Mitch Reviews Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention

[Guest blogger Mitch reviews Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention. I make some comments at the bottom.]

Aaron Sorkin's new play The Farnsworth Invention is on Broadway now and in general it's a very brisk, entertaining historical drama. But in the most important ways, it seems, it is the textbook definition of a bad historical drama, in that much of the narrative is completely, utterly untrue. Sorkin is always a hotly debated figure on this blog, so I thought I’d pose the question: if the play is good, does it matter if Sorkin tweaked history to improve the dramatic flow of the story?

Spoilers follow.

When I worked for my old job, one of my tasks was carting scripts around from one Broadway executive’s office to another. Just to make it as surreal as possible, this task was carried out in the company limo. Most of this was painfully uninteresting and anyone who has spent time in a cab in midtown Manhattan at lunchtime can probably imagine how annoying it was. Every once and a while, though, something really neat found it’s way into my lap. One day I was in the limo and I found myself with the manuscript of Sorkin’s new play, The Farnsworth Invention—a historical drama that illustrates the complications Philo Farnsworth endured while inventing and securing the patent for television. Immediately I thought it was a great idea. Here is Broadway playwright cum television producer Sorkin returning to Broadway with a play about television. When Hank Azaria was cast, I knew that I would definitely go see it.

The play is rapid in the best sense of the word—there are over 60 characters in just as many locations. Farnsworth (played by very well by Jimmi Simpson) and RCA mogul David Sarnoff (played by Azaria) counter-narrate the action of the play through five decades. Occasionally Sorkin stumbles into cheesy scenes between two characters where one character starts to leave, but then stops and says “for whatever it’s worth…etc;” but mostly his reverence for the history and potential of television is inspiring. The climactic court case where RCA swiped the patent for television from Farnsworth and left him drunk and depressed left my fiancée and I captivated.

There’s only problem. Farnsworth DIDN’T lose the patent to RCA. While Sorkin’s play makes a brief mention to the fact that there were numerous appeals in the case, the rights were, in fact, eventually sold to RCA. The play is audaciously cut and dry about the matter—Sorkin didn’t trust the audience to grasp the complexity of years of both won and un-won legal battles that would, yes, eventually sink Farnswoth into drunken depression.

I guess I wondered if such a simplification is insulting to the memory of Farnsworth or merely economical storytelling. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wonder long. Pressed by members of Farnsworth’s family, the New York Post (of all places) printed this article.

Not to be undone, Sorkin sent a defensive email to the Farnsworth family member, which the family member posted here. There is also a great review of the play, which compares it to other revisionary historical dramas.

With respect to the members of Farnsworth’s family, I find myself strangely siding with Sorkin on this. Granted, he is quite defensive and in denial in that post, but even so—his ending is KIND OF a better ending for the stage version of Farnsworth. Remember, in real life Farnsworth the underdog won a lot of money and still became a lay-about alcoholic. Dramatically, it was better to me to see Farnsworth definitively defeated in one case, rather than worn down over a couple of decades.

The reaction of Farnsworth’s family reminded me eerily of the fan outcry at the ending to Star Trek: Enterprise, which was almost universally reviled as being untrue to the series. (Look it up on Wikipedia if you are interested: It’s called “These are the Voyages”) All of this led me to wonder about endings in general. In this case, can an ending still be true to the story if it isn’t actually true to the source material?

[I think folks around here will already guess I think it CAN, and also that to a certain extent IT MUST. Oscar Wilde famously complained that the problem with life is that it has not sense of dramatic structure, or proportion, or timing. Art, said Wilde, was our chance to teach life its proper place. That being said, it still may be the case that in Sorkin may have gone too far in simplifying the ending -- not because it is false, but because it suggests that the audience is too dumb to understand complexity. Changing the ending of such a recent piece of history, he should also have been prepared for the backlash -- it is not like he is making 300.]

Michael Clayton

This movie opened a long time ago to excellent reviews. I have very little to add, except to say that the reviews are right. What makes the movie so smart is that it appeals to mainstream audiences with a solid John Grisham-esque story and appeals to the move-savvy viewer with excellent direction very much in the Stephen Soderbergh vein. The character’s are basically recognizable lawyer fiction types, but they are all at a much more human level of ambiguity, which is excellent. The “villain” in particular stands out because it would have been so easy to make her into a monster who has simply lost touch with humanity. It even would have worked with the theme. But as someone who is losing her way in the film we are watching, she is so much more compelling.

I wonder what I would say to someone who complained Michael Clayton was derivative of Soderbergh, who is an executive producer. It does feel a bit like a house-style: washed out colours; tense but subtle, smart music; hearing the audio of an earlier or later scene superimposed on a present one; deeply ambiguous moments, like Michael with the horses, or the closing credit sequence. But it a style I very much want more of, so I certainly will not fault the film for a lack of originality. Michael Clayton is the directorial debut of Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy – the guy is absolutely solid on every point. This is my favourite kind of film – one with such technical mastery that it makes something fundamentally dumb transcendent. It is not unlike Lost or Angel, on this point.

[I do not know if people are frustrated with these short, somewhat haphazard posts. It is a mode I want to try more, but it will not take over this blog for too long at a time. I like to put something small up, especially on a day with a guest blogger because I do not want to steal the spotlight from our new writers with a huge essay, but I am also trying not to disappear under a hail of guest-bloggers either.]

Saw: A Pedantic Bore

Scott91777 found this pretty good article on Slate about how annoying and dull the Saw movies are, and why. It chimed well with the AVPR review I just put up, so I thought I would link to it.

