Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty.

        We accept PayPal, Visa & Mastercard
        through our secure checkout.

 

Mastercard                              

 

Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay

Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay
Your Price: $21.99 CDN
Limited Quantities
Author: John Wranovics
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 256
Pub. Date: 2006
ISBN-10: 1403973032
ISBN-13: 9781403973030

About the Book:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

The first book about the unusual friendship between Pulitzer-winning author James Agee and the legendary Charlie Chaplin, which resulted in Agee's first screenplay: The Tramp's New World, written for Chaplin's tramp character and set in post-apocalyptic New York.

Chaplin and Agee charts the friendship between James Agee, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Death in the Family and screenwriter for American classics including The African Queen, and Charlie Chaplin, who starred in a staggering number of films from 1914 to 1967. This friendship emerged in the midst of the tumult of the 1940s and 1950s, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, McCarthyism and blacklisting. In print here for the first time is James Agee's first screenplay, The Tramp's New World, lost until recently. The striking screenplay – a comedy "so dark it was without precedent" – was written for Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, the apparent sole survivor of a nuclear attack on New York City. Chaplin and Agee also features many previously unpublished letters and photographs. As the story moves from Hollywood to Greenwich Village, these two figures come to life, revealing the untold story of the great bond between two influential twentieth-century artists.

What people say:

"The spirit of James Agee comes through these pages beautifully...." — New York Times

"Here is high art and high drama given the flesh of knowing, skillful story-telling: two wonderfully talented individuals come together for today's readers as they once did in life-and the result is a brilliantly telling account of an era's breakthrough achievements of mind and heart." — Robert Coles, Pulitzer prize-winning author

"John Wranovics has written an amazing book! It is certainly by far the best biographical work about James Agee that has yet been done. It is highly readable and full of fascinating, little-known detail ... dug deeply and synthesized beautifully. Most importantly, Chaplin and Agee not only brings to light a deeply significant episode in our nation's literary, cinematic and political history, it gives us a brand-new, rough-hewn, dazzling masterpiece by James Agee to contemplate and enjoy." — Ross Spears, acclaimed documentary filmmaker

"Wranovics weaves personal, historical, and cultural threads into a true page-turner as he outlines Agee's efforts to become Chaplin's close friend and overcome his own psychological demons enough to craft what may be his most ambitious and deeply felt project. The screenplay itself is a riveting document of progressive 20th century thought." — The Christian Science Monitor

"Much more than a footnote, Chaplin and Agee is a real addition to film culture (and the culture of the Cold War), complete with the treatment for an unmade movie so vivid that it practically sears the mind's eye." — Village Voice

About the Author:

John Wranovics is a Director of Marketing for a leading electronics and computing manufacturer and an independent scholar who has written for The Boston Book Review. He is the author of Chaplin and Agee.