Before There was Facebook
Before there was Social Networking
There was Arthur Inman

www.diaristmovie.com

"The Diarist" is a 5-Part Limited Series from writer/producer Lorenzo DeStefano, an ambitious drama/black comedy inspired by true events recorded in "The Inman Diary", by the notorious Boston eccentric Arthur Crew Inman (1895-1963). Published by Harvard University Press, Inman's diary clocks in at 155 volumes containing 17,000,000 words, making it one of the longest and most fascinating diaries ever written. Arthur spent 60 years of his life, from the age of 8, creating this chilling epic of collective memory. Now, nearly 70 years after his death, Inman has morphed into the original blogger, a man obsessed with "connectivity" decades before that word was even conceived. A deeply curious but highly conflicted man of deep insecurities and profound inner strength, Inman's mission was a singular one, to paint the parts of a connecting frieze that encompassed his life and times.

"The Diarist" seeks to break new ground as a "twisted biography" merging epic and intimate storytelling with visionary visual effects and period detail.

It illuminates the fascinating diary world created by Arthur and his wife of thirty years, Evelyn Yates Inman. One of the most eerily devoted yet independent spouses in all of recorded literature, the revelation of Evelyn's decades-long affair with Dr. Cyrus Rumford Pike, her husband's favorite osteopath, is as shocking as it is understandable.

From the 1930s into the 1960s this oddly modern couple, akin to Masters & Johnson, Studs Terkel, and Alfred Kinsey, conducted a remarkable human experiment inside the walls of apartment # 604 in Boston's Garrison Hall. They took out personal ads in the Boston papers ("Wanted-Talkers & Readers, to amuse an invalid author"). After being vetted by Evelyn some would be interviewed by Arthur. If they were intriguing enough these paid visitors, men and women of all ages, races and persuasions, often became lifelong friends. They might even find themselves immortalized in Arthur's mammoth diary along with 1000 other "characters". The Inman Diary became the repository of their dreams as much as it was the tabernacle of Arthur Inman's prodigious talents as a listener and keen social observer.

People from wildly diverse backgrounds and social strata came up to talk with "Mr. Inman", "Arthur", "Artie". The diary eventually contained the minutely-drawn record of not only Arthur & Evelyn's lives but also the hopes and struggles of those whose lives Arthur helped immortalize. Within the pages of his mammoth diary, throughout the hundred hours of audio tape recordings, Inman kept a scathingly honest record of his politics, his social attitudes, his various illnesses (real & imagined), and the fluctuating dynamics of his complex marriage.

A man simultaneously at war with and hugely fascinated by the modern world, Inman's diary contains one of the most fascinating collection of humans ever assembled. What Arthur and Evelyn have created within the walls of Garrison Hall, the still-standing edifice in Boston's Back Bay, is a social microcosm filled with human emotion, aggression, self-interest and, ultimately, strong and enduring affections.

On December 5, 1963, two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, Arthur's lifelong quest for literary immortality becomes too much for him to bear. The years-long construction of the gargantuan Prudential Center just across the street, the ever-changing face of his beloved Boston, along with deep divisions in his married life and complications of his many medical conditions, real and imagined, threaten to tear Arthur's fragile world apart.