What do you think?
Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay
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 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 Chaplin's tramp character and set in post-apocalyptic New York. Chaplin and Agee also features many previously unpublished letters and photographs.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.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published May 9, 2005
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 10, 2017
Wranovics surely means well. But the man cannot keep himself from rambling, veering off into wholly irrelevant narratives, and repeating himself. The book fails to follow a chronological sequence and doesn't retain an emotional route through the events. I feel as though this story is interesting enough, but maybe Wranovics wasn't the man to tell it.
And good lord, do I have questions for Agee about that nonsensical screenplay at the end. The man must've put much much more effort into getting the screenplay into Chaplin's hands than he did editing it.
And good lord, do I have questions for Agee about that nonsensical screenplay at the end. The man must've put much much more effort into getting the screenplay into Chaplin's hands than he did editing it.
July 31, 2014
I'm a big fan of both Chaplin and Agee, so I had high expectations for this book. The story behind the script is a lot more interesting than the script itself.
May 15, 2026
Paradise lost
Have you ever wished you could wind back the clock, or start life over? Have you ever felt like a significant cog in the wheel? Have you had the chance to risk everything, then chickened out? Have you ever dreamed of a better world: a place of security, harmony and peace?
If “yes” to any or all of the above, then John Wranovics’ Chaplin and Agee, The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer and the Lost Screenplay must find its way to your library.
In the first part of the book, the, arguably, world’s funniest man and the conscience of print journalism shadow each other during the ‘40s and ‘50s: first as the accused and the defender (the infamous April 12, 1947 press conference where Chaplin’s newest film—Monsieur Verdoux—is virtually ignored in favour of a media witch hunt about his political and moral beliefs (e.g., “You seem to like the Communists”). Film critic Agee, desperate to have Chaplin read his screenplay that would bring back the Tramp as the sole survivor of Obnoxia’s (fictional country) successful Armageddon, attended and was the sole supportive voice to be heard amongst the nation’s finest scribblers (hello there Ed Sullivan). In concert with Charles Ives before him, the oft-married writer posed the question that was heard around the world: “How does it feel to be an artist who has enriched the world with so much happiness and understanding of little people, and to be derided and held up to hate and scorn by the so-called representatives of the American press?” Like his early films, Chaplin was speechless.
Through mutual friends (e.g., producer Frank E. Taylor) and Agee’s ability to pitch his Life editors into sending him to Hollywood (Where better to do in-depth articles?—particularly a three-part series on director John Huston, which led to numerous drinking binges, a script assignment for The African Queen, and a debilitating heart attack).
The origin of the Part II script (author-entitled The Tramp’s New World) was a result of the Hiroshima bomb and Agee’s assignment to write the “U.S. reaction – check this” cover story for time. Being no stranger to socialist doctrine and having many friends beyond Chaplin (e.g. composer Hanns Eisler) who were undergoing government-led persecutions of their own, Agee felt certain that the Little Tramp would be the perfect recreator of humanity once science had had its final triumph and obliterated every human being but the child-loving funny man from the planet. (Still the notion that “Chaplin plays poor; lives rich,” is included, adding further depth to the personalities of both men.)
But in the script (published for the first time as part of the book), it turns out that others have survived the ultimate revenge fuck of the unidentifiable rogue state). Always prepared, due to their gift of rationalization, the scientists have made it through, but are nearly paralyzed with fear trying to open a can of food without a watt of electricity available: a common trog has to show them the way. The Tramp also discovers a Mother and her baby, protects and feeds them in the New York City (the descriptions of the fictional result of the attack and the reality of 9/11 are beyond eerie—soothsayer indeed), only to be shunned when a more attractive man comes her way.
Happily, music is everywhere. Agee was a fair-to-middling pianist (Schubert’s sonatas are personal favourites) and chooses to use the theme and variation I of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio—Cortot-Thibault-Casals’ performance—to underscore the hither unto known value of art to the Tramp and his disenfranchised (but alive!) child bearer. Many other musical references pervade Agee’s over-detailed but compelling script of Gotterdammerung U.S. style.
