Welcome to LA

When I first got the email, it just seemed like one of those offers that’s too good to be true. The idea that I would be holding the reins of a horse drawn carriage tearing across the high plains of Colorado and that my passenger would be the famous movie star Ethan Hawke, the whole idea of being in a movie just seemed unlikely. This was the dream of millions of people who have made their way to L.A. It’s become a cliche, all those starry eyed dreamers flocking to California with a singular vision of becoming a movie star. But I’m not an actor, and that has never been my dream. But it was hard not to get swept up in the excitement of it all. I was going to be a star. Technically it wasn’t my first role, I was in a short film once, we shot it mostly at my house. My friend Michael Almereyda wrote and directed it, and now he was making a feature film about the scientist poet Nikola Tesla. He’d been telling me about it for years. He wrote the first draft of the screenplay in 1981, the same year he dropped out of college and headed West to make a go of it in Hollywood. And for a minute it had looked like he was going to knock it out of the park on his first swing. The Tesla screenplay, the first he’d ever written was optioned and Michael was flown to London to revise the script. Then it all fell apart and was never made. But now nearly 40 years later here we were. And this time it looked like it might actually happen. Ethan Hawke was going to play Tesla, Kyle MacLachlan would play Thomas Edison and Jim Gaffigan would play George Westinghouse. And here was this offer sitting in my lap, to play Fritz Lowenstein, Tesla’s assistant. All I had to do was say yes. From KCRW, this is Welcome to LA, episode 15: Nikola and Fritz David acting alongside Ethan Hawke in the upcoming film ‘Tesla’, written and directed by Michael Almereyda. On January 12, 1943, 2,000 people gathered at the Cathedral of St. John The Divine in New York City, for the funeral of Nikola Tesla. The pallbearers included some of the great inventors from the dawn of the electric age. But none of them had what Tesla had. He was on a different level than the humans who walked among him. There’s a TV show called Drunk History where comedians get drunk and explain … history. In one episode, Duncan Trussel, laying on the bathroom floor, describes Tesla. [CLIP: Drunk History] Tesla was the electric Jesus. [vomits] This is a nightmare. DAVID: In some ways Tesla was the electric Jesus. His inventions came to him as fully formed visions, like they were divine messages from God. Then he would simply kneel to the ground and draw the device in the dirt with a stick. Bam! A revolutionary new motor. He also claimed to have superhuman senses. He once wrote that a housefly landing on a table caused a dull thud in his ear. Tesla was so far ahead of his time that people thought his ideas were the wild fantasies of a madman. Also like Jesus, Tesla was a champion of the poor. At the dawn of World War II, Tesla wrote he hoped a new world would emerge where the poor were no longer exploited by the rich. And Tesla was a feminist who thought women should be granted the right to vote. He even predicted that some day women’s struggle for equality would end up with them becoming superior to men. Also like Jesus, Tesla was celibate his entire life. But there are a lot of ways in which Tesla was nothing like Jesus. He treated the common people around him like trash, he said racist and anti-semitic things. But at the same time he once said, ”Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of the races and we are still far from this blissful realization.” As the writer Samantha Hunt once said about him “For all his love of humanity, it seems Tesla did not care much for humans.” Tesla believed that world peace was achievable in his lifetime but only by building a super weapon, a death ray capable of unparalleled destruction, which [...]