Leonard Maltin Let Himself Into Sammy Davis Jr.'s Empty House and Waited Until Midnight

Leonard Maltin once walked Red Buttons over to say hello to Paramount's goodwill ambassador AC Lyles at Spago, and Red looked up and asked if he hadn't just been wondering whether AC was still alive. That is the register of this whole conversation, which finds Leonard and his daughter and podcast partner Jessie Maltin on Dropping Names with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, trading stories that only a man who reviewed films on Entertainment Tonight for thirty years and put his name on Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide could actually have. The centrepiece is the night Sammy Davis Jr. invited the Maltins up to Tower Road after a charity dinner, the gate swung open, a man at the door told them to let themselves in, and Leonard spent hours alone in Sammy's den studying the autographed photos, the Pac Man machine and the hole cut for the projection booth while the house stayed empty until nearly midnight.

There is also Katharine Hepburn in her Turtle Bay brownstone, talking freely about twenty seven years of never being seen in public with Spencer Tracy while an NBC publicist fumed off camera because nobody was discussing the television movie. Leonard describes being thirteen and finding Buster Keaton reading a newspaper in the back of a car near the Brooklyn Bridge on the Samuel Beckett shoot, getting a still signed and learning it was from Parlor Bedroom and Bath. He explains the strange on again off again decades with Burt Reynolds, who was convinced the bad reviews of Stroker Ace and Cannonball Run were personal, and Jessie remembers Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman shouting at Clint Eastwood through a junket door because he would not stop talking. Dale Evans came to Jessie's bat mitzvah in a wheelchair, Gloria Stuart came too, Fayard Nicholas taught her to dance, and the two of them close by talking about their new book, Family Movie Night, the first one credited to Maltin and Maltin.

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