Modern Times

In the film Ed Wood, Wood is speaking in a hospital waiting room to the woman he’d marry, Cathy. She asks him what he does for a living, and he says he’s in movies --- as a writer, producer, director and actor. Awww, no one does all that, she replies. Yes, two people do, says Wood, he and Orson Welles. But there was an individual who did all that and went some better, helping to compose the music for his films and the editing. And from the 19-teens to the 1950s. It was Charles Chaplin, Knight of the British Empire, better known as Charlie Chaplin, perhaps best known as his film persona, the Little Tramp. Out of a childhood of want and strife, he became the world’s greatest comic character, an innovator and magnate in the film industry, a multimillionaire. He was also despised by many in Hollywood, decried as a Communist and degenerate and expelled from the US. Most important, he taught me (along with the Marx Brothers), through the films of his classic age, that it was not only fine to make fun of the wealthy and powerful, it‘s crucial to do so. 

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