FLASH OF GENIUS PITS A LONE INVENTOR AGAINST THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY
When Flash of Genius begins, Professor Robert Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear) is lecturing Electrical Engineering students at Wayne State University, Detroit, about the ethics of their field on the first day of class. (However, all the filming takes place in Canada, not Detroit.) The scene then reverts to a few years earlier when Kearns invents the intermittent windshield wiper in his basement with the help of two of his sons. With the aid of Paul Previck (played by Andrew Gillies), he files a patent for the invention and tries to sell the wiper to Ford, where the vice president for engineering agrees in a verbal contract to purchase the wipers, which are to be manufactured by Kearns. Three months later, however, the deal is off. Ford engineers, exploiting a prototype of the wiper, have designed their own product and reneged. From 1976, Kearns fights to win a copyright infringement case. In the process, he turns down two lucrative settlement offers, is driven at one point to need mental health treatment, is relieved of his teaching position, runs up $10 million in legal fees, and loses his wife Phyllis (played by Lauren Graham) and family of six children. The film is primarily about his obsession, which is fueled in part by letters from other small-time inventors who have similarly been victims of copyright piracy. After one attorney resigns over his refusal to accept a $250,000 out-of-court settlement, he decides to read up on the law and serve as his own attorney. Since his experience is a matter of public record, there will be no spoiler by revealing in this review that he won his case (first filed in 1978) against Ford in 1992 as well as another against Chrysler in 1995, with monetary damages of $30 million, and died in 2005 at the age of 78 of brain cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Directed by Marc Abraham, the story is expanded from an 1993 article in The New Yorker by John Seabrook. Demonstrating as the film does that the people (in the form of a jury) can prevail over corporate power, the Political Film Society has nominated Flash of Genius for an award as best film on democracy for 2008. MH