The Farnsworth Invention

by Aaron Sorkin

Drama / 15m, 3f
It's 1929. Two ambitious visionaries race against each other to invent a device called "television." Separated by two thousand miles, each knows that if he stops working, even for a moment, the other will gain the edge. Who will unlock the key to the greatest innovation of the 20th century: the ruthless media mogul, or the self-taught Idaho farm boy?

Genres: Plays, Fiction, Drama, Theatre

102 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Aaron Benjamin Sorkin is an American screenwriter, producer and playwright, whose works include A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, Sports Night and The Farnsworth Invention.

After graduating from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Musical Theatre in 1983, Sorkin spent much of the 1980s in New York as a struggling, largely unemployed actor. He found his passion in writing plays, and quickly established himself as a young promising playwright. His stageplay A Few Good Men caught the attention of Hollywood producer David Brown, who bought the film rights before the play even premiered.

Castle Rock Entertainment hired Sorkin to adapt A Few Good Men for the big screen. The movie, directed by Rob Reiner, became a box office success. Sorkin spent the early 1990s writing two other screenplays at Castle Rock for the films Malice and The American President. In the mid-1990s he worked as a script doctor on films such as Schindler's List and Bulworth. In 1998 his television career began when he created the comedy series Sports Night for the ABC network. Sports Night's second season was its last, and in 1999 overlapped with the debut of Sorkin's next TV series, the political drama The West Wing, this time for the NBC network. The West Wing won multiple Emmy Awards, and continued for three more seasons after he left the show at the end of its fourth season in 2003. He returned to television in 2006 with the dramedy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, about the backstage drama at a late night sketch comedy show, once again for the NBC network. While Sorkin's return was met with high expectations and a lot of early online buzz before Studio 60's premiere, NBC did not renew it after its first season in which it suffered from low ratings and mixed reception in the press and on the Internet. His most recent feature film screenplay is Charlie Wilson's War.

After more than a decade away from the theatre, Sorkin returned to adapt for the stage his screenplay The Farnsworth Invention, which started a workshop run at La Jolla Playhouse in February 2007 and which opened on Broadway in December 2007.

He battled with a cocaine addiction for many years, but after a highly publicized arrest he received treatment in a drug diversion program and rid himself of drug dependence. In television, Sorkin is known as a controlling writer, who rarely shares the job of penning teleplays with other writers. His writing staff are more likely to do research and come up with stories for him to tell. His trademark rapid-fire dialogue and extended monologues are complemented, in television, by frequent collaborator Thomas Schlamme's characteristic visual technique called the "Walk and Talk".

Reviews

[blueisthenewpink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nagyon szeretem Sorkint, a pergő, szellemes párbeszédeit, a remekül felépített jeleneteit, a szuperintelligens főszereplők szarkazmusát, az idealizmusát, mindent. Olyan volt ezt a darabot olvasni, mintha újra a Newsroomot nézhetném (még mindig hiányzik). Nagyon érdekes, gyors, szórakoztató, izgalmas és okos írás. Szeretem az ilyet.

(Kezeket fel, aki tudja, ki találta fel a tévét!)

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that I am a sucker for Aaron Sorkin dialog. Ever since Sports Night and A Few Good Men, I've been hooked. So, I actively searched out a copy of this recent short-run Broadway play.

It's about the race to invent television and the legal fallout between the young inventor and the RCA/NBC company over the results. Written with opposing narrators and a quick flow, the play feels like a quick-cutting movie (so no surprise that it was originally written as a movie script). That may have been too much for audiences, but as a book seen only in the imagination, that was perfect.

Unfortunately, the history takes up too much space, losing out on some of the human drama, and the conflict/ending could have been longer to add more dramatic weight. But, fortunately, the two main characters come shining through and the dialog sparkles. So, while not perfect, I still loved it.

If you're a Sorkin fan, I suggest tracking this one down.

[KTB · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a play about the invention of the television. I loved it. My only wish is that it was longer!

“The Farnsworth Invention” — which follows the inextricable fates of Philo T. Farnsworth, a boy genius from Idaho, and David Sarnoff, a New York broadcasting titan whose Jewish family fled from Russia to the United States when he was a boy.

Both men, albeit it different ways, could be considered the inventors of television.
And athough they never met (despite a scene in the play imagining a meeting), each was acutely aware of the other, and their interests collided in court over the patent to what was essentially Farnsworth’s invention.

The humor is witty. The dialogue flows like a melody. The stage directions present perfect imagery. I highly recommend this play!

