Two obvious choices, but I’m going with them anyway:
His own “My Autobiography” (what a genius title! haha), and David Robinson’s “Chaplin: His Life and Art”
Chaplin: His Life and Art by David Robinson
Robinson’s book was the first Chaplin book I bought. It was around the beginning of my fanhood days. I had seen it in my favorite used book store, but was hesitant to get it because “what if it was no good?” The internet wasn’t a big thing yet, so I couldn’t Google it or check Amazon to find out other reviews. Then one day I was sitting in one of my college classes and out of nowhere I had an urge to go down to the store and get it after class.
So I drive down there and I stop and think I better skim through it, and right away there were some interesting images. One was of the Chaplin family tree (up to date as of book publishing, circa 1985), a newspaper clipping announcing his birth, and a picture of a child age Charlie for the Sherlock Holmes play. All three of these (especially the last one) sold me. And I have loved the book ever since!
A few years later I bought another edition of it that was published around the time of the “Chaplin” had more updated information about his family.
Below is a recent interview with David (during the coronavirus ordeal) by Dan Kamin for the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum YouTube channel:
My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin
I don’t remember when I first read Chaplin’s autobiography. Maybe before I bought it, like from the library? I don’t know. ut When “Chaplin” came out, they re-released the book in paperback and I bought it. And then visited England about 2 years later and while in a bookstore in the airport, I found another copy, and how could I *not* buy a copy from his birth country? And so I bought that as well. I still have both of those, which the silhouette of Downey as the Tramp on the cover. Wore them out.
I loved reading about his rough childhood, getting on stage, coming to America, being scared to death of getting into movies but taking the plunge anyway.
I do hope that sometime in the near future there will be a new, or re-release, of an audiobook version. There was one I listened to years ago on cassette tape (that gives an idea how long ago! LOL) from the library.
Love these two books. Absolute must-haves for Chaplin fans or fans of movies in general.
My Father, Charlie Chaplin by Charles Chaplin, Jr.
Charlie Sr, Charlie Jr, and Lita Grey Chaplin
Another book that I really love is “My Father, Charlie Chaplin” by Charlie Chaplin Jr (one of two sons when Chaplin was married to Lita Grey). That is a lovely book. One of my favorite stories was when senior Chaplin came home, still in makeup, and came over to toddler-aged junior. Junior was confused who this strange looking man was with his father’s voice, and started to cry. Not knowing why his son was crying, Senior tried to cheer junior up, and then it dawned on him why there was crying. The makeup. So senior washed off the makeup and junior began smiling at the familiar clean face of his dad.
In trying to improve the blog and fix an image error (long story, but there was a watermark on all my images to prevent hotlinking, even though the images were hosted on my own site. Curse you, outdated WordPress plugins!). Couldn’t get it fixed. Uninstalled plugins, and voilà! All my images disappeared! And restoring my backup images did not work.
Oh, yay for me.
So I’ll have to do what I did a couple years ago, and that is start with new blog fresh and try an install everything that way.
Real bummer since that was one of the things that kept me from posting much here. Stupid watermarks. Which is a mixed blessing since that’s less stuff I have to reupload.
Ah, the year 1986. A big year that became very influential in my life. I hope to write an entry for each one (I already wrote about how I got introduced to Sherlock Holmes), but here’s a summary (in no real order):
Disney’s Dreamers and Doers
The Disney company here in Florida (for a few years) picked someone from each county in the state from elementary, junior high, and high school as someone showing the “4 Cs” – curiosity, confidence, constancy, and courage. And somehow I was picked for the junior high level for Volusia county! It was one of the most exciting days of my life! And I still have my medal, hangs in my living room. May 2 is the anniversary 🙂
Sherlock Holmes
Thanks to reading the classic Hound of the Baskervilles story in my 8th grade English class, I got hooked on the adventures of Sir Author Conan Doyle’s famous detective. Not because of the mystery genre, but in the characters of Holmes and Watson and how the stories were written. I found, and still find, that endlessly fascinating! And for the last few years I have basked in the glow of it being a big thing with the help of the Robert Downey Jr movies, and BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary tv shows.
The Smothers Brothers
Fate has a wicked sense of humor, and so it introduced me to these guys, by accident. And, boy, I had no idea what I landed myself into. My poor family somehow put up with me either listening to or watching this harmless looking comedic brother duo – a lot. I also got really interested in classic comedy due to these guys (Thanks Tom and Dick!), along with history (particularly the 1960s), folk music, and being politically involved.
Doctor Who
A guy that traveled in time and space in a spaceship disguised as a British Police Box. And he’s not always able to control where or when his ship ends up.
That’s how the show was described to me by a couple classmates in school. And I was curious. And the first episode I watched was the very first episode from 1963, An Unearthly Child. And I have stayed curious for the last 30 years. And I still haven’t used to the idea that Doctor Who is a big thing now. I love it, it’s just weird.
