Word: chaplinitis
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After scoring an Oscar nomination for his performance in Chaplin four years ago, ROBERT DOWNEY JR. seemed on the verge of becoming the next Robert De Niro. Now Hollywood is worried that he may instead become the next River Phoenix. Stopped by police as he sped through Malibu in his truck last weekend, Downey was found to be carrying a small pharmacy of illegal drugs--crack, heroin--and, police said, a heavy-duty handgun. The hard-partying actor has been through rehab at least once since the late 1980s, but friends recently became alarmed at his downward spiral...
...Hollywood's most popular male actor, outranking Charlie Chaplin; the top female was Mary Pickford, the cagey gamin called America's Sweetheart. A year later, the three stars and Griffith started their own company, United Artists. And in 1920 Fairbanks married Pickford. His Majesty the American...
...throwing out back issues once they had transferred them to microfilm. He wrote letters, even sometimes sent the cover subject a gift as an enticement to sign. Among those who took the bait: Pablo Picasso, Joseph R. McCarthy, Herbert Hoover, Charles de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio, Hopalong Cassidy (actor William Boyd) and all four Marx Brothers...
...raspy voice, wryly unflappable manner and ever present cigar were trademarks as familiar as Chaplin's cane or Lucy's red hair. Burns was not a particularly influential or groundbreaking comic, like Groucho Marx or George's old friend Jack Benny. But no one commanded the stage with more easygoing--and, as the years went on, inspiring--authority. He was 62 when his wife and longtime partner Gracie Allen retired, but his career was barely past its midpoint. He went on to even greater success in nightclubs, television and movies. His longevity became part of his appeal and the subject...
...this film (and in another enticing compilation, David Johnson's The Lavender Lens: 100 Years of Celluloid Queers, available in some video stores), we see gay characters haunting the corners of the film frame. From the early days of silent films (when Charlie Chaplin, in a barbershop, gives a cruel hairdo to an effeminate man) to the '90s (when gay or bisexual murderers lend lurid pizazz to The Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct), American films--like America itself--have typically treated gays as a joke or a curse...