farnovision

THE FACTS VS. 'FARNSWORTH'

With the play opening officially this coming Monday night, it's gratifying to see "the rest of the story" -- the REAL story that the play neglects, beginning to get some traction:

Link: THE FACTS VS. 'FARNSWORTH'.

November 30, 2007 -- CAN Aaron Sorkin handle the truth - or does he just not care? So wonder Philo T. Farnsworth fans who've seen Sorkin's new Broadway play.

Opening Monday, "The Farnsworth Invention" describes Farnsworth's struggle to build a TV system and protect his work against RCA and its leader, David Sarnoff. Audiences leave believing Farnsworth was a failed, drunken genius.

In truth, Farnsworth won his patent fight, showed off a working TV system in 1934 and was manufacturing TVs by 1939.

Farnsworth's admirers, who've tried for decades to adjust the fuzzy historical picture, say Sorkin's drama plays like a bad rerun.

"After 30 years of telling that story, we finally see it turned into popular entertainment, and it's wrong!" says Paul Schatzkin, author of the Farnsworth biography "The Boy Who Invented Television."

Follow this link for a scene-by-scene analysis of the play -v- the true story

The Strike Is Settled!

Broadway stagehands have settled their dispute with the Producers Guild and ended their walk-out.  Preview performances of The Farnsworth Invention resume tonight (Thurs, Nov 19) and the official opening is scheduled for next Monday, December 30.

No Opening for "Farnsworth"

Looks like the current round of negotiations have reached and impasse, and Broadway will be dark through Thanksgiving weekend:

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Talks to end Broadway's longest strike in 32 years reached an impasse yesterday, resulting in performances for 27 shows being canceled through Nov. 25.

``We are profoundly disappointed to have to tell you that talks broke off tonight, and that no further negotiations are scheduled,'' Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of The League of American Theatres and Producers, said in a statement.

Negotiators for producers informed representatives for striking Broadway stagehands that what stagehands offered ``was not enough,'' Bruce Cohen, a spokesman for Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, told reporters at the Westin New York hotel, where talks were held.

Particularly hard hit have been the bumper crop of plays this season. They include Tom Stoppard's ``Rock `n' Roll,'' which opened to rave reviews six days before the strike shut it down, and Aaron Sorkin's ``The Farnsworth Invention,'' which has had to postpone its opening.           

      

"Everyone was crossing their fingers, hoping for a quick resolution this weekend,'' Michael David, a producer of ``Farnsworth,'' said before last night's impasse. ``But we've also been making contingency plans for each show's unique needs.''           

Regular readers here know I have some issues with how the play deals with some of the actual history, but I wouldn't wish this on anybody.  I really expected to hear that the strike was resolved and the show would go on.  No such luck.  I'm sorry it will not be happy Thanksgiving for all the cast, crew, and creative people who have assembled The Farnsworth Invention.

Another Example..

...of the false history lesson that audiences will take away from The Farnsworth Invention.
This is from a blog entry by Alan Meckler, the CEO of Jupiter Media:

Farnsworth refers to Philo Farnsworth who was the real father of the television. He conceived of "television" as a teen in 1912. Later he lost out in getting the patent to television technology to David Sarnoff (founder of RCA and the National Broadcasting Company).

At least Meckler learned that "Philo Farnsworth was the real father of television." But irony here is that Farnsworth did NOT "lose out in getting the patent to television technology" to David Sarnoff, RCA, or anybody else. Farnsworth WON all that litigation, but in the play, a different verdict is rendered.

I'm still trying to figure out how the verdict can be reversed in a production that bills itself as "historical drama."

Strike claims play about TV inventor Farnsworth

The AP's television writer Frazier Moore has picked up the story of "Farnsworth's" postponed Broadway debut, as reported in the inventor's home town paper, the Fort Wayne (IN) Journal Gazette.

Another lousy break for Philo Farnsworth.

Farnsworth is the chap who invented television 80 years ago, then was cheated out of his due credit, fame and riches.

