BECAUSE EVERYONE NEEDS A LAUGH THANKS TO THE LITTLE TRAMP. 6/8: 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
🗓️ 12 May 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
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)
1925 TIME THE LITTLE TRAMP GOLD RUSH
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batcha with Scott Iman. The book is Charlie Chaplin versus America |
| 0:06.0 | when art, sex and politics collided. |
| 0:08.0 | Hugh Act, the FBI, eventually the Truman administration pursuing Charlie Chaplin but he's got a studio at |
| 0:14.9 | Lebraya and sunset in LA and he's making a movie that will be called Limelight. |
| 0:21.3 | It's a brilliant piece of construction having to do with his life. It's based on a story that he writes up as a novel, Calvero. |
| 0:31.0 | What's in the novel? You've studied it, have in Scott. What's in there that he makes a movie out of because you can't use everything in a novel? |
| 0:38.0 | No, a lot of it is not, he never put it in the screenplay a lot of the novel was never |
| 0:44.3 | he put in the screenplay it was it's it's a very atmospheric memoir slash novel |
| 0:50.0 | about the Edwardian theater as chaplain found it as a young man and what the life like it |
| 0:57.0 | What was like life was like what the bars were like what the backstage life and the theaters was like. |
| 1:03.5 | It's very rich and very nostalgic. |
| 1:06.4 | And I think what he was trying to do |
| 1:08.0 | was immerse himself in his memories |
| 1:10.5 | by constructing a fictional narrative, which he then took and transposed by cutting a lot of the |
| 1:18.0 | atmosphere and sticking with the plot but injecting as much atmosphere as he could get into the screenplay. |
| 1:24.9 | Because he's recapitulating his life, he's in a sense recapitulating his father's life. |
| 1:30.6 | It's the story of an old musical comic who became an alcoholic and drank his career away. |
| 1:35.6 | Well that's not Chaplin, that's his father, you know. |
| 1:39.0 | But on the same token, by the same token, it's also, he also injects his compulsive narrative about saving |
| 1:46.0 | a helpless young woman, which recurs over and over again in his films. |
| 1:52.8 | Whether it's the kid or the Gold Rush or the Circus, |
| 1:58.1 | Citilites, Modern Times, they're all about the Tramp |
... |
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