Charlie Chan In London
The character of Hollywood film producer Morris Weissman, played by reallife Gosford Park producer Bob Balaban, is a guest at Gosford Park who has been brought along by his friend Ivor Novello. Unlike Ivor Novello, though, Morris Weissman is a character fictionalized for Gosford Park.
The 20th Century Fox project that the fictitious Weissman is hard at work on, however, did indeed get made: Charlie Chan in London was filmed at the end of 1933 and released in 1934. Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellowes laughs, "Charlie Chan in London [produced by John Stone and directed by Eugene Forde] is all about the Chinese detective [played by Warner Oland in the sixth of his sixteen appearances as Chan] going to an English house party. So we created this joke-within-a-joke. But it's also a device: it's easy to see how extraordinary these rituals are that the upper classes take for granted, when an outsider, be it Charlie Chan or Morris Weissman, comes to observe them."
