EDISON ILLUMINATED

EDISON ILLUMINATED won the Alfred P. Sloan Grant from the Tribeca Film Institute. The script was subsequently optioned by Castle Rock Entertainment.

A trial is underway. A reputation is at stake. The man on the stand is Thomas Edison. The accusation against him: stealing the design for the carbon-filament light bulb. Rival inventor, Thomas Sawyer, and his team of lawyers, has built a formidable case. And unfortunately for Edison, it’s only one of several patent infringement claims against him.

This historically accurate drama draws on recently published court documents and other primary source material in an attempt to de-mythologize a man who had a skillful, if not uncanny knack, for self-promotion.

Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse, Sarah Bernhardt, William Vanderbilt and JP Morgan are merely a few of the larger-than-life characters Edison encounters in order to realize his visionary ideas: the phonograph, the telegraph, the electrical power station, the car battery, and the motion picture camera, to name merely a handful of the 1,093 U.S. patents he accumulated in his lifetime.  

The narrative follows the epic journey of the electric light bulb from inspiration to experimentation to presentation for investors. And not just the light, but the complete system for distributing electrical power. At home, his young wife Mary, mother of two, battles a secret morphine addiction for which Edison is more than partially responsible.

Ultimately, Edison must confront the scrutiny of an unrelenting press, a fickle public and a skeptical courtroom, all of who begin to doubt the inventor’s credibility. The circumstances cause him no small amount of mayhem as his personal and family life unravel in the wake of his pathological determination to do what no other scientist before him had been able to do.