He died in 1971, but, 36 years later, was poised for a posthumous revival. A new play about the Fort Wayne-based inventor was opening on Broadway – then theater stagehands went on strike.

Granted, “The Farnsworth Invention” is just one of 27 Broadway productions the strike has shuttered for now.

Written by Aaron Sorkin, the play dramatizes Farnsworth’s losing battle with David Sarnoff, legendary boss of the Radio Corp. of America and founder of NBC. Sarnoff was determined to seize television as his own. And he did, condemning Farnsworth to obscurity in the world TV remade.

“I think your invention is extraordinary,” says Sarnoff (played by Hank Azaria), “and it’s my intention to be a worthy custodian.”

Farnsworth’s wry response: “Good luck.”

Another Actor's Take on The Strike

The Asbury Park Press offers this story about actor Michael Mulheren and how he is handling the strike:

"It's just insane," Mulheren said as he was on his way to pick up his two children from a pre-school in the Red Bank area. "This could be a long one because the stagehands union has never struck before."

If the strike continues through Thanksgiving and into December — the busiest and most lucrative season for Broadway — Mulheren predicts some shows will post closing notices before January, usually the slowest month of the theater season.

Mulheren, incidentally, is the actor who speaks the most erroneous lines in the whole play, when he plays the judge who says "priority of invention is awarded to Vladimir Zworykin." 

I get what the playwright is trying to do here, it's just not consistent with the facts -- any more than Goliath dodging David's stone.

Despite whatever issues I have with how the play handles the actual history, I hope the strike gets settled before the producers have to seriously consider posting a "closing notice."  That would be truly tragic.

"Pem" is Just Waiting

While the opening of The Farnsworth Invention remains in limbo due to the stagehands strike on Broadway, the New York Times offers a profile of Alexandra Wilson, the actress who landed the role of Pem Farnsworth:

“She’s great,” Ms. Wilson said of her character. “I’m totally in love with her. Not to sound like a cliché, but she’s the woman behind the man. In real life they were like 18 and 19 years old when they got married. She actually passed away only a year ago, and Aaron Sorkin met her. She made it her life’s work to get Philo’s story out there, to get the credit he deserved.”

One wonders if the "credit he deserved" includes being portrayed as drunk when he proposed to her, and a court decision that awards "priority of invention" to.... Vladimir Zworykin. 

Don't Anybody Tell The Producers

The opening of The Farnsworth Invention on Broadway has been postponed until the stagehands settle their strike with producers. But the PR machine was cranked up to fulll volume last week, making the cast and crew available to whatever media outlets were ready to soft-peddle the play's "even handed" treatment of the subject matter.

Nevertheless, the producers of this particular play will probably be chagrined to read this quote from an article that appeared in the Fort Wayne Indiana Journal Gazette:

The play is based on “Distant Vision,” a biography written by Farnsworth’s wife, Elma “Pem” Farnsworth.

Both the playwright and the producer have denied that there is any direct connection between the play and Mrs. Farnsworth's book -- despite the fact that the project was first instigated back in the 1990s when the people who own the rights to the book brought it to the writer's attention, and despite the fact that one of those people is listed as a producer of the play. All coincidence, of course, since the play is really "fiction" anyway...

More First Impressions

And Once again, the false premise justifies the false conclusion:

Blogger: Adventures in and out of Mainstream Media

The play was rather revisionist about the life of David Sarnoff, humanizing him, and making him almost sympathetic, or at least comprehensible. He wasn't so bad really, it was just that the Cossacks burned down his house in Russia when he was 10 years old and he had to make sure to burn Farnsworth's house down before Farnsworth torched the Sarnoff mansion. A little bit reductive I say--to explain much of American media history via childhood trauma but Azaria did a great job in trying to show how the most powerful of men often feel as if they are under siege, always about to go completely under if they don't stay on top.

"A bit reductive"?  That's putting it charitably.

Of course, it could all be moot, for a while at least, until the stagehands settle their strike.  But despite whatever objections I may have to the play 's version of history, I hope the  strike does not interfere with its opening.  Whatever the play's shortcomings, at least people are learning that somebody DID invent television.

An Actress see The "Invention"

Here's a blog post from Naiomi's acting journal that  somehow manages to capture all the upsides and downsides to Aaron Sorkin's Broadway play.  I hope the author will forgive me for quoting it almost in its entirety, with comments:

So yesterday my acting class went and saw “The Farnsworth Invention.” I loved it! It was an awesome show. So the play was about philo T Farnsworth (played by Jimmi Simpson) and the great race to produce a device that sends pictures from one place to another. And the play shows how incredibly bright Philo was. In 9th grade he drew his science teacher a picture of what a machine that could send moving pictures from one place to another would look like.

 

One of the things that makes the play challenging for anybody familiar with the actual story is that it starts out so seductively; As the blogger says, the opening seens are a heart-warming rendering of the actual facts. 

... as the play progresses you see how David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria) takes advantage of Farnsworth. Sarnoff manages to create the first machine that could give a very clear picture of an object. But only by basically stealing information from Philo. (Farnsworth had created, years earlier, a machine that could produce a picture but it was of very poor quality and the amount of light needed to create a clear picture would be enough to blind a person).

 

And that's where things start to get a bit scrambled.  Farnsworth's "machine" proved the principal of electrical scanning.  As I have said many times, that was "a breakthrough of epic proportions," regardless of its light-sensitivity.  Sarnoff and RCA had to begin with what Farnsworth achieved, and could only build on that.  From that beginning, RCA produced some advancements that improved light sensitivity, but so did Farnsworth, and the play completely overlooks that point and to the contrary makes Farnsworth seem inept and confused. 

Over the years, RCA built its entire "we invented television" campaign on the improvements it made to Farnsworth's breakthrough.  The play only perpetuates that myth.

...Many times during the play Farnsworth turned to alcohol to deal with his increasing stress and powerlessness.

 

It's encouraging that the writer arrives at that conclusion.  Yes, Farnsworth turned to alcohol later -- in the mid-1930s -- as a coping mechanism, but the play portrays him as "under the influence" from almost the moment he gets funding to begin his work, which was simply not the case.

 

A memorable line that Sarnoff says towards the end of the play is, “I burned down his house, so he wouldn’t burn down mine.” When Sarnoff was 10 he saw his home burned by a Russian solider. He and his family had to flee the country. I guess Sarnoff was not going to let that happen again. He was not going to let Farnsworth burn down his house-his company.

<*sigh*>  So this becomes the theatrical Sarnoff's justification for his actions.  The historical problem is that scenario is not consistent with the facts.  Sarnoff's family left Russia more or less voluntarily; there is no evidence that their house was ever burned down in a Cossack raid.  So this story point is allegorical, at best. 

 

I loved how the play was organized in such a way that Sarnoff would tell Farnsworth’s story and Farnsworth would tell Sarnoff’s story and there would be moments when one would try and correct the other or times when Sarnoff and Farnsworth disagreed about an event that happened.

I agree, the two "unreliable narrators" is a very effective dramatic device.

I don’t know. The play just got to me. It just hurts me how a person can invest so many years of their lives in something only to have it fall apart. Only to find out that all those years were wasted. Yes without him we may not have had television but look at the price Farnsworth had to pay.

 

My contention has always been that the real loss in this story comes later, when Farnsworth's entrepreneurial freedom has been compromised (actually, for a lot of reasons, David Sarnoff was just one of them) and he is unable to bring his Second Great Invention to fruition.  In the 1950s and 60s, Farnsworth developed a nuclear fusion process -- based, ironically enough, on discoveries he made while trying to improve the light sensitivity of his camera tubes.  Had that invention proven successful, we would have a clean, safe, and virtually inexhaustible source of energy and global warming would never have become the problem that it is today.  But that's a subject for another essay.

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