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, by Jim Agee

A book I would like to recommend to movie buffs is Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of The Tramp, the Writer and the Lost Screenplay. Jim Agee was a movie critic who wrote for Time, Life and Nation magazines at one time or another. He was rebellious, unkempt and eventually descended into alcoholism, which greatly shortened his life. (He died at age 47). Yet, he was considered a genius who collaborated with John Huston on such screenplays as The African Queen. During the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, Agee was the only journalist to come to the defense of Charlie Chaplin, who was accused of being a Communist sympathizer. When Time assigned Agee to write a follow up to the bombing of Hiroshima, this greatly affected him, and he eventually decided to write a screenplay for Chaplin titled The Tramp's New World. It was a stream-of-consciousness work about a post-apocalyptic New York City that never reached the silver screen. The screenplay can be found at the end of the book. This work is not only an interesting study about a critic who befriended a star, but also provides some insight into the McCarthy era.
-Carl