City Lights is based on real life events when Charles Chaplin made the film of the same name.  Interwoven is the fictional story of Isabel, a young English girl battling to win the part of the blind flower seller for herself.   But this is not a tale of rising stardom and success; City Lights embraces the losers and low-lives hanging around Hollywood – and the heroic failures who never even make it as far as the cutting room floor.  As Chaplin’s right hand man puts it: “For every smiling face on the screen, there’s a million others, sobbing buckets.” 

Read an extract of City Lights.

 

Listen to the songs (this link takes you to the website of the composer, Edmund Jolliffe)

 










Chaplin meets Isabel at the fights.  Illustration by Michelle Kent.