The Electric Hotel

Following the New York Times best-selling The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Smith imagines silent-film pioneer Claude Ballard, who began his career as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers and was eventually bankrupted by his chef d'oeuvre, The Electric Hotel. The past is reawakened when a film student comes to interview Claude in his shabby suite at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel.

March 15, 2019
A long-retired moviemaker recalls the early days of silent films in Smith's atmospheric follow-up to The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016, etc.).In 1962, 85-year-old Claude Ballard lives in a run-down Hollywood hotel and spends his days gathering mushrooms and photographing street scenes. He has not made a movie since his "grand cinematic experiment," The Electric Hotel, appeared in 1910. As his reminiscences to young film scholar Martin Embry unfold, we eventually learn the reasons for his decision, but first we get a wonderfully vivid re-creation of the spell cast by the earliest films, when photographer's apprentice Claude sees the Lumière brothers' first reels exhibited in the basement of a Paris hotel in 1895: "every inch of the screen was alive...you burrowed into the screen, dug it out with your gaze." His work for the Lumières takes him to New York, where the audience's loud response to a moving picture next door to her theater infuriates touring French actress Sabine Montrose. She winds up in bed with Claude and in the new medium; buccaneering producer Hal Bender finds them a studio perched over the Palisades in New Jersey, where he hopes to elude Thomas Edison's litigious Motion Picture Patents Company. Smith skillfully blends film history with the adventures of his cast; a Stanislavsky-obsessed acting coach and an Australian stuntman are among the intriguingly idiosyncratic folks who join Sabine, Claude, and Hal, each haunted by damage a parent has inflicted, to joyously invent a new art form. The novel climaxes with a brilliantly detailed account of the filming of The Electric Hotel and its triumphant premiere, followed by multiple blows that have been deftly foreshadowed. The account of Claude's traumatic experiences filming the devastation of World War I is something of a letdown, but a final scene with Sabine ties up emotional loose ends, and Martin's screening of the restored Electric Hotel provides a moving finale.A compelling plot, robust characters, and finely crafted prose richly evoke a bygone age and art.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 8, 2019
Smith (The Last Painting of Sara De Vos) takes readers back to the dawn of the motion picture era in his splendid latest. Claude Ballard is an old man in 1962, living at Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel, when he’s contacted by Martin Embry, a PhD candidate in film history. When the elderly director reveals that he owns a print of his first feature film, long considered lost, the young scholar’s enthusiasm about its discovery prompts Claude to reminisce about the film’s genesis and aftermath. From his early days photographically documenting ailments at a Paris hospital, to his rapid rise to prominence by demonstrating the capabilities of the Lumière brothers’ moving picture innovations, to his ill-fated (both professionally and personally) production of The Electric Hotel, to his surprising heroic turn in WWI, Claude’s own story—and those of the leading lady, stuntman, and impresario who collaborated with him—unfolds as cinematically as the scenes he creates on film. Fascinating information about the making of silent films (including a villainous cameo by Thomas Edison) is balanced by poignant, emotional portrayals of individuals attempting to define their lives offscreen even as they made history on it. Smith winningly delves into Hollywood’s past.

