In the world of telecommunications, Walter Shaw was probably the most important inventor after Alexander Graham Bell. A Bell Telephone lineman turned engineer who eventually had 39 patents to his credit — among them call forwarding, conference calling, touchtone dialing and the voice-activated speakerphone — he died penniless and forgotten. With the documentary Genius on Hold, opening in limited release, director Gregory Marquette unearths a story so intensely emblematic of American corporatism that its significance is self-evident. Shaw’s experiences speak loud and clear about the devastating greed of monopolies and the hypocrisy of elected officials who do
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- 3/1/2013
- by Sheri Linden
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Corporate America's foulness—from its slave-trade foundation to its ransacking of public coffers before and after the most recent Wall Street meltdown—is exhaustively documented, but it's been a while since any film (fiction or nonfiction) illustrated it with the passion, focused fury, and humanity of Gregory Marquette's documentary Genius on Hold. Here is the crushing story of Walter Shaw, the blue-collar genius whose innovations included technology that made possible such now-standard phone features as conference calls, the switchboard, and call forwarding, but who died broke, broken, and forgotten after battling Bell Telephone for decades to get his fair share of credit and profits. Old newsreels and photos are seamlessly woven with interviews with scientists, pro...
- 2/27/2013
- Village Voice
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