Alva
TFI Suppport
Logline
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.
Alex Lyras
Writer
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.
Michael Dorian
Writer
Michael Dorian is a filmmaker, writer, arid performance artist. In 2007 he completed producing and directing Pizza! The Movie, a feature-length documentary about the pizza industry and the wild world of acrobatic pizza- dough tossing competitions. The film was represented by Films Transit International and sold to numerous global television markets, including to the Documentary Channel here in the U.S. In 2006 he had a short film about pizza on The Discovery Times channel. His work as a filmmaker has also appeared in a series on The History Channel. Dorian’s first book, The Nektonic Facteur: Poems & A Play, was published by Silk City Press in 1999 and is available through Amazon.com. As a result, he was granted the Leonardo da Vinci Award for Best Poet from the Beaux Arts Society in 2000. Dorian also received an Artist-In-Residency from New York City’s prestigious Mabou Mines Performance Company in 2001.