Television

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

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.

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

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,

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

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

I suspect we’re going to be seeing more assessments of The Farnsworth Invention like this one, as more people come away from the play wondering how much of it has any connection to anything that really happened: In addition, I felt a little cheated to learn that a key scene in the play is a

Link: TheStar.com  Sorkin pens Broadway play. Before Sorkin gave us Sports Night and then The West Wing, he became obsessed with Philo Farnsworth, the alcoholic loser and electronics genius.

Blogger-type "reviews of the previews" keep showing up in the daily alerts: So it’s probably anti-climactic to say I loved the show. I liked the way he had Philo Farnsworth and David Sarnoff, the two main characters, narrate each other’s story. I liked how the scenes flowed seamlessly across time and space, from New York

Another blogger chimes in: THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION. An interesting problem here. After it ended, I really found I had enjoyed it – it felt both really entertaining and very educational – and it held my interest the entire time. Well, then I got home and went to Wikipedia and read the real story of Farnsworth