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Charles Champlin wore a lot of hats on the Los Angeles arts and entertainment journalism scene. After a stint at Life magazine, including as Los Angeles bureau chief, he joined the Los Angeles Times in 1965 as entertainment editor and columnist. In 1967 he became the LAT's main film critic, and filled that role until 1980. He then moved to book reviewing and wrote his "Critic At Large" column. He continued to contribute to the Times after retiring in 1991, and to Variety. Along the way he hosted the locally programmed "Citywatchers" on KCET with fellow Times columnist Art Seidenbaum, and hosted "Film Odyssey" on PBS, "At One With" on KNBC, "On the Film Scene" on the old Z Channel in Los Angeles and "Champlin on Film" on Bravo. Champlin is the author several books, including at lest two that he wrote after his vision suffered from macular degeneration. Champlin also is credited with co-founding, in 1975, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and was president for many years.
Champlin died Sunday of what his son, Charles Champlin Jr., called complications of Alzheimer's. "Charles Champlin was one of the great gentlemen of American film criticism and a pioneer in showing that mass-market newspaper reviewing could be smart and well-written as well as accessible," Times film critic Kenneth Turan said in today's LA Times obituary. The story also goes into Champlin's role in the paper's controversial approach to coverage of Hollywood's David Begelman scandal.
His tenure as arts editor in the late 1970s was touched by controversy over the paper's coverage of one of the era's biggest Hollywood scandals: the ouster of David Begelman as president of the motion picture and television division of Columbia Pictures after he had forged $40,000 worth of checks, including one for $10,000 made out to actor Cliff Robertson.
The Times did not investigate the Begelman affair until well after rival papers had thoroughly reported on it, opening the paper to criticism in an era when the paper's entertainment staff was not expected to pursue investigative stories.As a movie critic, Champlin estimated that he saw 250 movies a year and reviewed half of them. He came to the job at a time when the new movie rating system launched in 1968 gave filmmakers unprecedented creative freedom.
"I quickly came to realize that I had acquired an aisle seat at a period of historic ferment in American films," Champlin wrote in "Hollywood's Revolutionary Decade," a 1998 annotated collection of his reviews from the 1970s.
Champlin was known for being "a discerning critic," as fellow film critic Arthur Knight once noted. But he also was criticized by some for writing what The Times' late media critic David Shaw, in a 2001 examination of how the media cover Hollywood, called "overwhelmingly favorable reviews."
Also this from the Hollywood Reporter story: "A cornet player influenced by Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington, Champlin also wrote about jazz for the Times and in album liner notes. He was named the “Grand Emperor of Jazz” of the Sacramento Jazz Festival in 2001."
