Let There Be Light: Nicola Tesla (2005)

Historical fiction based on real fact about what allowed Nicola Tesla to continue inventing for 20 years after his near demise by his own hand. It's the third decade of the 20th century, and master inventor/innovator Nicola Tesla is getting...old, his physical health not doing so good. His mental health is not so good either. He has spent his entire life trying to serve and revolutionize the world through his ground breaking inventions, but his scientific and economic competitors have thrown him out of the loop, leaving him in a dingy apartment in New York with barely enough money to feed himself and the animals around him, the only life forms he still trusts. The most prominent person who discredited and betrayed Nicola is Thomas Edison, all American success story who made much of his fortune by stealing Tesla's work, particularly in Nicola's younger years when he came to America to work for the famous inventor. But now Nicola is done...no one is listening to him anymore, and all of his funding has dried up. His brain has dried up with regard to new ideas as well, and 'when the singer has no songs to sing, the singer should be no more'. He puts off jumping off the roof of his overdue-rent apartment by a reporter, Virginia, a young woman who claims to have been sent by Milosovich, the only historian still interested in the old man who was once nominated for the Nobel Prize but is now labelled as a delusional idealist, and political subversive. Virginia claims that she wants to do a story on Nicola, but he soon interviews her, finding out very quickly that she is far more intelligent than her station as a lower rung interviewer for the NY Times. Virginia has a brilliant scientific mind that just needs someone to recognize it, and to let her participate in the "mans' world" of scientific innovation. Finally seeing someone to whom he can pass on his Torch of scientific wisdom and the vitality-infused Spiritual Core from which it comes, Nicola (as his health deteriorates) relates his life story and most valued inventions to Virginia. She tries to convince him that being a success in the world as it is requires one to 'give the world what it wants, not what it needs', but such is the mandate of selfish capitalists such as Edison according to the still idealistic, humanity-serving Tesla. They argue, and then connect even deeper than before, Tesla offering to take Virginia on as his only apprentice, and willing to entrust her the lab book with his most valued (and guarded) ideas in it. He is willing to do this even though he figures out that she was not sent by Milosovich, as she originally claimed. But Virginia teaches Nicola something as well. The old man finally realizes regarding his inventions that the world accepting his ideas is up to 'a Higher Wisdom' and his Calling, and job, is to just keep coming up with new ideas. It eases his tortured soul and gets his creative soul working again. He sends Virginia out the door with his most trusted lab books, convinced that she will build upon his discoveries with her own. But, Virginia is confronted after she leaves by Thomas Edison, Nicola's arch rival who is still bent on discrediting Tesla as well as stealing from him. Virginia is to get a lab or her own and funding, and lots of money from Edison as part of the deal...but, she delays handing over the book to Edison. She keeps Tesla's most valued and guarded discoveries to herself as she walks away from both scientists, now having to figure out who SHE really is and needs to become.