Overview

The Freak is the legendary Charlie Chaplin's last, and perhaps most mysterious, film project - an ambitious tale that came within a hair's breadth of being made. Conceived in 1968, when Chaplin was nearly eighty, the story centers on Sarapha, a young woman with wings, both miraculous and vulnerable, who becomes a mirror for humanity's fears, faiths, and cruelties. For the first time in the original English, this book publishes Chaplin's complete script alongside a wealth of unseen material: storyboards, designs, production notes and photographs. Drawing on many pages from the Chaplin Archives and newly discovered papers of producer Jerry Epstein, it reveals a project already deep into pre-production - casting, location scouting, even the construction of Sarapha's extraordinary wings for Chaplin's daughter Victoria, who was to play the role. Far more than a lost screenplay, The Freak stands as a profound meditation on innocence and corruption, exile and belonging, faith and exploitation. In Sarapha, Chaplin created a heroine as timeless as the Little Tramp, an outsider pursued and misunderstood, yet radiant in her freedom. Written by film historian David Robinson, Chaplin's official biographer, with contributions from the Cineteca di Bologna and members of the Chaplin family, this volume offers not only the script of an unmade masterpiece, but also a moving portrait of Chaplin in his final creative years. It is a story of cinema that never reached the screen, but which still soars in imagination.

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Film critic, historian and author David Robinson is best known as the official biographer of Charlie Chaplin. He began his career writing for Sight & Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin in the 1950s, later serving as film critic for the Financial Times (1958-1973) and The Times (from 1973 onward). His magnum opus, Chaplin: His Life and Art (1985, revised editions 1992, 2001), is widely regarded as the standard biography of Chaplin. From 1997 to 2015, he also directed the Giornate del Cinema Muto, a silent-film festival in Pordenone, Italy.

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