I’ll admit: I love reading comments on my stories. I devour them, scour them, argue them, and use them. But very rarely do they throw me for a loop. That’s exactly what happened, though, when I broke the news last year that Greg Kinnear and Lauren Graham were starring together in a movie about Bob Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. One comment came from a personal acquaintance of Kearns’. Another from a friend of his son’s. Another still from his own daughter, Kathy.
As self-evident as it should have been, it hit me only after reading those comments: This guy was actually a real person who, for better or worse, waged a nearly unwinnable battle, profoundly messing up his children in the process.
If I felt that way reading a comment from his daughter, though, imagine how Greg Kinnear must have felt playing the man in “Flash of Genius” and having the daughter right there!
“It was very, very strange,” Kinnear said of meeting Bob Kearns’ real life children. “His kids and his wife Phyllis were there and I felt that they were incredibly helpful; I felt a little bit more pressure while they were there.”
Now, keep in mind that Kinnear non-ironically admitted to me that he judged Kearns while portraying him, saying “that by all indications the truth of this story is that he is right up to the edge [of sanity],” that taking on Ford Motor Company “would be like your friend taking on Google today,” that if Bob Kearns were alive right now “we [have] drugs we give people like that – Prozac.”
And he said this in front of his children?
“Yeah, they were very helpful,” Kinnear said. “You know, we had a pretty open slate but with them there and my own personal sense of trying to get this story right and get this man right kind of created a character that felt truthful. I think we all felt a real obligation to that.”
Question of the day: Would you want a movie made about you, or about your family? Or would it just be too surreal to experience? Sound off on your thoughts below.
Comments