Highway to Heaven
The Summer of ’86 introduced me to this show. I have had a long interest in the nature of God and religions in general, it did not really take off until I happened upon this show by accident. Starred the late Michael Landon as an angel, and Victor French as a former Oakland cop (hence the Oakland A’s baseball cap), driving around the country on assignments from “The Boss”. Had a lot of heart and some laughs.
Well, I finally ripped out the old site, installed WordPress (successfully…yay!) and now I’m going about uploading the images. For some reason, WordPress does not backup the images like it does posts, comments, and pages. So I am uploading them and inserting them into the correct post. That will take a little time, but less than it took to get this thing rebooted.
I am still planning on also uploading the Comedy Classics Forums again. It has been a long time and I haven’t forgotten,
Time has been running me ragged but I am restructuring my life so that I can get these things done :).
While I’m still working on moving the blog to here (all the images….argh! It’s getting there), I thought I would share another great Sherlock Holmes fanvid made by one of my favorite fanvidder YouTubers: KatrinDepp . Below is a great video,”We Solve Crimes” using ColdPlay’s Charlie Brown
One of my favorite shows with one of my favorite band’s best songs that was inspired by the theme song of my favorite comic strip, whose anniversary is today (Peanuts first appearance was on Oct. 2, 1950)
A couple weeks ago, I reached 2000 people that I follow on twitter (Charles Trippy was my 2000th person I followed! Awesome vlogging series!). Twitter puts a limit on the number of people you can follow if you don’t have enough followers (Read more about that here on their site: “Why can’t I follow people?“). So until I have more followers, I won’t be able to follow you.
I created a list on my account so that I can still “follow” those of you who recently followed me.
When will I actually be able to follow more than 2000 people on Twitter? When I have more followers, which is somewhere in the 1800s according to what I have read on various different articles around the web. At one time I had a couple hundred more people following me than I followed. Then I used Twitter less (no reason, just used it less) and didn’t look into following people back.
I am also going through my huge list (right now, 1061) and either unfollowing people like bots or spammers (mostly. If you are reading this, and I am already following you, don’t worry about me unfollowing you) or unfollowing big names and putting them into different lists. Example of the latter is various news outlets. Would the BBC News or New York Times follow me? Ever? Highly doubtful, but they put out great, informative tweets. So I have put them in a News list. As I move those guys around, I’ll follow
As I move bigg
You can read more about how to deal with the 2000 limit here.
I have been trying to get my Comedy Classics Forums working, ad there seems to be some programming conflict with this blog being on the front of this site. So I am just moving this blog to a sub-directory, and maybe (just maybe) my forums will work.
(Did the above make sense? I hope so. It’s late. It made sense in my head)
Sherlock Holmes Tweet-along update…
Also wanted to remind those Sherlock Holmes fans out there that we are still doing the Thursdays tweet-along. You can read more about that here.
This coming Thursday, we’ll be watching The Sign of Four. At 10:30 EST (old time was 8pm EST. I hope they change it back to that, cause 10:30 is kind of late for me)
Unfortunately, Netflix discontinued the Granada series on their streaming service, though they have done this before and brought it back. So hopefully they’ll do it again!
We follow WETA’s (Washington DC’s PBS channel) schedule, so be sure to check to see what episode is coming up.
And, yes, this will interfere with another Sherlock Holmes show, CBS’s Elementary (I like it, not as much as Granada’s or BBC’s, but it’s getting better and growing on me). I probably will be live tweeting during the new season.
BBC Sherlock Pajama Party…
Also for the next couple weeks we’re watching BBC’s Sherlock, on Wednesdays at 10:30. Only two are left, Hounds of the Baskerville, and The Reichenbach Fall. Since we also following WETA’s schedule for this too, this is also the PBS edited version. So you may want to consult my list for Hounds and Reichenbach on what was cut so you can keep up.
Note; This chat is done in a chat room (with optional video… I wear my deerstalker 🙂 ), rather than Twitter.
And it’s nice to have sooo much Sherlock Holmes around. In the many years that I have been a Sherlockian, I never thought I would have to miss one Holmes for another and go…uhhh…I CAN’T DECIDE!
That’s it for now. Time will tell if the move and fix-around works…
While the insides of the old blog were a mess, I was able to export the posts and comments and such before removing the old place. Looks like they arrived in one piece! Huzzah! Even the embedded YouTube videos seem to work! Excellent!
I am still working on getting the widgets the way I want, and yes, will decide on what social media doo-dads I will use… there will be less buttons once I get that organized.
And all those tweets were done automatically, although they stopped last November… don’t know why. Since I wasn’t able to write normal posts during the dashboard messup, all that went up (until November that is) were those. I’m currently looking for a way to keep the tweet on a separate page, auto updated but more organized. I don’t want it to look like all this blog is is a bunch of tweets! Haha…
A couple weeks ago, I reached 2000 people that I follow on twitter (