[Yourfiendmrjones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorkin is one of my favorite writers of dialogue, so I was already pre-disposed to like this play. Also, the story of Farnsworth is one I was aware of since reading about him in Glen David Gold's "Carter Beats The Devil". I'm happy to say the play lived up to my expectations, taking the basic "David and Goliath" aspect of Farnsworth's story and showing how both Philo Fanrsworth and David Sarnoff (the head of rival RCA) complemented each other. Neither was a hero or a villain, exactly. And yet, in this day and age of corporations taking political power, the story of the invention of television proves a powerful and moving metaphor for today's economy.

[Kyla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, how I love Aaron Sorkin's writing. I wish this play was a novel so it could have continued for 400 more pages.

The subject is fascinating, the story is intriguing, and the dialogue is witty and memorable. I hope I can see a production of this one day because, done correctly, I think it would be absolutely brilliant.

[Connie Ciampanelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the name Philo Farnsworth was not familiar to me, both David Sarnoff's and Vladimir Zworykin's rang a bell, a hint that this play is based on fact. I did a bit of research.
Although not necessary, I found it helpful to know something about these three men and the people in their lives.

The Farnsworth Invention, a play reworked from an unproduced screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, was a birthday gift from my son who shares in my enjoyment of Sorkin's brilliance. It is not a history lesson, but a look at a competition between brilliant men on the cusp of an invention that would change the world: television. The play unsurprisingly is replete with Sorkin's crisp, smart dialogue and characteristic humor, and in its brief 100 pages provides the characters with history, heart, and individuality.

The story is engaging, the human connections affecting, but what makes reading the play sing is the unique staging. It's easy to visualize. I'd love to see a production.

I'm generally not a fan of reading plays, but this one grabbed me from the first stage direction.

Highly recommended.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic Sorkin at the top of his game. The story of the invention of television is a mix of scientific innovation, business ethics, and bizarre personalities. Sorkin moves the story along rapidly - perhaps too fast - and explains how most people not only lacked comprehension over how the science worked but also the impact television would have on society. An easy, one day read I would recommend to everyone. This play should be performed more often but given the size of the cast, understandeably has been set aside as too large and pricey a task.

[Brittney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike a lot of plays I have read and reviewed I have seen this play in a full production and loved it and reading it was no different. If you want to see the story of the founding of NBC and the invention of the Television and the race to be the first on to get a clear picture. Based on a true story and beautifully told with internal narration by Philo Farnsworth and David Sarnoff the two men who battled it out across the country for the TV.

[Efrat · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Farnsworth Invention” ended my fiction desert. The book is witty and smart, but the humanity of it is classic Sorkin. The best part is that Sorkin showcases a real life person, Philo Farnsworth. Farnsworth was a genius. He invented television, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, but he remained a somewhat obscure figure in history. I read somewhere that Sorkin has a new adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird". Look forward to reading it!

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the playwright (Aaron Sorkin) but this was a little confusing. Probably would have been more clear to see it as a play rather than read it. Interesting historical story though.
Side note re: book design - putting the back of the book description in blue print on a black cover makes it very difficult to read.

[Nick]

I know it has the usual Sorkin-level reorganizing & altering of facts & timelines that gives me pause in bio-drama works, but... putting some of Sorkin's finest ear-candy dialogue into a play about the invention of television? It's just one of my favorite things & I can't believe I don't revisit it more.

[Hannah Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

- invention of the television in the 1920s - featuring 2 teams racing for the patent
- I usually have trouble imagining scripts, but this one was easier for me!
- good dialogue
- only 3 female actors, and not many more parts for them. cast includes 15 men :/

[Matthew · Rating 1 out of 5]

This play is not good, so Aaron Sorkin is not perfect! It is like when an author or playwright thinks a piece of history is interesting and then writes something about it.

[Tatyana Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better watching and hearing it than reading it.

[Dan Bogosian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little too Sorkin-y at the start but my god it ends so well.

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Farnsworth Invention is television, and one of the great successes of this play by Aaron Sorkin is how it conjures up a sense of the gravity of that eponymous event. We're about a generation away from a world where no one can remember life without television, and so looking back to the impact of a breakthrough that completely changed the way we communicate and live is pretty valuable.

But for me, the real contribution of this remarkable work is the way it reminds us of an American spirit that's become both scarce and elusive of late, at least in our drama. Sorkin presents the creation of television from two complementary and interlocking perspectives: one of our narrators is indeed Philo Farnsworth, the young Utah genius who figured out how to move images at the speed of light while he was still in high school; the other is David Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant who became head of the world's first modern media company, NBC. The first had the brilliance to build something that no one else had ever seen. The second had the vision to figure out what it was for. The Farnsworth Invention debates which of these men was properly the "owner" of the thing they both made.

