Richard Dreyfuss recalls: “When you walk off stage after receiving your Oscar, posed to walk offstage and hand it to someone so they can engrave it. No one was there and I had to fly directly back to New York [for a theater performance. They were working on my apartment at the time and I didn’t feel it was safe to leave it there, so for three weeks I carried my Oscar around in a plain brown paper bag, to the theater and back.”
Dreyfus remembered a story about Emil Jannings, who won the first best actor Oscar, in 1929. “He returned to Nazi Germany and became a mainstay of the Nazi film industry. When Patton’s Fifth Army was taking town after town in Germany, a platoon was walking down a street, and a tattered figure in an old greatcoat came shambling out of a building yelling, ‘Don’t shoot! I vin Oscar!’¼which is some kind of metaphor.”
