Tesla

Tesla jolts and flows between the extraordinary life of the inventor Nikola Tesla, the making of a feature film about him by the celebrated director Michael Almereyda, and episodes from the filmmaker�s own restless, quixotic career. In these pages, we encounter Tesla�s colleagues and friends intermingling with Almereyda�s collaborators and influences: Thomas Edison and David Lynch, Mark Twain and Sam Shepard, Sarah Bernhardt and Ethan Hawke, J.P. Morgan and Orson Welles. A rich array of illustrations � vintage and personal photographs, film stills, drawings and comic-book art � enhance the sense of time travel and parallel histories, as we read of a scheme to transmit wireless energy through the earth, of the electrocution of an elephant, of fortunes made and surrendered, and of the obsessions that propel a scientist seeking to transform the world and a director seeking to make a movie.