It’s not hard to understand why Chaplin never took the bait: The Tramp would have to speak (akin to Marcel Marceau); Chaplin, by then, did not have the physique to portray his most brilliant alter ego; but, perhaps most importantly, Agee’s rough-and-ready masterpiece (many sections say “I haven’t yet worked out any ideas”) was beyond even Chaplin’s creative genius.
Yet, this truly terrifying, and, sadly, in our present day of U.S.-Knows-Best/smaller countries’ power envy, totally believable film needs to be made before its vision comes to a theatre of war near you.
Awkward and uneven in spots, Wranovics’ passion and big-picture savvy permeate the book portion of this marvellous publication, which should be required reading for all world “actors” no matter what their role in today’s global stage.
Have you ever wished you could wind back the clock, or start life over? Have you ever felt like a significant cog in the wheel? Have you had the chance to risk everything, then chickened out? Have you ever dreamed of a better world: a place of security, harmony and peace?
If “yes” to any or all of the above, then John Wranovics’ Chaplin and Agee, The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer and the Lost Screenplay must find its way to your library.
In the first part of the book, the, arguably, world’s funniest man and the conscience of print journalism shadow each other during the ‘40s and ‘50s: first as the accused and the defender (the infamous April 12, 1947 press conference where Chaplin’s newest film—Monsieur Verdoux—is virtually ignored in favour of a media witch hunt about his political and moral beliefs (e.g., “You seem to like the Communists”). Film critic Agee, desperate to have Chaplin read his screenplay that would bring back the Tramp as the sole survivor of Obnoxia’s (fictional country) successful Armageddon, attended and was the sole supportive voice to be heard amongst the nation’s finest scribblers (hello there Ed Sullivan). In concert with Charles Ives before him, the oft-married writer posed the question that was heard around the world: “How does it feel to be an artist who has enriched the world with so much happiness and understanding of little people, and to be derided and held up to hate and scorn by the so-called representatives of the American press?” Like his early films, Chaplin was speechless.
Through mutual friends (e.g., producer Frank E. Taylor) and Agee’s ability to pitch his Life editors into sending him to Hollywood (Where better to do in-depth articles?—particularly a three-part series on director John Huston, which led to numerous drinking binges, a script assignment for The African Queen, and a debilitating heart attack).
The origin of the Part II script (author-entitled The Tramp’s New World) was a result of the Hiroshima bomb and Agee’s assignment to write the “U.S. reaction – check this” cover story for time. Being no stranger to socialist doctrine and having many friends beyond Chaplin (e.g. composer Hanns Eisler) who were undergoing government-led persecutions of their own, Agee felt certain that the Little Tramp would be the perfect recreator of humanity once science had had its final triumph and obliterated every human being but the child-loving funny man from the planet. (Still the notion that “Chaplin plays poor; lives rich,” is included, adding further depth to the personalities of both men.)
But in the script (published for the first time as part of the book), it turns out that others have survived the ultimate revenge fuck of the unidentifiable rogue state). Always prepared, due to their gift of rationalization, the scientists have made it through, but are nearly paralyzed with fear trying to open a can of food without a watt of electricity available: a common trog has to show them the way. The Tramp also discovers a Mother and her baby, protects and feeds them in the New York City (the descriptions of the fictional result of the attack and the reality of 9/11 are beyond eerie—soothsayer indeed), only to be shunned when a more attractive man comes her way.
Happily, music is everywhere. Agee was a fair-to-middling pianist (Schubert’s sonatas are personal favourites) and chooses to use the theme and variation I of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio—Cortot-Thibault-Casals’ performance—to underscore the hither unto known value of art to the Tramp and his disenfranchised (but alive!) child bearer. Many other musical references pervade Agee’s over-detailed but compelling script of Gotterdammerung U.S. style.
It’s not hard to understand why Chaplin never took the bait: The Tramp would have to speak (akin to Marcel Marceau); Chaplin, by then, did not have the physique to portray his most brilliant alter ego; but, perhaps most importantly, Agee’s rough-and-ready masterpiece (many sections say “I haven’t yet worked out any ideas”) was beyond even Chaplin’s creative genius.
