Alex Lyras
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About
Alex Lyras has produced two feature films to date, Mona, a romantic comedy shot in 2006, written by Robert McCaskill and directed by Alan Kirschen. The film won Best Picture at the Malibu Film Festival in 2008 and next screens at the HBO New York Latino Film Festival. His second feature as producer is Heterosexuals, written and directed by Robert McCaskill, now shooting in New York. Lyras’ third feature length script, The Polyester Philosopher, is slated for production in summer 2009.
He has numerous producing and writing credits in New York Theater. He produced his first solo performance, desperelics, in 2000 at the Gene Frankel Theater, and later at the HBO Workspace in Los Angeles. It lead to a development deal with NBC based on his characters, and a roll in Mike Nichol’ s What Planet Are Your From? Unequalibrium, his second solo effort (co-written and directed by writing partner Robert McCaskill), was produced in 2002 at the Gene Frankel in New York and selected for publication in Best Plays of 2002 and Best Men’s Monologues For the Twenty First Century. The show was produced again in LA, where it was nominated for a 2003 Dramalogue Award.
The presentation of the plays in Los Angeles lead to various development deals. The first, with Warren Littlefield and NBC, was a dark comedy about a Wall Street day trader. Their second script, a drama was about competing real estate agents in LA, was sold to Brillstein Grey. Lyras and McCaskill also sold an hour comic drama to FOX in 2005 concerning a Greek shipping tycoon and his three daughters. The script was developed with Dawn Parouse (Prison Break). The Common Air, Lyras and McCaskill’s third collaboration in the theater, was produced in Los Angeles in fall 2007 and ran for five months. The dramedy links 6 characters during an airport delay, due to possible terrorist activity. The Los Angeles Times writes, “Tensile energy and unflagging skill in his well—crafted, must—see show.” Lyras is a member of The Classical Theater Lab and The Writer’s Guild west.
Alva
Was Thomas Edison America’s greatest inventor, or a clever thief with a pioneering acumen for marketing? The screenplay ‘ALVA’ explores the life of Edison from a precocious young rule breaker, to the full blown ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’. The historically accurate story is loaded with emotional turns and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse, William Vanderbilt and JP Morgan are merely a few of the larger-than-life characters Edison battles in order to bring his ideas to reality: the light bulb, the phonograph, the power station, the film camera, to name 4 of 1093 patents he filed in his lifetime.