Starred review from April 1, 2019
In 1962, cinematographer Claude Ballard is rusticating with the other eccentric, washed-up denizens of Hollywood's Knickerbocker Hotel. When a doctoral candidate arrives to interview him, Claude's past begins to unspool, and Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, 2016) shifts the focus to the nascent film industry at the turn of the century. On the Hudson Palisades, a ragtag bunch of innovators?Claude, aging French stage actress Sabine Montrose (clearly modeled on Sarah Bernhardt), an Australian stunt man, and a Brooklyn entrepreneur?creates a silent film masterpiece, The Electric Hotel. Success is within their grasp when archvillain Thomas Edison lets loose his copyright lawyers. The atmosphere is convincing as Smith transports readers to fin de si�cle New Jersey, the sick room of a tubercular widow, and Belgium in the throes of WWI. The depth and breadth of the characterization is truly impressive, the story line immersive, and the prose richly evocative as the novel ranges from tragic to nail-biting to hilarious. Smith's tale is as luminous as celluloid projected on a silver screen hung from a dirigible floating over the Hudson (yes, this happens). Highly recommended.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 15, 2019
A long-retired moviemaker recalls the early days of silent films in Smith's atmospheric follow-up to The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016, etc.).In 1962, 85-year-old Claude Ballard lives in a run-down Hollywood hotel and spends his days gathering mushrooms and photographing street scenes. He has not made a movie since his "grand cinematic experiment," The Electric Hotel, appeared in 1910. As his reminiscences to young film scholar Martin Embry unfold, we eventually learn the reasons for his decision, but first we get a wonderfully vivid re-creation of the spell cast by the earliest films, when photographer's apprentice Claude sees the Lumi�re brothers' first reels exhibited in the basement of a Paris hotel in 1895: "every inch of the screen was alive...you burrowed into the screen, dug it out with your gaze." His work for the Lumi�res takes him to New York, where the audience's loud response to a moving picture next door to her theater infuriates touring French actress Sabine Montrose. She winds up in bed with Claude and in the new medium; buccaneering producer Hal Bender finds them a studio perched over the Palisades in New Jersey, where he hopes to elude Thomas Edison's litigious Motion Picture Patents Company. Smith skillfully blends film history with the adventures of his cast; a Stanislavsky-obsessed acting coach and an Australian stuntman are among the intriguingly idiosyncratic folks who join Sabine, Claude, and Hal, each haunted by damage a parent has inflicted, to joyously invent a new art form. The novel climaxes with a brilliantly detailed account of the filming of The Electric Hotel and its triumphant premiere, followed by multiple blows that have been deftly foreshadowed. The account of Claude's traumatic experiences filming the devastation of World War I is something of a letdown, but a final scene with Sabine ties up emotional loose ends, and Martin's screening of the restored Electric Hotel provides a moving finale.A compelling plot, robust characters, and finely crafted prose richly evoke a bygone age and art.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2019

The year is 1963, and silent-film director Claude Ballard is tracked down at the Los Angeles hotel where he's long lived by a PhD student writing about Claude's lost masterpiece, The Electric Hotel. Smith, who delved into art history in his previous novel, The Last Painting of Sara De Vos, does much the same for the history of early cinema this time around. Beyond that, we end up learning much more about Ballard's life, including his derring-do covering the carnage of World War I and his relationship with the love of his life, the complex and sultry actress Sabine Montrose. There's even a cameo by a most unpleasant Thomas Edison, who does his best to put a stop to Ballard's wildly successful film. Ballard's obsession with the moving image drives him throughout his journeys, and at times you want reach through the pages and give him a little shake. But he's an admirable person even if he doesn't realize it. VERDICT Smith tries to cover too much territory, but Ballard is finely rendered, and there are quite a few edge-of-your-seat moments. Recommended to fans of Graham Moore's The Last Days of Night and Amor Towles's The Gentleman from Moscow. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]--Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2019

Following the New York Times best-selling The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Smith imagines silent-film pioneer Claude Ballard, who began his career as a concession agent for the Lumi�re brothers and was eventually bankrupted by his chef d'oeuvre, The Electric Hotel. The past is reawakened when a film student comes to interview Claude in his shabby suite at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel.

April 26, 2019
Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel is a sensory delight, retelling the life story of a former film director—known as ‘the Frenchman behind the viewfinder’—with the rich vocabulary of cinema. Claude Ballard, a French auteur of silent films now lost to history, is dragged out of obscurity by a film student interested in his masterpiece The Electric Hotel. Through interviews, readers learn of Ballard’s tutelage under cinema’s first greats, the Lumiere brothers, his struggles and successes in the early American studio days, and how an unrealised romance bled into his film, ultimately leaving him emotionally and financially bankrupt. Smith uses Ballard’s lost cinematic work as an anchor for this emotional and turbulent story, highlighting not only the incredible and alluring power of film but also its ability to provide structure and meaning to sometimes impossible lives, even if that same ‘art’ is tragic too: ‘When I dream of that old life I see it like a strip of burning celluloid,’ says Ballard. With a keen eye for cinema’s early history, The Electric Hotel will attract readers with an appetite for old Hollywood and keep them, with its protagonist’s story of ambition, art and redemption.

Nathan Smith is a freelance writer