it in The Cutting Room uh money was of No Object time was of No Object it had to be as good as he could possibly make it and remember this is his own money because he believed correctly that if you take Studio money you have to take Studio notes and you give them you give them more leverage over the content of the film and he that he would not do a Charlie Chaplain movie was financed by Charlie Chaplan money and it reflected Charlie chaplain's ideals and his ideas about Society about the individual and about film making was there anything when you did your research that surprised you about him that you didn't know I found his his roster of Investments uh the time he was banished from the country his portfolio as it were and they were classic mid-century Blue Chips reliable stuff that would pay 2 to 3% a year I mean General Motors you know those kind that kind of thing that was his portfolio the only dodgy investment he had uh in the portfolio was parent was a theater Paramount Theaters uh and in 1952 the theater business is plummeting much as it is right now because nobody was going to movies because of Television uh and an investment in the theater a theater chain in 1952 was not a good investment because nobody was going the movies they were staying home to watch TV but other than that this was a uh a portfolio that could have been maintained by a Wall Street finer but he was regarded as a dangerous political [Music] radical let's switch it up just for for a little bit I know you've taught film history before on the college level what's something that you've learned from your students that everything's new if you haven't seen it before you can make things meaningful and relevant uh movies that are 100 years old 80 years old 90 years old if they're couched in the right way that they're open to experiences and art manners of art that you wouldn't imagine they would be if you can make it understandable to them in in in a way that makes it seem like it could happen today uh to show a kid modern time for the first time or to show them Citizen Cane for the first time or Chinatown for the first time whatever it might be whatever Masterpiece you happen to be throwing at them uh it's fascinating to watch them come alive or not sometimes sometimes they don't have the life experience and and things seem a little utree or artificial kids today expect unless it's the Marvel Cinematic Universe and people in tights and Spandex and green screens they expect to see people acting like they see people on the street and that doesn't have to be that way you can you can go in all sorts of of of extreme directions in a movie if you're consistent about it and so it was interesting to see them come alive you know in a way that they didn't think they they didn't think they would the book is Charlie Chaplan vers America when art sex and politics collided and I want to end with your own words from the book that I found very powerful the conventional narrative was that chaplain had left America but in truth it was America that left him Scott Iman thank you thank you an I'm Anne boock please join me on the next between the [Music] covers a