Reputedly, although the bulk of the film is set in Detroit, is was mostly filmed in Hamilton, Ontario, for too much of Detroit has decayed to the point of no return to stand in for its 1960s heyday, when most of the film is set. The title comes from the "flash of genius" test for patentability, where the Supreme Court affirmed an invention could come to an inventor out of nowhere, without years of work beforehand. The story comes from a 1993 article by John Seabrook in the New Yorker, on Kearns, with the same title.
But, facts like that are mere trivia. What can set a film apart and above (aside from the already mentioned ‘hard’ aspects of the art) are the intangibles, something Flash Of Genius just does not have. Why? If one could pinpoint that, they would not be intangibles, and this film would rise a few notches, to the level of films like Inherit The Wind or Erin Brockovich, both films like this, that are definite ‘prose’ works, but works whose prose is more akin to a Herman Hesse or Mark Twain, rather than a soap opera. As for poetry? Perhaps Ford stole that, too. Wouldn’t be the first time, right?
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