INVENTING TESLA

vyZ Music has launched a Web site to promote its new movie, NOVUS (short for Novus Ordo Seclorum — New Order of the Ages), an experimental documentary celebrating the achievements of one of the world’s greatest inventors, Nikola Tesla.

This off-the-wall film is described in a press release as follows: “NOVUS paints an inspiring, yet highly controversial, picture of Tesla’s most incredible invention, which was his greatest secret: the flying saucer. Do flying saucers really exist? Did Tesla really invent them? Are they humanity’s greatest invention? What about free unlimited energy? The playful combination of Mother Goose nursery rhymes, pirate cartoons, Superman, UFO mythology, black-hole astronomy and investigative journalism, evoke a trailblazing tale of the past 100 years with an optimistic vision of the future. While avoiding the cliche of ‘New World Order’ conspiracy theory, the film does ‘connect the dots’ to the genius of Tesla and the real possibility that we can create a better world: A New Order of the Ages.”

Personally, I am looking forward to Ken Russell’s Charged: The Life of Nikola Tesla, from a script by Ljiljana Kojic-Bogdanovich and Katarina Bogdanovich, reportedly starring Paul Rhys and featuring music by Michael Nyman. (Russell dismissed rumors that Jack Nicholson — who at one point had optioned the rights to Margaret Cheney’s Tesla biography — had been cast to play Tesla, as the actor was “too old”.)

According to The Sunday Telegraph, the family of Thomas Edison are unhappy with Russell’s plans to depict Tesla’s arch rival as a ruthless sadist who encouraged NY prison authorities to use Tesla’s alternating current (AC) to carry out the country’s first electrocution of a death row prisoner.

Previously called Tesla & Katharine, Ken Russell’s film, still in pre-production, deals primarily “with aspects of [Tesla's] private life based on his correspondence with close friends, Robert Johnson, poet and editor of the magazine Century, and his wife Katharine, in New York during [the] 1890s. This is [the] story of [a] complex and delicate triangular relationship, and Tesla and Katharine’s love.”

Although Tesla did have a close relationship with J.P. Morgan’s daughter, Ann Morgan, who Jean Strouse once told me she suspected was a lesbian, perhaps Russell has discovered information that Tesla’s biographers — who generally support the claim that he was asexual — previously overlooked… or perhaps Tesla’s “greatest secret” remains his invention of the flying saucer!