5/8: Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
5/8: Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Scott-Eyman/dp/1982176350
Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace. In the aftermath of World War II, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold.
Politics aside, Chaplin had another problem: his sexual interest in young women. He had been married three times and had had numerous affairs. In the 1940s, he was the subject of a paternity suit, which he lost, despite blood tests that proved he was not the father. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US after a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland and made his last two films in London.
In Charlie Chaplin vs. America, Scott Eyman explores the life and times of the movie genius who brought us such masterpieces as City Lights and Modern Times. “One of the finest surveys of the man and the artist ever written” (Leonard Maltin) this book is “a sobering account of cancel culture in action.” (The Economist)
1947 LA
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is on the |
| 0:05.0 | This is CBS I on the world with John Bachelor. |
| 0:09.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.0 | Continuing with the author Scott Eimen. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.5 | Continuing with the author Scott Eimen, |
| 0:15.1 | the book is Charlie Chaplin versus America |
| 0:17.4 | when art, sex, and politics collided. |
| 0:20.2 | The second war is over. |
| 0:21.3 | The catastrophe has happened. |
| 0:23.0 | There are tens of millions of dead. |
| 0:26.0 | There are war crimes tribunals in Europe and then war crimes tribunals in Japan. |
| 0:30.0 | And Hollywood, like everywhere else in America, institutions, trying to go back to work with the returning soldiers. |
| 0:37.0 | Charlie Chaplin's going back to work. He's world famous, and he wants to make movies. He's got his own studio and he has plenty of money, |
| 0:46.7 | lots of money, although he's still haunted by the poverty of his childhood. He can no longer |
| 0:52.1 | be the tramp. He needs to deal with speaking |
| 0:57.1 | pictures and in this instance he comes across a plot, a story idea given to him or suggested him by Orson Wells. It will eventually be called |
| 1:09.3 | Monsieur Verdo, a French name, but it was in Orson Wells mind has a serial killer, a blue beard called |
| 1:18.4 | Lady Killer. Scott, this is a wonderful story to introduce Orson Wells. |
| 1:24.4 | Orson Wells's idea, what was it based on and how did they see it as comedy? |
| 1:29.2 | Good evening to you. |
| 1:31.4 | Thanks, John. Wells came to Chaplin a few months after Citizen Kane opened with this idea. |
| 1:37.8 | It was an idea that Wells wanted to direct and use Chaplin as the Star to play a character based on Land Drew, who was a famous French serial killer who murdered a succession of wives, of his wives. wives. |
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