Yet, this truly terrifying, and, sadly, in our present day of U.S.-Knows-Best/smaller countries’ power envy, totally believable film needs to be made before its vision comes to a theatre of war near you.
Awkward and uneven in spots, Wranovics’ passion and big-picture savvy permeate the book portion of this marvellous publication, which should be required reading for all world “actors” no matter what their role in today’s global stage.
March 4, 2013
[Reviewed in 2005]
Any lingering doubt as to the literary standing of James Agee (1909-1955) should be dispelled later this year when the prestigious Library of America publishes two volumes devoted to the writer’s work, which includes screenplays, film criticism, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (A Death in the Family), and a masterpiece of New Journalism years ahead of its time (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). As a warm-up, Agee aficionados and cinema buffs can feast on John Wranovics’s Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay, a marvelous new book that brings to light a previously unpublished (and largely unknown) 80-page film treatment that Agee wrote in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing with the hope of convincing Charles Chaplin to direct and star in the project.
Agee’s startling script idea was to place Chaplin’s Little Tramp character in a crumbling New York City following an atomic blast. Envisioned as a silent film with music and sound effects, the darkly comic story casts the Tramp as the benevolent leader of a ragtag society of survivors. Among the screenplay’s most intriguing passages is a description of the community’s utopian social politics encouraging “free love, ménages à trois, and racial inbreeding.” Conflict arises when a second group of survivors emerges from the rubble: a band of scientists living in an underground bunker. Before long, the scientists—whom Agee describes as representing “the extreme opposite to individualism”—entice the Tramp’s community with laborsaving gadgets and a HAL-like supercomputer that becomes dangerously neurotic after a mouse crawls inside its machinery. Ostracized and alone at the end of the film, the Tramp shuffles off toward the horizon, his expression “a blend of indestructible hope with irreducible disillusion.”
Wranovics’s extensive introductory chapters provide a trove of historical and biographical context, mixing established sources with a good deal of fresh archival material. Particularly illuminating is an examination of the rough-draft notes for Agee’s overly enthusiastic review in The Nation of Chaplin’s 1947 box-office failure Monsieur Verdoux. A black comedy with political overtones in which the comedian plays a serial wife-murderer, the controversial film has had few wholehearted defenders over the years. Agee’s uncompromising reverence for Chaplin was a blind spot. Wranovics quotes the writer’s friend and fellow film critic Dwight MacDonald: “I suspect that Agee’s response is an example of his chief weakness as a critic: his directorial imagination which sometimes remade the movie inside his head as he watched it, so that what came out on his page was often more exciting than what had appeared on the screen.” On the other hand, Agee had studied Chaplin’s work so assiduously over the years that the screenplay he wrote for the Tramp character is filled with uncanny simulacrums of Chaplin’s pantomime style and gag construction.
It was likely naïve to believe that a self-consumed filmmaker like Chaplin—who clearly preferred writing his own material, as well as starring in and directing (and composing the music for) the movies he made—would have the slightest interest in someone else’s screenplay. In fact, the Chaplin Studios were adamant about returning unsolicited manuscripts, which is initially what happened to Agee’s script. How it eventually landed in Chaplin’s hands, and the ensuing friendship between the two men, makes for a rich and compelling narrative. It was a friendship destined to be cut short not only by Agee’s untimely death, but also by the State Department, who barred Chaplin from re-entering the U.S. in 1952 on trumped-up McCarthy-era charges. Writing Agee from exile in Switzerland, Chaplin lambasted America as “that stink-pot country of yours.” Wranovics paints a dispirited portrait of Agee in New York, his health broken, confessing to an actress with whom he was having an affair: “I am a drunk.”
Any lingering doubt as to the literary standing of James Agee (1909-1955) should be dispelled later this year when the prestigious Library of America publishes two volumes devoted to the writer’s work, which includes screenplays, film criticism, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (A Death in the Family), and a masterpiece of New Journalism years ahead of its time (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). As a warm-up, Agee aficionados and cinema buffs can feast on John Wranovics’s Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay, a marvelous new book that brings to light a previously unpublished (and largely unknown) 80-page film treatment that Agee wrote in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing with the hope of convincing Charles Chaplin to direct and star in the project.
