What a night, dear reader.  It’s tough being me some nights.  Legitimately difficult.  And last night was one such night.
Unlike the previous decade, which saw me getting 2-4 hours of sleep a night at the most, my sleep hygiene in the ’20s has been immaculate.  My Apple Watch regularly kisses my ass over meeting my 7-hour/night sleep goal.  But sometimes, every couple of weeks or so, things don’t go as planned.  There’s no secret to it: it’s all very obviously the fault of my overactive mind.

Last night, I very responsibly turned off the show I was watching at the appropriate time, and headed to bed.  I should have been asleep no more than an hour later, but an hour and fifteen later, I was still quite awake.  It was around that exact time that I decided I really needed a Dodge Challenger.  But a quick bit of research left me heartbroken…Dodge quit manufacturing new Challengers in 2023.  “Son of a bitch!” I said, out loud, upsetting everybody else in the bed, who were already asleep.  I was upset, so, not wanting to further disturb anyone else’s slumber, I got out of bed, went to the other room, and looked out the window at the fog.  That made me feel better, and made me think of Lovecraft and Poe.  It also reminded me that the new Dracula movie comes out in the States on February 6.  This, too, improved my mood.  But it did nothing to slow down my mind.  Which mind then jumped suddenly to W.H. Auden, most likely because I’ve been reading some of his poetry recently.  I thought about some stories of eccentricities one of my professors in college had told me about when Auden had stayed at his house for a couple of days.  It then occurred to me that there had been no feature film or biopic yet made based on Mr. Auden, and that a) it was high time one was, b) I was the person to write the script, and c) the time to do that was right this very sleepless second.  So I went into the studio and got to work.

I’d recently finished reading Carpenter’s biography of Auden, so things moved quickly.  It would be called “The Necessary Angel.”  It would be Tár meets The Imitation Game, and would have lots of smoky rooms, cigarette ash, opera rehearsals, and political arguments, and it would center around this poet who lived like a storm cloud with a library card.  Brilliant!  Smoky, cerebral, and emotionally jagged.  Great…time to outline:

Act I – The Making of a Monster
1.     Prologue: The Old Lion
Opening in 1972, Auden in his final years: disheveled, brilliant, chain-smoking, lecturing in a Vienna classroom.  He begins reading a poem – then stops, pissed off, muttering that he “no longer believes a word of it”  Cut to black.

2.      Childhood in Birmingham
Auden as a pretty weird kid, obsessed with mining equipment and reciting Icelandic sagas.

3.      Oxford: The Young Genius
Auden arrives at Oxford and immediately becomes the weirdest, smartest, most magnetic student in the room.  He meets Christopher Isherwood, who becomes his mentor, lover, and co-conspirator.

4.     The Auden Group
Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and MacNeice form a literary group that feels like a punk band of the 1930s.  The write, argue, drink, and reinvent modern poetry.  Auden becomes the reluctant leader, which he both hates and secretly loves.

5.     Spain and Disillusionment
Auden goes to Spain to check out the Civil War and hopefully get some moral clarity.  Instead he finds chaos, propaganda, and his own political ignorance.

This was going just swimmingly.  If the next two acts went as smoothly and quickly as this opener, I’d have a saleable treatment by dawn.  But there was a problem…when I originally got out of bed to go look at the fog, I popped a lightweight muscle relaxer, which was suddenly kicking in.  Shit…I may not have until dawn.  Whatever…a couple of notes about casting this fucker.
W.H. Auden will be played by Andrew Scott.  Not because he looks like Auden (he doesn’t), but because he does razor-sharp intellect, emotional volatility and dry, surgical wit better than anyone.  He also has a strange mix of shyness and arrogance that I appreciate, that Auden seemed to radiate.  Especially in his work in Sherlock, he has the uncanny ability to make genius feel truly dangerous.  All that, and I just think Andrew Scott should be in everything.
Ben Wishaw would be great as Christopher Isherwood.  And Cate Blanchett would have to be Erika Mann.  That’s it for casting…for now.  Back to the outline:

Act II – The Exile and the Angel
1.     A Marriage of Convenience
Auden marries Erika Mann to help her escape Nazi Germany.  Political, absurd, and deeply moving.

2.     Flight to America
Auden and Isherwood leave England for the U.S.  The British press calls them cowards.  Auden shrugs it off, but is actually deeply wounded.

3.     New York: Reinvention
Auden meets Chester Kallman, the love of his life.  Opera, poetry, cigarettes, and late-night arguments.  Auden feels reborn.

Christ.  It’s now 03:17, and I am starting to nod off.  Finally. I save this to a file with 27 other started screenplay projects, none finished, all started in the  pre-dawn hours of some sleepless night and almost immediately abandoned when the muscle relaxers or whatever was on the menu to help me sleep when nature failed kicked in that evening.

N.P.: “Why Do I Do” – Plaine