The parallel narratives of Farnsworth's and Sarnoff's journeys toward destiny (and toward one another) are told with great economy and style by Sorkin. The play begins with Sarnoff recounting Farnsworth's early history: a farmer's son with a talent for electronics brings a drawing (of what we know is a television set) to his provincial chemistry teacher. By the time he's reached his early 20s, Farnsworth has attracted the attention of backers who give him enough money to enable him to build a prototype of his invention. Sorkin gets the audience so wrapped up in the excitement of creation that when Farnsworth actually successfully demonstrates his first television--something we all knew he accomplished before we came to this play--the excitement is thrilling and palpable.

Sarnoff, meanwhile (Farnsworth tells us), rose from wise-guy teenage telegraph operator to radio mogul in about a decade. Sarnoff is the first to understand that mass communication technology is truly transformative; he maps out a vision for radio and then for television in which it is the grand new engine of democracy, spreading culture, knowledge, and information across the land and elevating its listeners/viewers to new levels of actualization. Later, we see Sarnoff first resist and then give in to a more commercial impulse, i.e., to rent out broadcast time to advertisers. And the seismic cultural shift happens, right in front of our eyes.

Both Farnsworth's and Sarnoff's stories spill out on stage in this play, depicted in short, intense scenes. The play reaches its climax when the stories inevitably intertwine: Farnsworth has created a functioning, if imperfect, prototype of television, and Sarnoff wants it (but wants neither to pay for it nor to share ownership of it). Did Sarnoff, via his employee Vladimir Zworykin, steal Farnsworth's secret? Did Farnsworth shoot himself in the foot by naively believing in the free exchange of scientific knowledge among colleagues?

Sorkin ultimately does not stick strictly to the facts in his play, but in presenting these two larger-than-life, utterly American archetypes, he fashions a provocative, intelligent, and stimulating drama. The facts of the case and even the ultimate "meaning" of television prove less significant than the facts and meanings of his two protagonists' lives. In the scope and audacity of their startling visions, these inauspicious-seeming fellows--one an unsophisticated boy who taught himself science on his father's farm, the other an immigrant who taught himself English on the streets of New York--represent the promise and hope of America.

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite having been a fan of Sorkin since watching The American President and later The West Wing, I'd somehow not managed to encounter his 2007 stage play The Farnsworth Invention until recently. Originally meant to be a feature film directed by his West Wing creative partner Thomas Schlamme, it instead made its way to the Broadway stage. Reading it just as the script on the page, how does it hold up?

The script is the story of the clash over one of the twentieth century's defining inventions: television. Specifically, its creation and the battle in court between the two leads: the inventor, the titular Mr. Farsnworth, and the media mogul, David Sarnoff, who wanted to control and exploit it. In a way, it's hard not to look at the play as almost a prototype for Sorkin's Oscar-winning screenplay for The Social network just a few years later. Both are tales of technologies that changed the world, the stories behind which are framed by lawsuits and unreliable narrators.

More than that, it seems tailored to the author. The dialogue is brimming with wit and intelligence, something which makes hearing or reading it just on the page. The script too has his non-stop pace, clicking along through both acts with only enough of a pause for an intermission. In that regard, it's quintessential Sorkin.

And yet, those are precisely the problems with it as a stage play. Sorkin's delightful dialogue obscures the characters into cut-outs, a large cast playing dozens of roles who don't so much inhabit them as delivering his lines. The pacing gives it the feel not of a work of theatre but of what it began its life as - a screenplay. It's full of short scenes which often, both on their own and in the sum, don't feel as though they amount to much as subplots arise and fall with little or no payoff. To his credit, Sorkin has owned up to the fact that story is his Achilles Heel and, ultimately, The Farnsworth Invention is no exception to that.

On the whole, however, if you're a Sorkin fan, then this is well worth checking out. In many ways, it is everything one would like from one of his scripts with its dialogue and pacing, even if they are also contributing factors in its shortcomings. Plus, let's be honest, even anything less than successful by Sorkin is better than nothing.

[Finn Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my acting teachers assigned me to read this over break because I said I wanted to do an Aaron Sorkin scene. I love Aaron Sorkin!