Slate on Saw

Aliens versus Predator: Requiem

I knew going in this was going to be bad. The Onion, who I usually trust, gave this an F, which surprised me since they are usually pretty stingy with those. (They rely heavily on the "gentleman's F" -- the D). I sort of liked the previous Alien versus Predator movie, which I thought did a pretty good job within the parameters of the PG-13 rating -- the buried temple with hidden passages had a kind of goofy boy's adventure novel exuberance, and I thought it was cute how the human became the "sidekick" rather than the savior. Not a good movie really, but I found a lot of reasons to cut it some slack.

If you were looking for the essence of the word "perfunctory" AVPR would be a good place to start. At 94 minutes long it is so boring you cannot believe you are not sitting through an extended cut of My Dinner with Andre. I understand that all movies have the potential to be boring, but I felt that there was some kind of lock on how boring a Predator-Alien movie could be, as opposed to say, a British period piece. You feel that on a scale of 1 to 10, one being the most boring, a monster movie that has inherited some good basic creature designs, and has a pretty good mythos to draw on, could not really get below a 3. And yet here is Alien versus Predator: Requiem. The most boring movie I have ever seen. I cannot put my finger on what was really the cause. The humans are the most awful kind of cardboard cutouts, but I feel like I have seen movies with cardboard cutout characters that were bad movies of course, but still not anywhere near this purely "check your watch every five minutes" dull. From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, for example. One person I saw it with claimed the problem was long shots, but I am not sure that was it. I know one thing that hurt a lot was the rigorous insistence in the first half of the movie to the structure "A scene with the creatures, a scene with the people" so that when you cut from an alien to something in a child's bed, you know the thing in the bed is a fake-out -- it was just her own hand reaching for something on the night-stand. It HAS to be a fake-out because the film cannot break from the patterns it establishes.

I think at least one culprit is the total lack of respect for both the Aliens and the Predators. It just feels like the directors -- and yes it actually took two people to direct this movie -- took everything for granted. You know what the monsters are so no effort is put into reintroducing them. The monsters worked before, so no effort is put into rethinking them. The Predator-Alien hybrid is barely distinguishable from the Predator or the Aliens. I actually thought at one point it was killed, and realized later that that fight was just between the Predator and a regular Alien. And the Predator-Alien does nothing new. It is just maybe a little bigger. In the fights they just lumber after one another, and it is assumed that is interesting enough, even though you can barely tell who is who, or see anything that is going on. The Predator does not seem to be very skilled. The aliens do not seem more threatening than large tigers. There is no thought given to the specifics of the creatures at play.

The film has a lot of problems but it is the boredom it causes that is just fantastic. Algebra-class level dull. The next film could be called Alien Versus Predator: The Sailboat Race, and it would be better just for the absurdity.

Movies like this make me appreciate Southland Tales so much more. Whatever went wrong there, Southland Tales is at least up to something, is at least pushing the edges of something. If I said it was boring that is only because too many good movies made me forget what the word properly meant.

Comics Out December 28, 2007

X-Men. I have now read chapters one, five and nine, and was pleased to discover that since Bachalo is drawing the final part I will get to see how this all turns out without being suckered into buying a lot more books than I really want when I suspect that a summary of those books would do just as well. A new character, one I always loved, gets thrown into the mix, and Bachalo uses blood spatter liberally to distinguish those on the front lines from those clean and safe. A gay character is something, I suppose, but I feel like I have seen the dark future where mutants are in camps about a hundred times now, and it makes me glad I am avoiding the other books.

Batman. SPOILERS! I love the understated cover -- this could be any issue of Batman -- that does not hint at the insane last page, or anything like it. This issue is intriguing, but I think I am going to need either more issues, or more background, to figure out what to make of it. Part of the problem is that my entire Morrison Batman run is lent out so I cannot check to see if Commissioner Vane is from 666, or the year that story takes place -- will this Devil Batman become the Batman of issue 666? Time Travel? Just a concept chiming? The Bruce Wayne sequence did not really hold my attention, until he jumps out of a balloon and his Neil Adams lifestyle, and is figured as the Dark Knight Returns; then our Batman is reverse "crucified" on his own Bat-signal by the Devil Batman; gets shot in the chest revealing the shielding plate -- as in Dark Knight Returns; dies, as he does in Dark Knight Returns of heart failure; in his final moments sees the most iconic image from Year One, the full page bat breaking though the window; BUT in one of the strangest non-satiric revisions I have seen calls the Bat-Mite for help at the last moment, something Miller's Batman could never have done -- Morrison is doing what only he can do here, which is smart. Also there is something with a purple mask that I am not clear on -- is this from 52 or something? I am not quite sure how to put all of this together -- and anyone who has ideas should not stay quiet in the comments -- but Morrison does have my attention, at least, for the first time on this book I think. I hope he has a better point than "Batman has a wonderful history, can't we just embrace it all?"

As a side note, does anyone else think that DC pulled the rug out from under Morrison -- or he did it to himself -- with the whole return of the multi-verse thing at the end of 52? Morrison using excised pre-crisis stuff in Animal Man and JLA for example seemed so much more daring before DC decided to canonize so much of the weird stuff in other worlds. Isn't Bat-Mite a more interesting thing to use when you feel Morrison is "breaking the rules" a bit, than when "Zur En Arrh" or whatever turns out to be one of the 52 universes, right next to Wildstorm?

In Comics News Spider-Man: One More Day ended -- someone give us a detailed spoiler.