Michael Almereyda – författare

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.

A revised edition of unpublished pieces from the “B-sides” of Eggleston’s archive, curated and analyzed by Hollywood writers, directors and authors

American photographer William Eggleston approached his quotidian snapshots of Americana with a vivid and cinematic eye. For Now is a curation of Eggleston’s unpublished photographs by filmmaker Michael Almereyda, director of the 2005 documentary William Eggleston in the Real World. Almereyda pores through a collection of over 35,000 images in the archive spanning four decades of work in what he calls “the B-sides, the bootlegs, the unreleased tracks.” This oversized fourth edition includes eight additional new unpublished photographs. Essays include text by Almereyda as well as Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century; author and film critic Amy Taubin; Kristine McKenna, Los Angeles Times journalist from 1977 through 1998, and one of the first mainstream chroniclers of the L.A. punk rock scene; and director and screenwriter Lloyd Fonvielle. Unusual in its concentration on the artist’s family and friends, the book suggests an air of offhand intimacy, typical of Eggleston and typically surprising.William Eggleston (born 1939) encountered photography and abstract expressionism while studying at Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi. Inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston began working with color film in the 1960s and is credited with popularizing its use among artistic photographers. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.Michael Almereyda (born 1959) originally studied art history at Harvard before leaving the university to pursue filmmaking. He is best known for his 2000 adaptation of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. His 2005 documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World was nominated for a Gotham Award.