Last Saturday, Brownlow was among various speakers and movie notables appearing at the second (and presumably annual) TCM Fest.
It's been a big year for Brownlow. In February, he received an honorary Academy Award for his six decades spent making television documentaries about movie history, for his film preservation efforts and perhaps most significantly, for capturing in intimate interviews the reflections of many who pioneered and developed the motion picture as an art form.
Kevin Brownlow's Hollywood the Definitive Documentary About the Silent Era
On Saturday, he pointed out that of all those interviewed for the series in the late 1970s, all but one have since died. So capturing their recollections on film represented a landmark in film scholarship.
Now 72 and appearing somewhat frail himself, the Oscar winner nonetheless exuded a wry wit and undiminished passion for movies and the people who made them.
Charlie Chaplin
Of Charlie Chaplin, Brownlow pointed with pride to his mini-series Unknown Chaplin, which enjoyed unprecedented access to never-before-seen outtakes from Chaplin’s Mutual Co. shorts made in 1916 and 1917.
Chaplin himself suppressed all the unused material during his lifetime, preferring to keep his filmmaking techniques a secret. The outtakes revealed a remarkably seat-of-the-pants approach: Chaplin would shut down production for days or weeks when stymied on how to build upon the germ of an idea. This was especially true of the beloved short The Immigrant, co-starring his then- real life girlfriend, Edna Purviance.
Brownlow’s simple explanation almost sounded sacrilegious: “Chaplin didn’t know what he was doing. The most famous filmmaker and actor in the world and he was going on and on and on trying to make it funny.”
Louise Brooks
Chaplin’s summer-long fling in 1925 was with actress Louise Brooks, whose animated, thoughtful interview was a highlight of Brownlow's Hollywood series.
“Louise Brooks,” he recalled, was “still an attractive woman” and a “powerful speaker” when they met. The one-time dancer – known as ruthlessly direct, often to her own detriment – was also “very funny, very naughty and very disrespectful.”
After the interview at her modest apartment in Rochester, New York, she asked him, “Have you got a hotel room?”
“Oh,” he stammered, “I forgot to book it.” She insisted he stay with her, "so I slept on the floor." In the morning, he was startled when she commanded, “Get into my bed!”
The order was doubly surprising since Brooks was always frank about her sexual appetites. “I felt,” he said, in a reference to Sunset Boulevard, “like William Holden. (But) all she wanted to do was make breakfast.”
Buster Keaton
Charlie Chaplin’s chief comic rival in the 1920s was Buster Keaton. On Brownlow’s first visit to Hollywood, he naively tried calling Keaton – and was stunned when Eleanor Keaton casually handed the phone to her husband. At the time, Brownlow was little more than an avid fan of silent pictures, but was quickly invited to their chicken ranch. “I was fighting Buster Keaton’s dog, trying to get through the front door.”
For the wide-eyed Briton, the meeting was extraordinary: “Buster Keaton was everything you’d hoped he would be,” not the “quavery old man” he had expected to meet. While Keaton’s voice was low and guttural, “like an anchor chain going out,” his boyish zeal for filmmaking was undiminished.
At one point, Eleanor Keaton interrupted to ask her husband, “Have you fed the chickens?” To their visitor’s delight, the old master “got up and ‘did’ a chicken.” Brownlow demonstrated with a chicken-style foot shuffle. Grinning, he added: “Magic.”
Clarence Brown
Brownlow also had kind words for MGM studio director Clarence Brown, now relatively obscure but whose four-decade career included a long association with Greta Garbo and sound-era classics including National Velvet, The Gorgeous Hussy and The Yearling.
Brownlow said he began re-evaluating Brown’s work after locating a rare print of 1925’s The Goose Woman, with Jack Pickford (Mary’s brother), Constance Bennett and Louise Dresser. Calling it a “remarkable film” and “so unexpectedly marvellous,” Brownlow then sought out Brown and screened it for him. “He was very impressed with it, too.” He said Brown added later, “I didn’t know I was that good.”
Of the director's work, he added, “These are really outstanding films, and I think Clarence Brown will be known as the last of the great directors.”
Near the end of his appearance at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Brownlow drew cheers by chastising studios that have let their own film heritages decompose through thoughtlessness or disinterest. “A studio that destroyed a film and does nothing to find it,” he said, his raspy voice rising, “shouldn’t have the copyright of that film.”
Barry M. Grey - Barry M. Grey is a non-fiction TV writer-producer in Los Angeles whose love of classic film borders on the dangerously obsessive.
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