'On My Way To Hollywood'

Representative ' Visual Deck' images for my Film about Dylan Thomas

and Igor Stravinsky, and the Opera on which they were collaborating in 1953.

'On My Way To Hollywood' is an Independent Feature Film  film about the final months of the life of Dylan Thomas

The story follows Dylan in late 1953 — Broke, diabetic, physically declining, serially unfaithful — as he criss-crosses America                            on lecture tours and poetry readings, trying to hold together his marriage to Caitlin in Laugharne, his affair with Liz Reitell in New York,         and his grand ambition to write the Libretto for a Chamber Opera with Stravinsky about the end of the world and a new Garden of Eden.

The film ends with Dylan’s death in St Vincent’s Hospital, NYC, on 9 November 1953, aged 39.

His last telegram to Igor Stravinsky read .....

 “On My Way To Hollywood.”

He never arrived.

The Opera was never written.

The Film structure moves between three worlds, cutting between them throughout:

                •              Laugharne, Wales — the Boathouse, where Caitlin manages three children and a permanent overdraft with furious, despairing wit. Their marriage is fractured but deeply alive.

                •              America — Boston, Hollywood (a party at Chaplin’s house with Marilyn Monroe), New York’s Chelsea Hotel and White Horse Tavern, and finally St Vincent’s Hospital.

                •              Hollywood — Stravinsky and his long-suffering collaborator Robert Craft prepare for Dylan’s arrival, as Boston University gets cold feet about the commission.

                 A distinctive formal device runs through the Screenplay: Animated characters from 'Under Milk Wood'.           

Reverend Eli Jenkins,   Polly Garter, and Captain Cat materialise and hold conversations with Dylan.

They are his conscience, his muse, and his death’s-door visitors.

                Animation is also used for Dylan’s atomic-nightmare visions of Cwmdonkin Park,   his own childhood Eden,                                                        which becomes  the imaginative seed and location for of the Opera that never was.

                                                     The emotional core is the tension between Dylan’s self-mythologising and his private knowledge                                                                      he is finished as a poet,  drinking himself to death, and failing everyone he loves.

Yet still capable of wonder, humour, and devastating honesty in his final weeks.

                                            Caitlin is his equal throughout : raw, raging, grieving, and finally arriving at his deathbed  only to be sedated                                                        and temporarily removed to a Psychiatric ward as Dylan slowly dies.

The film closes with Stravinsky’s 1954 setting of ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’,  and text listing the deaths of all the real people depicted, and finally old Caitlin’s voice  from Sicily, forty years on, speaking of

“The stubbornness of loving.”

                             'On My Way To Hollywood’ is elegiac, darkly comic, adventurous portrait   of flawed genius

And the Opera that ‘got away.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​‘