Carol Burnett strode into a room filled to capacity with a crowd of over 200 people for the second Malibu Film Society (MFS) “Guest Presenter Series” event the night of Thursday, March 31, to a standing ovation. Burnett spent 30 minutes wowing the audience with sparkle and humor during an interview and Q&A, which were followed by a screening of her favorite film, “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952).
When asked to remember the first time she went to the movies, Burnett joked that when she was a child, “movies hadn’t been invented yet.” The audience roared.
Then Burnett got serious and said, “I remember in San Antonio, [Texas,] my grandmother and I went to see a black and white movie, and I had to have been pretty little, because my feet didn’t touch the floor. I remember seeing this really tall man on the screen with this great speaking voice that turned out to be Jimmy Stewart.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off him and I fell in love with him, I felt so connected,” she recalled. “I went home and said to my grandmother, ‘I know him; he’s my friend, even though I haven’t met him yet.’ Years later, I did meet [Jimmy Stewart] and we did become friends.”
Eventually, Burnett and her grandmother moved to Hollywood, where she attended Hollywood High School “back in the covered wagon days,” she quipped. They got in the habit of going to see double features four times per week.
She was so hooked on film that Burnett’s first job was at a movie theater.
“I got a job as an usherette — that’s what they called them in those days,” she said with a laugh. “We had to wear these funny costumes with woolen pants, satin jackets with epaulettes and hats that looked like a fez — ridiculous outfits. I was the spotlight girl in the middle of the lobby in an amber spotlight.”
Burnett explained that back in those days, people often arrived at theaters in the middle of a movie and stayed until it started over again to see what they missed. When a couple came during Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” she said she begged them to come back later and see it from the beginning. The couple complained to the manager.
“He was certifiable — he ripped off my epaulettes and I was fired,” Burnett said, describing a real-life scene that easily could have been turned into a sketch on “The Carol Burnett Show.”
Years later, when they asked where she wanted her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Burnett chose the front of that very theater.
Burnett credited her time watching movies with giving her some of the tools for handling life’s ups and downs.
“I was fortunate growing up in that era because nothing was cynical then,” Burnett shared. “The good guys won, the bad guys didn’t. I think it imprinted on me, so when I got into showbiz, I never got cynical about it, and I never got terribly discouraged even though I lost a lot of jobs and went to a lot of auditions.”
Whenever someone else got the job she auditioned for, Carol said she just told herself, “It was [the other person’s] turn, it wasn’t my turn, and my turn will come.”
When asked why “Singin’ in the Rain” was her favorite movie, she said, “I was gob-smacked when I saw it — a term my friend, Julie Andrews, taught me. The musical numbers kept topping each other, one after the other, and it wasn’t just the musical numbers — which should go into a time capsule — but all of the performances. Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont was hysterically funny.”
Burnett knew a lot of trivia about the movie, including a story about how a 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds had the daunting task of learning how to tap dance for the film in just a couple of months in order to do a number with “two of the finest hoofers in the business:” Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor.
A member of the audience asked Burnett when she knew she was funny.
“I’m still wondering,” she said with a laugh.
The third event in MFS’ “Guest Presenter Series” is Billy Crystal who will host a Thursday, April 14, screening of “Mr. Saturday Night.” For more information, visit malibufilmsociety.org.
