Trumpeting ‘The Tramp’

Though raised on opposite coasts, David Totheroh and Bonnie McCourt share a nearly identical, intimate feel for the Southern California locations of Charlie Chaplin’s 81 films. They crane their necks when they pass the Woodland Hills Golf Course, featured in the opening of “The Great Dictator.” They sit at Glendale stoplights only to recognize a formerly rural setting that served as backdrop in Chaplin’s 1928 “The Circus.” “I’ll be driving along and go, ‘Hey, that’s right where Charlie ran down that dirt road!’ ” McCourt says. “Only now it’s Pacific Coast Highway.”

Out of an ever-widening entertainment stream, the couple seize Chaplin’s ancient celluloid, haul it ashore and hold it up to the light. Totheroh, 51, is the grandson of Rollie Totheroh, Chaplin’s principal cameraman for 38 years. McCourt, 44, drew from decades of adulation to create what is, surprisingly, the only organized society of its kind in the world: the Charlie Chaplin Film Co., which hosts retrospectives and consults on Chaplin-related projects. The society’s 4-year-old quarterly magazine, Limelight, boasts hundreds of subscribers, from the United States to Iceland to Pakistan.

“People think they know Charlie Chaplin,” McCourt says, seated cross-legged next to a wood-burning stove and growing increasingly flushed in the Topanga Canyon cottage she and Totheroh share. “They know the icon. They think he walks funny and kicks people in the behind. But he is so much harder to define. He’s not hokey. He’s not maudlin. He’s about a balance of every human emotion.”

Totheroh, a carpenter, grew up in Santa Paula, an area that served as a principal location in Richard Attenborough’s 1992 film biography “Chaplin.” (“They needed somewhere with the feel of early Hollywood,” Totheroh recalls, “so instead of modern-day signs with ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ they had orange groves.”) A native of Staten Island, McCourt lived in Manhattan before coming to L.A. to work at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. After a long-distance friendship born out of their Chaplin fanaticism progressed, the pair moved into the cottage built by Rollie Totheroh.

At the core of McCourt’s Chaplin zeal is a desire to build her hero a museum; the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, located in the very town Chaplin helped invent, has no exhibit devoted to the director. McCourt scraped together money from part-time jobs to begin the film company.

“The whole reason I connect with them is that there is always dignity at the end,” she says of Chaplin’s films. “Charlie can be in tatters, living in a hovel, but he always dusts himself off. No matter how bad life is, no matter how low you go, you should still have dignity. You can still find the rose growing through cracks in the sidewalk.”

Totheroh agrees: “That’s something that has somehow been lost today.”

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“Charlie Chaplin: A Tramp’s Life” airs on A&E; Biography tonight at 9.