The Freak: Charlie Chaplin’s Unfinished Final Film Script Set for Publication

A long-lost screenplay by Charlie Chaplin — a fantasy centred on “a beautiful creature with wings” — is being reconstructed and published for the first time from scattered drafts, sketches and storyboards.

Chaplin, who rose from poverty in Victorian London to become cinema’s first great comic icon with works like The Great Dictator and Limelight, had been developing this project until his death in 1977 at 88.

The film, titled The Freak, tells the story of Sarapha, an ethereal female being described by Chaplin as “a bird with a human body”. She possesses miraculous powers, able to heal and bring peace to humanity. Chaplin intended to make a cameo as a drunken passer-by stunned to see her soaring above London’s Houses of Parliament.

The surviving materials for The Freak are more extensive than for any of his other productions. They include detailed scene breakdowns, special effects plans — including designs for Sarapha’s wings — as well as financial estimates, technical meeting notes and production schedules, indicating the project was close to filming.

David Robinson, Chaplin’s official biographer and editor of the forthcoming book, said: “It’s a shame that it wasn’t finished because it could have been a marvellous film.”

Chaplin had cast his teenage daughter Victoria as Sarapha. She recalled his obsessive research into flight: “For hours, for weeks, for months, he studied the movements of birds in flight. He watched films of men and women soaring through the air. But the techniques then did not satisfy him. He wanted his own method — crafted, personal — to translate the sensation of flying to the screen. I believe he would have found it. But time clipped his wings. Charlie Chaplin never brought his vision to life.”

Sticking Place Books will release The Freak: The Story of an Unfinished Film this weekend.

Publisher Paul Cronin said Chaplin had created a heroine as enduring as the Little Tramp — another outsider — which is clear from the production notes.

This is the first publication of the script in English in its original form. It was previously released only in Italian in 2020 by the Cineteca di Bologna in a limited edition while cataloguing the Chaplin Archive.

Cecilia Cenciarelli of Cineteca di Bologna, co-editor of the new release alongside the Chaplin family, said even scholars had barely known of the project: “We found ourselves handling hundreds of pages of a film we’d never heard of and turned to David [Robinson]’s ‘bible’, Chaplin: His Life and Art, for answers — only to find The Freak barely mentioned.”

Among the papers are confidential casting notes listing Robert Vaughn, James Fox and Richard Chamberlain as possible actors for the role of an English professor who finds Sarapha unconscious and injured on his rooftop and becomes her ally.

In one scene, she confesses her misery: “I don’t like mystifying and frightening people … I am afraid of everyone and everyone is afraid of me.” Elsewhere, Chaplin writes that she “loved him in spite of the fact that he was without wings”.

By 1969, Chaplin was in London investigating flying techniques. He held discussions with stage-flight specialists and film effects teams, including those at Shepperton Studios.

The book also features an interview with artist Gerald Larn, who made 150 drawings of Victoria as Sarapha in flight. “Charlie was very clear and precise about what he wanted,” Larn said. “We expected it to be difficult, but not impossible. The best part was that Charlie always responded to what we sent.”

Arnold Lozano, manager of the Chaplin estate, called the publication “the first comprehensive presentation of Chaplin’s last, unfinished film project”. Assembled from nearly 3,000 pages of Chaplin’s writings, photos, design notes, recorded narration and piano score sketches, he said it reveals The Freak as “perhaps his final bequest — unique within his work yet still unmistakably Chaplinesque — offering a rare window into one of the most extraordinary projects of his 63-year career in cinema.”