Author Spotlight - Todd Hughes & P David Ebersole
Todd Hughes & P David Ebersole are authors and documentary filmmakers. Both independently and in partnership via their production company The Ebersole Hughes Company, they have been writing, producing, and directing films and TV shows since the mid-1980s. This includes the award-winning feature documentary House of Cardin, about the iconic designer Pierre Cardin, which premiered to a standing ovation at the 2019 Venice Film Festival in the prestigious Giornate degli Autori section. In 2021, My Name Is Lopez, a concert/documentary feature film about the trailblazing Latino rocker Trini Lopez, won Best Documentary Feature Film when it premiered at AmDocs in Palm Springs CA and was picked up for distribution by Cinedigm.
In 2022, they turned their attention to literature, with P David releasing the hard-boiled crime novel 99 Miles from L.A. and Todd following in September with the compelling memoir Lunch with Lizabeth.
In 99 Miles from L.A., we’re introduced to Frank, a frustrated singer-turned-music professor who finds himself entangled in a love affair with Shelley, a highly-educated, unhappily married woman. Eager to quit his teaching gig, Frank jumps at the chance to implement his new girlfriend’s scheme to steal the skimmed-cash treasure from her marijuana business tycoon husband. Feeling they need a third, she introduces him to Ramon, her go-to bartender, armed with a nomadic upbringing and a gun from behind the register, who likewise is all in. But Shelley’s well-thought-out heist gets more complicated when the two men find themselves impossibly drawn to one another. Hiding out in Palm Springs—99 miles from L.A.—Frank and Ramon team up in more ways than one, breaking promises not to reunite before Shelley can escape the watchful eye of her husband’s colleagues after the brutal crime succeeds. With a trunk full of money and the aphrodisiac of lawlessness urging them on, was lust morphing towards love? Or was there a deeper plan in place between these three desperate partners, each of them scratching at their last chance for freedom from a failing American dream?
P. David delivers everything we crave in our mysteries including a bi-sexual love triangle and more double-crosses than Pulp Fiction.
Lizabeth Scott reigned in Hollywood as the queen of film noir. By the time obsessed fan and gay filmmaker Todd Hughes sat down to lunch with her at Musso & Frank in Hollywood, she had largely outlived her fame. The two of them formed a unique bond and an enduring friendship that spanned twenty years. One of the very last vestiges of Hollywood's Golden Age, Lizabeth reveals to Hughes her ebullient personality and zest for life while shedding insight into her fabulously brief career as an international film star, recording artist and mistress to one of Hollywood's biggest producers. They stumble over homosexuality, art and politics but always manage to find a way to navigate the turn of the century. Todd chronicles this deep relationship with a Hollywood icon in Lunch with Lizabeth.
And as if acting, writing, producing and directing are not enough, this talented duo also enjoyed a ten year reign of glory in the tablescaping competition at the Los Angeles County Fair!
99 Miles from L.A and Lunch with Lizabeth are for sale at the Mérida English Library and are part of the library’s permanent lending collection.
