My Journey to Chaplin

Everything begins in the dark: the feverish child is laid onto the couch to watch Chaplin, the thirteen-year-old falls in love with the girl from the second form who looks like Geraldine Chaplin, the 22-year-old film student sees the Chaplin`s »City Lights« in the darkness of the »Encore« cinema for the first time …

»My Journey to Chaplin« is the story of a passion. It tells us of Roth`s life-long love and veneration for the maker of »City Lights« (1931), whom he follows from the screen of a run-down L. A. cinema all the way to the door of his house in Vevey, Switzerland, just to hand over a letter to him in person.
In its own way, the »Journey to Chaplin« becomes a film à la Chaplin, with the young man in the role of the tramp and the narrator as the director of the story of a memory.

»With an expert mix of passion and calculation, intimate story-telling and clever construction, Patrick Roth succeeds in seducing us into joining him on his »Journey to Chaplin««
(Hubert Winkels, Die Zeit)

A small, great book, reprinted on the occasion of Charlie Chaplin`s 125th birthday.

Rights sold:
France: Le Bruit du temps
Arabic world: Kana’an

The Author
Patrick Roth, born in 1953 in Freiburg/Brsg., lives in Los Angeles and Mannheim and works as a freelance writer. His cinematic and dramatic works of the nineteen-eighties were followed by his prose debut »Riverside« in 1991, then by »Johnny Shines« and »Corpus Christi«. The autobiographical story »My Journey to Chaplin« was the prelude to the German-American narrative cycles »Die Nacht der Zeitlosen« (The Night of the Timeless), »Starlite Terrace« and »The American Journey«.