‘Flash’ Foe Ford Clears Up About Wipers
October 6, 2008
In this weekend’s well-meaning docudrama, Flash of Genius, Greg Kinnear portrays an inventor who struggled for years to sue car manufacturing behemoth Ford and get them to admit that they helped themselves to his patent on the intermittent windshield wiper. (Eugene reviewed it back at Telluride, and I basically concur with his assessment.)
Despite the real-life case being settled a couple of decades ago, Ford has taken this current opportunity to point out the factual inaccuracies in the motion picture that they’ve taken issue with, doing so in the form of this handy timeline, without causing any sort of formal stir, as covered in this accompanying text. Especially considering that the film’s subject, Robert Kearns, passed away over three years ago, I doubt it would (and hope it won’t) come to any sort of renewed head.
Maybe in thirty years or so, we’ll get a movie about a blogger battling impossible odds to get all the facts straight on either side of a movie in which an inventor battled impossible odds to get just some facts straight. Now, to just work the word ‘Genius’ back into the title…
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