The official "opening" of The Farnsworth Invention on Broadway is still ten days away, so there won’t be any full-scale reviews of the play until next week, but that hasn’t stopped the New York Times from running a lengthy profile of the playwright:
The two men never met but clashed in courtrooms over rights and patents for more than a decade, and though it’s tempting to interpret the story as a 20th-century tragedy, a perverse David-and-Goliath parable in which David gets stomped, Mr. Sorkin’s intent was more complicated. The two geniuses are dueling narrators, each telling the other’s story, their alternating voices spiced with personal animus, moral ambivalence, anguish and regret.
“Both characters have a utopian vision for what television could be,” Mr. Sorkin said. “And we already know the punch line of that joke. So for me it’s not a story about television. It’s an optimistic story about the spirit of exploration.”
The article also makes note of the play’s genesis:
The story of how “The Farnsworth Invention” came to be written has a pretty good plot itself. It dates to the early ’90s, when Fred Zollo, a producer, approached Mr. Sorkin with the idea of turning a memoir by Elma Farnsworth, Philo’s widow, into a biopic.
As some of you know the origins of the idea go back farther than that, like to to the mid ’70s, when a couple of wanna-be TeeVee producers thought it would be a bright idea to make a movie for television about the kid who invented it.