How To Turn It On

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

With a little over a year still to go of this extraordinarily long presidential election campaign, you may be forgiven for thinking the whole venture an enormous bore. That is, if you are paying attention at all.

Except for a small group of politicians, political journalists, and party activists, politics is about as interesting as knowing how the inside of a television works. The rational approach is: Spare me the technical details, just tell me how to turn it on.

Which is why “The Farnsworth Invention,” a new play at The Music Box theater in New York, is such an intriguing piece of work. The subject is the invention of television, which seems hardly the right material for a Broadway play until you discover who the author is: Aaron Sorkin.

Mr. Sorkin is the gifted dramatist who made presidential politics not just interesting but downright fascinating in the television show “The West Wing.” Over the course of seven years, as executive producer and principal writer, Mr. Sorkin hooked us every Sunday night on the politically motivated doings of President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, and his scurrilous White House aides. Like all good drama, the characters and the dialogue seemed uncannily real.

Until then, politics as a subject for entertainment was mostly a turn off. Hollywood is littered with well intentioned but commercially disappointing political movies. Even with Gore Vidal’s witty screenplay and Henry Fonda’s seductive acting, “The Best Man” (1964), about a party convention riddled with scandal, failed to catch fire. It won reverential Oscar nominations, but did little business.

There have been many good attempts: “Primary Colors” (1998), based on Joe Klein’s brilliant portrait of the first Clinton campaign; “Wag the Dog” (1997) about a president who concocts a fake war to cover up a sex scandal; and “All the King’s Men,” the Huey Long story as told by Robert Penn Warren.

Perhaps only “All the President’s Men,” based on Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Watergate expose, made the grade both artistically and commercially. And that was a movie mostly about journalism.

So now Mr. Sorkin, who grew up in Scarsdale and went to school in Syracuse, has turned his attention to the tattered life of Philo Farnsworth, the father of electronic television, and how his invention was stolen from under his nose by the founder of NBC, the Machiavellian David Sarnoff. It is gripping drama, exquisitely executed, and makes for a perfect night at the theater.

With the help of fine acting, from among others Hank Azaria as Sarnoff and Jimmi Simpson as the hick inventor, Mr. Sorkin convinces us, at least as long as the play lasts, that we, too, understand not only how television works but why early television experiments failed to work. It is no mean feat. But then, Mr. Sorkin is a playwright of genius capable of making even the dry internal workings of the White House of compelling interest to a vast worldwide audience.

Politicians who can make politics involving are as rare in public life as Mr. Sorkin is among screenwriters. Yet the rewards are enormous for those who can captivate the voters with their version of events and make the national story their own.

Franklin Roosevelt did it with the Great Depression, and even now conservatives find it difficult to overturn his definitive account of how America fell into disrepair and how it could best be fixed.

Winston Churchill told of the epic battle that needed to be fought between democracy and the tyranny of the dictators and captured the imaginations of the greatest generation with an almost Biblical sonority.

Ronald Reagan, with all the skills of a veteran Hollywood storyteller, also caught the spirit of the age and changed the narrative of the nation.

But who today, of the two dozen presidential hopefuls, has such a gift? It is by no means obvious. Among the Republicans, John McCain has a story, and a great personal back story, but it has become tired in the telling. Fred Thompson sounds like an actor without a script, Mitt Romney a script without an actor. Rudy Giuliani can only talk about himself.

Ron Paul grasps the imagination with both hands, but he and his version of events are so eccentric they fail to resonate. Only Mike Huckabee talks with ease about issues, but he has yet to find a persuasive theme.

As for the Democrats, Barack Obama mouths the words, but they appear to have little meaning. John Edwards, once the darling of the Democratic party, has quite lost his ability to charm.

Governor Richardson appears to be talking to himself. Mr. Biden can speak, all right, but he does not know when to stop, having spent too long in the Senate, like John Kerry before him. And Hillary Clinton addresses us as if we were recalcitrant children kept in after school.

So, with the start of the caucuses and primaries just two months away, we have a wider choice of candidates than ever before, who have had longer than ever to try to engage us. Yet, notwithstanding Mrs. Clinton’s apparent lock on the Democratic nomination, the election remains up for grabs.

It will take an eloquent raconteur to explain where America stands six years after the war on terror began, and which is the best direction forward. If such a storyteller emerges the nation will start paying attention as avidly as we did to “The West Wing.”

nwapshott@nysun.com


The New York Sun

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