[Michael P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on Philo Farnsworth's invention of the television and its subsequently being stolen and patented by David Sarnoff at the RCA Corporation - though to be fair, he also had scientists working on the invention at the time... so it was something of a race really - Aaron Sorkin's most recent Broadway play features the back and forth patter you've come to either expect and love from him or fear and loathe (if my review isn't quite clear, I dig that about him). However, the play is much more than a retelling of the race to invent TV, as it also works as something of a David vs. Goliath allegory, and in this case, Goliath had much better lawyers. Furthermore, through the play's time frame, which besides the birth of TV also shows the growth of radio, Sorkin examines the original best intentions behind both inventions proliferation without ever seeming overly indignant - something that can't always be said for Sorkin's writing - as found when Sarnoff claims of television that "It's gonna change everything. It's gonna end ignorance and misunderstanding. It's gonna end illiteracy. It's gonna end war... By pointing a camera at it." Much like in Sorkin's screenplay for Charlie Wilson's War, he explores history long after best intentions had been cast aside for money and power.

[Melchior · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm completely biased toward this work as I played Elma "Pem" Farnsworth in a production of it not long ago. It was difficult to crack into at first (I couldn't bring myself to read past the first act) but at the same time, once acquainted with it, it became fascinating, snappy, and utterly enjoyable. There's a bit of legal/electrical jargon, but if you can interpret it, or even vaguely understand, it's well worth the read.
When Kenny (my Pem and Philo's son) dies, that is really the emotional high point of the work. I admit it can lack emotion at times, but the ending and plot are just too good to resist!
Ah, now I'm getting nostalgic about my Pem days. Anyway, I highly suggest giving it a read.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The exciting story of the invention of television is told in this witty play by Aaron Sorkin. I enjoyed both the development of the characters of Philo T. Farnsworth and David Sarnoff and their quest for the answers to the mystery of how to make television work. Even though the actual story is not a mystery, Sorkin's play develops the action of the drama through short scenes that keep the suspense building. Crucial background details like the impact of the stock market and interaction with supporting characters are used to heighten the reader's interest. The combination of wit and good structure made this an delightful play to read.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between "Charlie Wilson's War" and "The Farnsworth Invention," Aaron Sorkin has more than made up for the regrettable experience that was "Studio 60." And I'll admit, even my utter devotion to all things Sorkinese had me wondering just how interesting my all-time favorite writer could make the advent of television. Rest assured, the script is abso-freaking-lutely fascinating, human and dripping with opportunities to showcase the best of what Sorkin's writing has to offer. I simply loved reading this play and am so bummed out that I never got to see this on Broadway.

[Ystyn Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will read anything written by Sorkin - the man is somewhat of a literary god - and the quality of this play is no exception. I liked it because the meticulous research is very akin to Sorkin's television work but the structure has its own feel. Granted, I never saw it on stage so maybe it becomes extremely Sorkinesque when delivered, but I liked the fresh take. I wasn't a fan of the continuous onstage narration to begin with but it definitely did develop into a clever theatrical device. As always with Sorkin, I also felt in equal parts smarter and dumber having read his work.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant dialog as one would expect of Sorkin and only a few Sorkinisms.

This is the story of Philo T. Farnsworth the REAL inventor of Television and how he was swindled out of his patent rights by Sarnoff, the head of NBC and RCA.

While the play does inform us of the story and entertain us all the while, the printed version sort of lacked those moments of true brilliance that a Sorkin movie or television show has.

I'm guessing that that to a large part is a failure on the part of the reader to intuit all that the lines actually mean.

[Sharron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw this play when it was on Broadway - so amazing! It would have been better to read it first. Reading it was easier to follow who was who. Really not missing much in the reading, because it has musical direction and the stage is mainly bare the entire show.

It's also a real book compared to another play I've gotten from Samuel French.

My huge problem now is Mr. Sorkin autographed my book and I have no idea part of what he wrote!

[Mylissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's something about this that fascinates me, that's entirely different about Sorkins work, but at the same time I enjoyed a lot of his television stuff more, and there isn't much for the female characters to do in this, alas. It's still excellent writing although far too many characters to be practical for stage, requires a lot of doubling.

[Letitia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent, if a bit too "cinematic" in that it jumps from scene to scene as a movie is better suited to do. Fun to watch.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, as is only to be expected from Aaron Sorkin. Masterfully written. I would love to see this live someday.

[Rachel C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not Sorkin's best work. Though apparently he is fascinated by the Farnsworth story - William H. Macy's character in Sports Night gave a long monologue on the brother-in-law and the glass tubes.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorkin does it again, although these re-printed plays are usually dry this one comes to life through sharp dialogue and sparce stage direction.