num_pages: 336
description: Dominic Smiths The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee New JerseyAmericas first movie townand on the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one mans doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.For nearly half a century Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumire brothers the inventors of cinema Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotelthe lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse Sabine Montrosethe past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration and Claudes memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.
language: English
title: The Electric Hotel
publisher: Sarah Crichton Books