Robert Kearns' flawed 'Genius'

That thought went through my mind last week while watching Kinnear's performance in "Flash of Genius," a new drama based on the story of the cantankerous Detroit engineer who successfully sued Ford and Chrysler for a combined $30 million for infringing on his patent designs for the intermittent windshield wiper.

Kinnear apparently never met Kearns, who died of cancer at age 77 in 2005. But his portrayal in "Flash of Genius" made me think of the few days I spent interviewing Kearns, his ex-wife Phyllis and several of the couple's six children when I profiled the inventor for the Detroit News in May 1993.

If the real Bob Kearns had possessed a bit more of the sympathetic quality that Kinnear transmits through his portrayal, life might've been less torturous for him and his loved ones, who paid an excruciating price for the old man's decades-long legal crusade. On the other hand, if Kearns had been less uncompromising and driven by his obsession, he wouldn't have been such a fascinating, though flawed, American folk hero, a kind of Middle American Captain Ahab.

Like Melville's tragic hero, Kearns was bent on gaining recompense for the wounding insult he felt he had received, no matter the cost to himself or others.

Kearns was a handful for much of his adult life, and not only for the corporate honchos and attorneys foolish enough to tangle with him. As one of the producers of "Flash of Genius," Michael Lieber, recently acknowledged in a New York Times article, "The real Bob Kearns was 10 times as paranoid, 10 times as difficult as Greg played him."

I'd say more like 20 times. A prickly bundle of brilliance, wounded ego, profound (some would say fanatical) spiritual faith and implacable energy, Kearns in many ways related better to machines than to human beings. Phyllis Kearns told me when I interviewed her that she used to tell her husband that, "if somebody cut him open he wouldn't bleed, it would be electronics in there."

Yet for all his angry bluster, Kearns also projected a basic decency and vulnerability that helped him win over courtrooms and earn many admirers.

Kearns was a Detroit university instructor in the 1960s when he hit upon the technology that would change his life. In the movie, which draws on a John Seabrook profile that ran in the New Yorker, Kearns describes the inspiration for his intermittent wiper in an emotional courtroom scene.