Agee’s startling script idea was to place Chaplin’s Little Tramp character in a crumbling New York City following an atomic blast. Envisioned as a silent film with music and sound effects, the darkly comic story casts the Tramp as the benevolent leader of a ragtag society of survivors. Among the screenplay’s most intriguing passages is a description of the community’s utopian social politics encouraging “free love, ménages à trois, and racial inbreeding.” Conflict arises when a second group of survivors emerges from the rubble: a band of scientists living in an underground bunker. Before long, the scientists—whom Agee describes as representing “the extreme opposite to individualism”—entice the Tramp’s community with laborsaving gadgets and a HAL-like supercomputer that becomes dangerously neurotic after a mouse crawls inside its machinery. Ostracized and alone at the end of the film, the Tramp shuffles off toward the horizon, his expression “a blend of indestructible hope with irreducible disillusion.”
Wranovics’s extensive introductory chapters provide a trove of historical and biographical context, mixing established sources with a good deal of fresh archival material. Particularly illuminating is an examination of the rough-draft notes for Agee’s overly enthusiastic review in The Nation of Chaplin’s 1947 box-office failure Monsieur Verdoux. A black comedy with political overtones in which the comedian plays a serial wife-murderer, the controversial film has had few wholehearted defenders over the years. Agee’s uncompromising reverence for Chaplin was a blind spot. Wranovics quotes the writer’s friend and fellow film critic Dwight MacDonald: “I suspect that Agee’s response is an example of his chief weakness as a critic: his directorial imagination which sometimes remade the movie inside his head as he watched it, so that what came out on his page was often more exciting than what had appeared on the screen.” On the other hand, Agee had studied Chaplin’s work so assiduously over the years that the screenplay he wrote for the Tramp character is filled with uncanny simulacrums of Chaplin’s pantomime style and gag construction.
It was likely naïve to believe that a self-consumed filmmaker like Chaplin—who clearly preferred writing his own material, as well as starring in and directing (and composing the music for) the movies he made—would have the slightest interest in someone else’s screenplay. In fact, the Chaplin Studios were adamant about returning unsolicited manuscripts, which is initially what happened to Agee’s script. How it eventually landed in Chaplin’s hands, and the ensuing friendship between the two men, makes for a rich and compelling narrative. It was a friendship destined to be cut short not only by Agee’s untimely death, but also by the State Department, who barred Chaplin from re-entering the U.S. in 1952 on trumped-up McCarthy-era charges. Writing Agee from exile in Switzerland, Chaplin lambasted America as “that stink-pot country of yours.” Wranovics paints a dispirited portrait of Agee in New York, his health broken, confessing to an actress with whom he was having an affair: “I am a drunk.”
June 6, 2024
This book has fascinating historical information, though I felt it could have been conveyed more effectively. Much of the book consisted of quotes and correspondence. While some quotes were needed, I believe the author could have written a more narrative-driven story rather than what resembled a research paper. I especially enjoyed the sections on the blacklisting of actors and Agee's views on film. This book would be perfect for cinephiles.
“Agee's unique approach to film criticism was both serious and idiosyncratic enough to gain a loyal following of readers who hungered for a passionate, literate discussion of movie art.”
“Agee's unique approach to film criticism was both serious and idiosyncratic enough to gain a loyal following of readers who hungered for a passionate, literate discussion of movie art.”
April 15, 2008
Absolutely fascinating account of Chaplin's later years, riddled with an America out to get him, finds a strange ally in film critic and writer James Agee. I found myself just as interested in Agee as Chaplin. The book includes a treatment of a screenplay Agee wanted Chaplin to make, telling the story of a post-apocalyptic New York where the Little Tramp is one of the few survivors. Can you even imagine!?
October 8, 2007
Wranovics likes to ramble and name drop a little too much, but overall he provides an interesting document of the relationship between two legendary and brilliant men. The main selling point, however, is Agee's lost screenplay, which is nothing short of remarkable.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews