farnovision

Like I Was Saying

Another more or less favorable review, spoiled in the end by the pesky vicissitudes of actual history:

We certainly can forgive "The Farnsworth Invention" for fudging some facts, but in the climactic patent ruling scene, Sorkin's script strays too far. It portrays the court siding with RCA, while historical accounts and Farnsworth fanatics insist it ruled in favor of Farnsworth. Entire websites (thefarnsworthinvention.com) have sprung up debating the play's veracity, point by point....

But apparently, showing Farnsworth winning the trial, but losing the war wouldn't fit neatly into a Broadway-friendly story frame. I suspect that Sorkin, like the money-minded Sarnoff, felt the urge to sacrifice truth and bow to the wicked pressures of commerce.

Farnsworth fanatics?  I guess that would be me....

Seems to be the Consensus

I was gonna let the dead horse lie for a while and not post this from Time Out New York, but then I got that comment telling me to "calm down" since it's "only" a play...

The big picture that results, however, is curiously fuzzy. The frank unreliability of both men’s narration provides cover for significant liberties that Sorkin has taken with history, ranging from the trivial (an urban legend about the first moon landing) to the pivotal (the climactic outcome of the patent dispute at the center of the play). Such documentary fudging might be forgivable if the play had anything else to offer..

The review is accompanied by three out of six stars.

Let Me Repeat That....

....for those of you on drugs:

Here, again, we see why ultimately this play serves the RCA party line, as yet another viewer who doesn't know the real story comes away from the theater thinking they've just  seen its genuine re-enactment:

Even though Farnsworth sued Sarnoff and RCA, he eventually lost his patent claims on a technicality of a previous held patent by Zworykin from 1923

Now repeat after me:  Farnsworth WON all his litigation against RCA, he retained all his patents, and RCA was ultimately forced to pay him no less than $1-million to use those patents.  Three years later RCA snuck Zworykin's 1923 application through a lay court on some technicality in order to spend the next (now) seventy years making the case that results in misconceptions like this writer's -- aided and abetted by "historical drama" like The Farnsworth Invention.

Likewise, The Village Voice

The Village Voice has posted it's review of The Farnsworth Invention:

Farnsworth never explores any aspect of the story deeply. From the sources of the stirrings that made a rural potato-farmer's kid an electronics whiz by high-school age to the seismic shift in social patterns caused by the mass success of radio and then TV, everything is brushed in, snappily, with a factoid or two, encased in a wisecrack whenever possible, as on those TV docudramas that leave you wishing you'd been told the real story instead.

And to think... the real story was right there all the time... <*sigh*>

Thank You, Mr. Leonard

Back on November 5th, I posted an entry here entitled "The Great Deception Continues" which cited a blog by Arthur S. Leonard, a professor at the New York Law School, who saw an early preview of The Farnsworth Invention as it prepared for its opening on Broadway.   I noted then how Mr. Leonard had reiterated one of the fallacies of the play, i.e. Farnsworth's inability to deal effectively with his "light problem," and how that contention has always been one of the cornerstones of RCA's PR campaign to dismiss the breakthrough represented by Farnsworth's Image Dissector Tube. 

This morning I learned that Mr. Leonard has obtained a copy of my book (ah, so he's the one...) and, apparently a couple of weeks ago, posted an extensive entry to his blog that is very sympathetic to the perspective I have been expressing:

Schatzkin strove mightily to create the most accurate account he could, based on recollections of the inventor's widow and sons as well as many who had worked with him.  To then see the oversimplifications, truncations, rearrangements of time and place, and so forth, that Sorkin undertook to create a dramatic vehicle of reasonable length, must be upsetting to any author.  But perhaps more significantly, presumably for dramatic purposes, Sorkin's stage play distorts Farnsworth's life by suggesting outcomes that differ from the reality depicted in Mr. Schatzkin's biography -- not just in detail but in broad outline and theme as well.

I think Mr. Leonard has gotten to the real crux of the issue, why this play (or movie) is so important, and why it's so frustrating that it turns out the way it does:

It would do well to remember that many of the important scientific inventions that created our modern world were devised by individuals who lacked extensive formal training in science and technology, who were largely self-taught, such as Thomas Edison, for example.  It may be that true scientific genius would even be hampered by formal training, since formal training may have the unfortunate effect of grounding somebody too deeply in the received paradigms of his or her time ... for the truly unusual geniuses among us who are capable of the transcendent insights that produce the quantum leaps in science, higher education may at times prove a hindrance rather than an enabler of such breakthroughs.

Now, why can't somebody put THAT into a play or movie??

The irony here is that it was my post of Mr. Leonard's post back in November that first tipped Aaron off to the fact of this biographer's (admittedly belated) reservations about his play. 

I may have had an opportunity to express these themes to Aaron Sorkin well  before the play opened on Broadway. If I did I blew my chance. Now I don't know if Aaron and I are on speaking (well, e-mailing...) terms.  So I just hope that whoever is monitoring this blog on Aaron's behalf will tell him about this post, and steer him toward Mr. Leonard's post.  Perhaps then we will have something to talk about:  "the spirit of exploration" (as Aaron put it in a couple of interviews).

Some Good, Some Not So Much

Here's a review from somebody in the cheap seats:

Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention got pretty roundly panned by Ben Brantley, but my assessment of it is far more kind. The first question is whether Sorkin has learned from the failings of Studio 60, and the answer is mostly yes.

What's more interesting are the comments that follow, which discuss some of the issues we've been entertaining around here.  Like, f'rinstance, this one:

It's not just Wikipedia. Apparently, Sorkin pretty much destroys the historical record, especially in terms of key patent decisions. As a Sorkin fan, I really want to see the show; as a historian, I'm queasy that he's reportedly playing so fast and loose with the facts. I have no problem with "historical fiction" as a genre, but I do think creative artists bear some responsibility to keep the major details correct.

Which is my point entirely. Anybody can make stuff up to serve their dramatic purpose (to varying degrees of success, as reviews of this play readily attest). The real challenge is remaining faithful to the underlying facts and finding/amplifying the drama within. That's a full order of magnitude harder. That one of the great screenwriter/playwrights of our time could not rise to such a task only underscores the degree of difficulty.

Bloomberg.com: Muse

Link: Bloomberg.com: Muse.

Aaron Sorkin had a pretty impressive Broadway debut 18 years back with ``A Few Good Men,'' before heading off to Hollywood and making great television with ``The West Wing.'' He returns with ``The Farnsworth Invention,'' at the Music Box Theatre, an odd duck of a play about ... television. Odd because it mostly defies the conventions of play writing, which ticked off some critics.

That, I think, is the point a lot of the reviews missed; the play at least tries to do something fairly original. Some critics who have found fault have done so through, how shall we say, a "conventional" prism. It is ever thus for those who try something different.

WSJ: TFI = 2B

"2B," is case you're wondering, is the baseball score-card notation for a double.  When somebody e-mailed me earlier this week his assessment that the reviews for The Farnsworth Invention had scored it a "FO" (fly out), I said I didn't think it was that bad, more like a ground-rule double.  Happily, Terry Teachout at the Wall St. Journal agrees:

I'll take them in ascending order of quality, starting with "The Farnsworth Invention." Aaron Sorkin, who fled Broadway two decades ago to till the greener fields of Hollywood, has returned for the first time since "A Few Good Men" with a play about television -- and it's not a gossipy roman à clef, either. While "The Farnsworth Invention" is as slick as "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," it's also impressively earnest, and its subject is the less-than-burning question of Who Really Invented TV. And you know what? It's good. Not great, you understand, but a rock-solid two-base hit.

Farnsworth and Sarnoff tell one another's stories in "The Farnsworth Invention," an ingenious conceit that keeps the action ping-ponging back and forth between the two characters. Mr. Azaria plays Sarnoff as a tightly coiled tough guy with a sandpaper voice, while Mr. Simpson's Farnsworth is engagingly and believably sincere. Des McAnuff's staging roars along like a high-speed tank, and the other 17 members of the cast, all of whom play multiple roles, put personal spins on even the smallest parts.

Reading this, I think it's safe to conclude that whatever shortcomings the play has encountered in the attempt to convey very complex and somewhat esoteric material, is compensated by the strength of the performances, the cleverness of the direction, and the originality of the approach, i.e. the interwoven narrations offered by the principal characters of each other's story.  I still think the playwright deserves high marks just for taking on the material, regardless of any other reservations.  It's a difficult topic.  If aaron Sorkin can't handle it, then maybe it can't be done.

 

Gee, Maybe the Facts DO Matter

In any event, The New York Observer. doesn't care much for the science lesson.

Alas, The Farnsworth Invention is swamped by all its unstoppable science lessons (which are rattled off at top speed as if everyone onstage—and off—wants them over and done with). Mr. Sorkin explains far too much—including act two’s unnecessary, clichéd opening scene that depicts the familiar panic on the New York Stock Exchange during the 1929 crash. (“Selling 2,000 shares at 81!” “Gimme 77 and a half!” “Get me the chairman of the Federal Reserve!”)

Makes ya wonder how "An Inconvenient Truth" got to be such a hit.   But then there's this:

We take Mr. Sorkin’s story with a big pinch of salt. Farnsworth’s biographer, Paul Schatzkin, has disputed many of the historic facts in the play—including its conclusion that Farnsworth lost his complicated patent battle. The reverse happened: He won. Nor was he broke: Sarnoff paid him a million dollars in 1939.

The woolly disclaimer from the producers that the show is really “a memory play” in which the adversaries “acknowledge their own unreliability” scarcely helps. Are we seriously meant to believe Sarnoff when he announces at the play’s end that he can’t remember whether he won or lost the most important legal battle of his life?

The (still unpublished?) review by David Spencer that Aaron asked me to post yesterday makes the point that this play will be how people remember this story for eons to come.  The tragedy in that statement should be obvious.  Philo T. Farnsworth finally gets his moment in the sun, and he is STILL overshadowed by David Sarnoff -- who, in this telling, can't even remember the real outcome.  How pitiful is THAT?

If you do read this review, by all means read the comment by Neil Cohen that follows:

The sad thing about Sorkin's FARNSWORTH play is that he fell in love with David Sarnoff. The David Sarnoff portrayed in THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION is a guy burnt by anti-semites who is standing up for the Jews; the reality is that RCA maintain[ed] contacts with the Nazi regime in Germany far into the 1930's....

Well now, there's a controversy not even I could have stirred up....

Aaron Sorkin Responds

Aaron Sorkin has e-mailed me with a response to this article which appeared in the New York Post on Friday, November 30.   His message appears  here  unaltered and unedited:

Paul,

I hope this finds you well. Below is one of the many positive reviews of the play and I think the reviewer says in his opening paragraphs what I was trying to say to you in a previous e-mail but, like most people and most things, he says it better than I'm able to. There are good forums for debating history--you and I participated in one and I would have been happy to participate in others with you. The forum you chose--the New York Post of all silly places--was, frankly, petty and spiteful. Moreover (and fairly ironically) the Post story got so many facts wrong. Not astonishing for the Post. (For instance, Pem not only smoked, she smoked in front of me and she was the one who told me the story about the smoke coming up on the screen. Since a brief lunch over sixteen years ago, I've never met, spoken or corresponded with Kent Farnsworth so it's not clear to me how working with me this whole time could have been a bad experience for him. The Post piece failed to mention that Georgia Skinner is your ex-wife. The Farnsworth Invention isn't even remotely based--as you've incorrectly suggested many times--on Pem Farnsworth's book, Distant Vision, which I've never read. (The Post forgot to mention that if I HAD based a play or a movie on Pem's book, Georgia Skinner would have made money.) Finally, Paul, this is between a deceased mother and her son, but shame on you for bringing Kent into this. You know as well as I do that Kent and Pem had deep, serious problems with each other for decades. Or maybe you don't. We could have debated these things in a great place in front of a crowd that really wanted to know and didn't just want to dish. You chose to do it in the same place we find out who Britney Spears threw up on last night. Your website seems to be about finding the truth. I certainly hope you'll post this, along with one man's take below

- - - - -

Aaron's message was accompanied by a review which appears in its entirety in the continuation of this post.

So that I don't get caught in the middle of this discussion, I have also posted the article, and Aaron's response to the discussion forum at thefarnsworthinvention.com. Visitors will need to register in order to participate in that discussion.

Click "continue reading" below to read David Spencer's review of The Farnsworth Invention.