The Freak is the legendary Charlie Chaplin’s last, and perhaps most mysterious, film project — an ambitious tale that came within a hair’s breadth of being made. Conceived in 1968, when Chaplin was nearly eighty, the story centers on Sarapha, a young woman with wings, both miraculous and vulnerable, who becomes a mirror for humanity’s fears, faiths, and cruelties. For the first time in the original English, this book publishes Chaplin’s complete script alongside a wealth of unseen material: storyboards, designs, production notes and photographs. Drawing on many pages from the Chaplin Archives and newly discovered papers of producer Jerry Epstein, it reveals a project already deep into pre-production — casting, location scouting, even the construction of Sarapha’s extraordinary wings for Chaplin’s daughter Victoria, who was to play the role.

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