Ultimate Hollywood Insider Charles Aidikoff to Celebrate 100-Year Milestone

Charles Aidikoff, the ultimate Hollywood insider, is marking a milestone on Feb. 22 — the same day as the 87th Academy Awards — by turning 100.

For a half century, he’s operated one of the most prominent private screening rooms in the business, first on Sunset Boulevard and then on Rodeo Drive, and unspooled around 45,000 films with the help of administrator Thad Bridwell and Aidikoff’s son and grandson. Aidikoff is so well regarded that he’s been the only projectionist member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences for the past seven years.

“If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself,” he quips. “When people ask my real secret, I tell them, ‘Fast horses and slow women.’ If it had been the other way around, I would’ve been dead 50 years ago.”

The one-liners originated from a stint working with Henny Youngman in the Catskills as a young man, and his roots go back to working at a silent moviehouse in Coney Island where his father worked as a projectionist. He remained in Brooklyn until 1955, when the Dodgers won the World Series for the first time.

“I said I’d never leave Brooklyn until they won the Series,” he recalls: “They won on a Sunday, and I began driving to California on a Monday.”

He initially worked at the Fine Arts in Beverly Hills, then in 1964 started his own screening room for producers to watch dailies and rough cuts. Aidikoff’s venue has evolved into a key location for awards-season screenings.

He’s certainly been privy to quite a few movies. “ ‘Citizen Kane’ is the best I’ve ever seen, followed by ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” he notes. As for the current crop of awards contenders, he’s partial to “The Theory of Everything,” followed by “Boyhood” and “The Imitation Game.”

“They’re good films, but there’s nothing great like ‘The King’s Speech’ or ‘The Artist,’ ” he muses. “I told Harvey (Weinstein) that he was going to win both times. He didn’t believe me.”

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