Another blogger in the peanut gallery chimes in on Fact & Fiction. Although I mostly enjoyed Aaron Sorkin’s sweeping saga The Farnsworth Invention, I felt cheated by the denouement, in which small-time inventor Philo Farnsworth squares off against RCA honcho David Sarnoff in a patent lawsuit that would lead to the creation of television. It’s […]
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After devoting a full page-and-half to the other big play that opened the same week — Tracy Letts’ "August: Osage County" — The New Yorker offers a whole two paragraph’s for Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention. Here’s one of them: To enjoy the play’s historical elements, one must push past Sorkin’s shiny competence and search
Pouring It On: The New Yorker Read More »
From last Friday, another item from our friends at the New York Post: Trailing the pack is Aaron Sorkin’s "The Farnsworth Invention," about the battle between Philo Farnsworth, who invented television, and David Sarnoff, who stole the idea. The reviews for the show were mixed, and the box office is taking in less than $50,000
The End Already Near? Read More »
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
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
Seems to be the Consensus Read More »
….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
Let Me Repeat That…. Read More »
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,
Likewise, The Village Voice Read More »
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
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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
Some Good, Some Not So Much Read More »
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
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