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! Read more...