By Daily Press staff
“Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin” will be shown at Santa Monica College on Friday.
The event, which will be moderated by professors Josh Kanin and Shirley Saint- Leon, focuses on Richard Schickel’s 133-minute documentary on Charlie Chaplin which Variety called “a must for lovers of cinema.”
It was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, 2003, and has played at more than 40 festivals around the world. The film brings Chaplin to life with a cavalcade of clips, rare footage, and interviews with family members, film critics, and other admirers like Johnny Depp, Marcel Marceau, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. It is narrated by director Sydney Pollack.
In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Schickel recalls daughter Josephine Chaplin telling him, “We want him to be seen kind of warts and all. We are no longer interested, if we ever were, in presenting this portrait of a serene and perfect individual who happened to be a genius.”
Schickel has said how liberating making this documentary was. “We could do whatever we wanted. I think it makes the film more moving. You get a sense of the various mistakes he made with his marriages, his politics.”
Schickel, one of the nation’s most influential film critics, has been reviewing movies for Time magazine since 1972. Before that, he was the film critic for Life magazine. In addition to his work as a critic, Schickel is one of the world’s leading film historians, and has written numerous books. These have included studies and biographies of film greats such as D.W. Griffith, Marlon Brando, Douglas Fairbanks and Walt Disney.
Schickel has pursued a second career as a producer-writer-director of television programs, which began with “The Men Who Made The Movies,” a 1973 PBS series that served as the basis for a book of the same title. The series included programs on Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh and William Wellman, among others. Schickel’s filmography includes “Life Goes to the Movies,” a three-hour history of American movies in the sound area; “Funny Business” and “Horror Show,” genre compilations broadcast on CBS; “Into the Morning: Willa Cather’s America,” a PBS biography of the writer; and biographical portraits of legendary Hollywood directors and performers such as Vincente Minnelli, Arthur Penn, Frank Capra, Clint Eastwood, James Cagney, Elia Kazan, Woody Allen, Gary Cooper, Myrna Loy, and Barbara Stanwyck (all for PBS or TNT). Schickel also is credited with a documentary on the making of Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” for ABC, and Hollywood on Hollywood, a history of movies about making movies for AMC.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 21, 2004. Read the original PDF.